Save DSC Campaign Update 21 May 2014

Privatisation on HOLD! 

Save DSC Campaign Update 21/5/14 

We have been advised that the privatisation of DSC Group Homes has been delayed. Despite DSC claiming in March 2014 that the privatisation was well underway, some DSOs have written to families to explain that there is a delay in starting the transition process. 

DSC ASD Update – 21st May 2014 

It is now seven months since the plan to privatise was announced and not one house has actually been privatised. Your union wrote to DSOs some time ago to advise them that they could face legal problems with this privatisation. DSOs now seem to have recognised that our advice was correct and are working through some industrial relations issues, hence the delay. 

The set-back to privatisation is great news for our campaign and for DSC workers. Members’ jobs are secure for longer, individuals’ care is assured for longer. 

However, the decision to privatise was obviously rushed and poorly planned. The minister stated in the beginning that the process would take up to 2 years. It is clear that it will take much longer. 

It is time that the minister and DSC owned up to the mess they are in and the pain they have caused - to individuals, to families and to their own workers. The Minister needs to go back to the drawing board and re-think her ill-conceived plan. 

Questions in Parliament. 

Our campaign to stop privatisation has been noticed up on the hill. 

In parliament Dr Ron Chalmers was asked to explain: “Has any modelling been done to show that [privatisation] is the most effective and efficient way to increase sector capacity…?” 

In his reply he admitted, 

“Is there a model that goes back into the last decade or the decade before?... — the answer to that is no.” 

No model and no plan! David Kelly, the member for Bassendean, might have summed it up best: 

Mr D.J. KELLY: I completely understand the pressures on the sector to attract good quality, direct-care workers to the sector. That is why I, for the life of me, cannot figure out why the DSC has gone down the outsourcing path for accommodation, because the staff in that sector, almost to a man and a woman, would rather work for the government than any non-government organisation. Yet a whole bunch of those government staff will be lost because in the transition they will say, 

“Well, sod this! I feel rejected. I feel let down by my employer. I am going to go off to do something much easier.” 

Given that the DSC is so desperate for staff, why is it poking the eye of all the staff by telling them that they are not wanted anymore; go and work for a private provider? I just do not understand it, Ron. I just cannot figure it out. 

Petition 

The Petition needs to get back to the CPSU/CSA office by the 6th June. Please invite your colleagues to sign it today and get it back to us at the office.

Download the petition.