MESSAGE FROM THE ASSISTANT GENERAL SECRETARY Judith Kiejda, Assistant General Secretary Over the past year, the world has changed with nurses and midwives at the centre of those changes. There is no doubt it has been difficult for everyone but when you work on the front line and the enemy is a virus, the reality is it has the capacity to really rock your world. The constant re-emerging of the virus, unclear messages from the government and confusion around vaccines and their rollout certainly has had major impacts on the lives of many. Despite 2020 being the International Year of the Nurse and Midwife and the enormous effort made by all our members across all sectors, the NSW government, despite its platitudes, saw fit to ignore all that effort and show just how much public sector workers were worth in their eyes by attempting to freeze their wages. The NSW Industrial Relations Commission didn’t improve matters by awarding a 0.03% pay rise. How totally insulting.
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2020 – 2021 Annual Report
Yet again, this year the NSW government refuses to see the heath system as it is and not how they wish it to be. In that vein, they have denied all our current claims, including the claim for minimum mandated nurse to patient ratios across the public sector and offered us another insulting pay rise of 2.04%. All this when economists and the Reserve Bank say for our economy to fully recover, we need real wage increases because when people have money to spend, the economy buoys. Not a concept the NSW government wishes to embrace. Not just because we are exasperated with a government that will not hear us. The community also needs to understand the critical situation of our health system. Of even more concern is that the government negotiators will not even agree to insert important guidelines – ICU staffing standards or the updated ACORN standards – into the Public Health System Nurses & Midwives’ (State) Award.
