Aged Care Insite Issue 120 Aug-Sep 2020 | Page 28

workforce No easy answers Care workers outside Epping Gardens Aged Care Home. Photo: Robert Cianflone/Getty Images. Union says paid pandemic leave won’t reach all workers. By Conor Burke and AAP Victorian aged care is struggling to contain the COVID-19 outbreak tearing through the system, with over a thousand active cases linked to aged care, including workers, and 87 facilities having active outbreaks, according to figures released by the state government. About 80 per cent of Victoria’s new infections since May have been linked to workplace transmission and in light of this, the Fair Work Commission announced that aged care workers would be eligible for paid pandemic leave. The ruling grants paid pandemic leave to staff working in residential aged care under the Aged Care Award, the Nurses Award and the Health Professionals Award. The Fair Work Commission said the pandemic leave will: • apply to workers who are required by their employer or a government medical authority or on the advice of a medical practitioner to self-isolate because they display COVID-19 symptoms or have come into contact with a suspected case • is limited to up to two weeks’ paid leave on each occasion of self-isolation • not be paid to workers who are able to work at home or remotely during self-isolation. 26 agedcareinsite.com.au NO SILVER BULLET However, the United Workers Union believes that the new pandemic leave is not a “silver bullet” that will save Australia from a second wave of COVID-19 cases nationwide as many workers who are not on the award rates will still not be eligible. According to a new survey nine out of 10 aged care workers said they could not afford to take unpaid leave if they needed to. The same proportion of aged care workers said they were worried their colleagues may come to work sick because they don’t have any sick leave. “There’s two bits of the paid pandemic leave. There’s the decision in Fair Work, but unfortunately that only covers aged care workers who are directly on the award. It doesn’t cover any who have registered enterprise agreements. And the vast majority of aged care workers would be on a bargaining agreement. I couldn’t give you percentages, but off the top of my head, it’d be 70-80 per cent of workers,” said Carolyn Smith, aged care director for the United Workers Union. “And when you start to look at numbers and bed sizes, there’s probably 10 or 20 big providers in each state that really had that proportion of the workforce.” Smith says that the government has reacted too slowly to the effect the pandemic is having on the sector and she points to the outbreak in Newmarch House as the harbinger of the current situation in Victoria. “We could have seen this coming; we certainly should have seen it coming after Newmarch. But you look around the world, aged care is a flashpoint because you’ve got the group of people who are most vulnerable to COVID because of their age and their physical condition,” she said. “One of the issues in Victoria, when you look at everywhere where workplaces are now the highest area of spread [is that] they are all vulnerable workforces that are casual, that perhaps work a number of different jobs that are in communities that haven’t been well communicated with about COVID because they’re not Englishspeaking background communities. “The federal government did almost nothing in this area. And now, are holding their hands up in the air, saying, ‘How did this happen?’ It’s quite clear that this was potentially going to happen.” LISTEN TO THE EXPERTS Smith says the government should be doing more to hear the concerns of unions, peak bodies and the workers themselves as they are the experts in the field. She points to the survey by her union of 1000 aged care workers which found that two-thirds say they do not feel very prepared if there is a coronavirus outbreak at their centre and three in 10 say they have not had training in how to use personal protective equipment.