Freight rail workers are keeping Australia moving during this challenging time. They are making sure necessities and raw materials continue to find their way to supermarkets, retail stores, pharmacies, petrol stations, flour mills, manufacturing plants and construction projects. Changes to working conditions affecting rostering can have significant effects on safety and fatigue levels. The other changes could drastically affect people's families with proposals for forced transfer. The Company's attacks on your conditions is creating an unhealthy and increasingly stressful working environment potentially causing employees to take the focus off COVID-19 issues! If Pacific National get away with this, it's a blank cheque for employers in the rail industry to use the current crisis as an excuse to avoid talking with workplace delegates and offcials about critical changes in the workplace.

The cuts being made will save very little money but are part of a misguided drive to continually cut spending in Public Health. One of the cuts takes 4 hours a day of labour from the Clinical Engineering Department, which will reduce the time the staff have to maintain essential equipment such as Defibrillators, Heart Rate Monitors, Ventilators, Oxygen Saturation Meters, Anaesthetics Machines and other essential hospital equipment. There are thousands of these machines at Prince of Wales Hospital. Another cut reduces the number of staff on call of an evening. These staff are called in to assist with urgent heart surgery. They must monitor machines such as Balloon Pumps, that help to increase the blood flow to the heart immediately before and after surgery. This limits their capacity to deal with multiple urgent heart operations of an evening. This will put lives at risk. Stop essential services being run down at this important Public Hospital. Sign the petition now.

Changes to working conditions affecting rostering can have significant effects on safety and fatigue levels. The other changes could drastically affect people's families with proposals for forced transfer. If Pacific National get away with this, it's a blank cheque for employers in the rail industry to use the current crisis as an excuse to avoid talking with workplace delegates and offcials about critical changes in the workplace.

The decision by universities such as MONASH, LATROBE, MELBOURNE and DEAKIN to defund cleaning contracts at this time has resulted in many cleaners being stood down without pay and, as many are international students, without any financial means upon which to survive. Universities receive large amounts of public money and rely on fees from international students such as those who have been stood down, this gives them a social responsibility for the conditions of these workers. Also, there is a continuing need for extra cleaning work to protect university staff from COVID-19. It is shameful that Australian Universities such as MONASH, DEAKIN and LATROBE who rely so heavily on the income they receive from international students have now left those students without any financial resources upon which to survive in this time of crisis.

Over a month ago, union delegates reached out to management in order to begin the process of establishing designated working groups and electing HSRs. Management have refused to speak to us about the formation of Designated Working Groups in order to form an Occupational Health and Safety Committee. As we have notified management on multiple occasions that Victorian safety legislation says that we have the right to elect Health and Safety Representatives (HSR’S). But, as Grant acknowledged in the workplace meeting on the 17/3/20 management have both failed to respond to our request and have outright refused us. This is a clear and very serious breach of the OHS Act which outlines in sections 43-46 that: if one or a group of employees makes a request to be represented by an HSR, then the employer has 14 days to commence the arrangements and do everything reasonable to start these negotiations within this period. In order to protect the health and safety of workers within the workplace and ensure our voices are heard, we elected several HSR’s. As democratically elected HSR’s we put together a list of OHS concerns which you can read here (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yLzBD4y_8dwgMhgTSOaEoy4AYGxWN5lf3Rry-ZDijdM/edit?usp=sharing) , we sent this to management via email last week, but they have, once again, failed to respond. We are very disappointed with management's continued refusal to communicate with us and acknowledge our concerns. This shows a clear disregard for the both law and our own health and safety. They are in breach of both our Enterprise Bargaining agreement, which they agreed to follow when they signed it in 2017, and the bare minimum Victorian safety legislation. We Demand that : 1. Management recognises us as democratically elected Health and Safety Representatives and for them to communicate with us directly, both in good faith and as required to do so by law. 2. Begin the negotiation process of Designated Working Groups immediately, in order to ensure that the voices of workers are heard and our health and safety at work is upheld. 3. Uphold the the E.B.A and Victorian safety legislation, this includes reimbursing interviewers for costs associated with setting up working from home, beginning the negotiations of DWG’s and many more things which we outline our letter to management.

UMSU has endorsed the system put in place at Adelaide University where students can see their results and then elect to have a passing grade converted to a non-graded pass which will not count for their WAM. Fails will become withdrawals – again not included in WAM calculations, and results pending can be used when components of courses are postponed to subsequent teaching period. This means that students have a safety net to prevent fails due to extreme circumstances, while maintaining the option of counting good results to their WAM.

These workers pick the fruit and vegetables we eat everyday, they’re in the hospitality industry, they’re delivery drivers and carers, they’re the backbone of our economy. The JobKeeper payment exists to provide a lifeline to those hardest hit by the COVID-19 crisis, how can the Morrison Government justify their decision to exclude over 1.1 million migrant workers, temporary visa holders and casuals? The Morrison Government does not address the very real public health crisis that millions of workers are facing. Asking them to ‘go home’ or raid their meagre retirement savings to survive COVID-19 is not only short-sighted, it’s racist. So many of these workers have built lives here and have made Australia their home and with borders closed, these workers have nowhere else to go. The Government must extend income support to all workers. Not doing so risks the entire community’s health and shirks Australia's moral responsibility to look after the wellbeing of all who are here during an unprecedented pandemic. The lack of support for this group of people shows that the Government treats migrants and international students as cash cows. They hire them for cheap labour and ask them to pay huge education fees, but when things get difficult, they wash their hands clean of any responsibility. This pandemic does not discriminate based on visa status or employment status, and neither should we. Everyone deserves to be safe. That's why we need Minister Ruston to ensure a wage subsidy for all workers so that all of us can follow public health advice and stay safe during this crisis.

The Government must extend income support to all workers. Not doing so risks the entire community’s health and shirks Australia's moral responsibility to look after the wellbeing of all who are here during an unprecedented pandemic. The lack of support for this group of people shows that the Government treats migrants and international students as cash cows. They hire them for cheap labour and ask them to pay huge education fees, but when things get difficult, they wash their hands clean of any responsibility. This pandemic does not discriminate based on visa status or employment status, and neither should we. Everyone deserves to be safe. That's is why we need Minister Ruston to ensure a wage subsidy for all workers so that all of us can follow public health advice and stay safe during this crisis. Sign the petition now.

Workers at Virgin Australia work hard every day to keep ensure Virgin Australia Passengers receive a great service and arrive safe and sound to their destinations. Together, these workers have decades of experience in delivering for the Virgin Australia and your passengers.

Amid the current COVID-19 pandemic, millions of Australians are facing the very real prospect of losing their job and they need the government to act – this is especially true for those in who work in the language colleges, the training sector and universities.   The recent JobKeeper wage subsidy announced by the government excludes casuals and their families in language colleges, private training providers, and universities across Australia. This is serious.  Language colleges bring billions of dollars into the economy and private training providers enrol around 80% of the 4.1 million students in vocational education and training.   Trainers and assessors do the heavy lifting in delivering the quality education and training that makes people job ready, and our universities are involved in cutting-edge research that shapes Australia’s future. Let the federal government know that it is only by keeping people in jobs that the future of Australian workers, their families, their communities and the nation’s economy can be secured. If we guarantee wages now, we will keep people in jobs and ensure that the economy can recover once this crisis has passed.   Sign the petition for a guaranteed wage subsidy for workers in post-secondary education and let the government know it needs to put workers first.

We , like many other Australians have mortgages, rents, children , family that we need to support and we rely on weekly income in order to survive.

On Monday March 30th, the QUT Guild Governance team spoke with the University Registrar and presented the results from the COVID-19 Student Concerns feedback survey. Over 450 students completed the survey and wrote extensively on how the transition to online learning and QUT’s response had impacted them and what more support they needed. This information was presented to the University Registrar who stated it will be considered by the relevant stakeholders. But we can't stop there, we need to keep the momentum up to ensure that the University administration takes your feedback seriously. In our review of the survey, we identified five major themes of student concerns which we have outlined in detail above. We are calling on the University to urgently take action, address these concerns & #saveourstudents