Carinity needs to show it cares for its teachers and school support staff by respecting their work as providers of high quality education and providing them with working conditions to match.
Despite over 18 months of negotiations for a new collective agreement, a range of protected action undertaken by staff and two employer-driven ballots being voted down, Carinity Education is ignoring the serious concerns of its staff and maintaining its agenda to cut conditions.
Carinity’s wish-list of cuts to working conditions includes:
* Maintain a top incremental step for teachers that is still more than $8,000 worse off per year than state and Catholic school teachers.
* Create a new classification structure that may mean school officers and youth workers need to gain further qualifications just to keep their jobs.
* Strip conditions including long service leave, superannuation co-contribution, job share and additional redundancy pay, as well as First Aid allowance access for school officers.
* Limit access to contemporary paid leave such as natural disaster leave and domestic violence leave.
Why is this important?
As an outreach of the Queensland Baptists, Carinity claims to “provide communities of care, compassion and respect” to those in need, yet is failing to provide any of these things to its staff – Carinity doesn’t seem to care.
Carinity’s cuts to the working conditions of teachers and school support staff will put them behind their counterparts in other Queensland schools and create second-tier teachers in the state but Carinity doesn’t seem to care.
Carinity’s cuts would reduce superannuation provisions for its largely female workforce putting their financial futures at risk but Carinity doesn’t seem to care.
Carinity’s cuts would deny its staff access to community standard leave provisions including paid Domestic Violence Leave – an area that Carinity works in and claims to care about yet when it comes to its own workers facing such devastating circumstances, Carinity doesn’t seem to care.
Carinity’s cuts would mean its students’ teachers are worse off despite Carinity publicly emphasising the extra support their students, many from disadvantaged backgrounds, are given by school staff but Carinity doesn’t seem to care.
