Photo credit: the guardian
Immigration detention staff are striking nationally in Australia.
The West Australian reports that workers at nine onshore immigration detention centres went on strike for four hours to 8.30 am on Monday with another four-hour action planned for the afternoon.
This follows two-hour strikes on Friday.
The dispute is centred around what the United Workers Union (UWU) calls a “huge and avoidable mess” – the outgoing operator being “unable to deal fairly with workers who are seeking legitimate “redundancies in a contract changeover”.
Outgoing detention centre operator Serco says all employees will be paid their legal entitlements.
The detention centre controller Australian Border Force has been contacted for comment.
The UWU says it has made concessions over “business continuity” during the handover, but Serco was holding out on relatively small redundancy offers.
It argues Serco telling staff to resign is an attempt to avoid paying redundancies and Serco should be paying redundancies because workers are entering a greenfield agreement with a new provider.
UWU allied industries director Godfrey Moase said, “It’s a stinging indictment of Serco that a multibillion-dollar corporation is unable to deal fairly with workers who are seeking legitimate redundancies in a contract changeover.”
The new operators, Management and Training Corporation subsidiary – Secure Journeys – will start running the centres in March. Serco has offered to pay the new operator a lump sum equivalent of each worker’s leave entitlement.
