Community Trusts-Sleepover payments

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The media silence on Government having taken Community Care Workers push for being paid minimum hourly wages on 'sleepovers' and for backpay in that regard dating back some five or six years, makes most of us believe that the issue has been finalised.

Although initially this matter was a Court action between the workers of Idea Services (previously IHC) and their employers, because the Court decisions upheld the rights of the employees, it de facto became a 'class action" and therefore applied to the whole industry.
Mainly because in the form that was upheld by the Courts, the findings would likely bankrupt Ideal Services and a large number of the smaller trusts in the industry which would be forced to pay higher sleepover rates and backpay going back five or six years, Government removed the matter from the Courts and legislated on it for the whole industry.

The legislation which has now been passed is unhelpful, because the funding authority will only pay a portion of the money owed in backpay and wages, and the trusts have been told that they must find the rest themselves, although in many cases, money from the funding authority is the trusts only source of income and most have few assetts to sell.

The trusts themselves have received no official advice through ministry channels as to how to meet their financial responsibilities to their staff over this matter.
Also the legal advice to trusts management has been inconsistent, especially on who has entitlement to backpay.

Some trusts believe that only union members who put in their claims for backpay prior to 2nd September last are elegible for the backpay going back several years, although those of us who know the law, realise that all staff who qualify can have their claims met because not only has the settlement not been promlogated for staff to know of any such cutoff date, the legislation does not differentiate between union members and non union staff, Idea Services and other community care trusts.

The union is still signing up membership on the basis that new members will be covered in their backpay claims because the Governor General has allegedly not signed off on the legislation yet, and most trusts just don't know what is going on.
The saddest fact is that if the trusts are forced to go bankrupt, then their clients may face a return to the institutionalised conditions that existed prior to the 1990s.

Surely all sides should agree to a token backpay of no more than two or three thousand dollars to those who are eligible for backpay, instead of the tens of thousands of dollars per eligible member which is the average being claimed. If such a reasonable payment was funded by the funding authority there would be hope for the future..........
This country still has the fiscal shock of where the sad state of the world economy, coupled with our own recent natural disasters, will leave its economy post the general election.

Dennis Pennefather

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