Already and this is the daily This is the Daily ohs oh, now it makes sense.
Good morning and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the twenty second of November.
I'm Zara, I'm Nandini.
Around a million Sydney siders, myself included. We're preparing for major disruptions today after the Rail, Tram and Bus Union or the RTBU, announced train workers were going on strike until Sunday morning.
Businesses, schools and.
Communities across Sydney and New South Wales had made contingency plans to prepare for a shutdown of train services. However, the union has now reached an agreement with the state government after multiple rounds of negotiations.
Nandini, I want to go back to tda's routes this morning, and tda's routes are to step back from a story or from a head deadline and just explain a bit more of the terms the context that people need to know. And this is one of those stories where I really want to do that because we talk about strikes and industrial actions so often. You know, I would have run out of fingers counting the number of times that we
have spoken about it on this pod. But I don't know that we've ever spent the time actually exploring what a strike is and why it happens in the first place. So that's what I really want to get into today. I want to start really really basic with you here. Can we strip it all back and just start with why do strikes happen in the first place.
The most common reason we have a strike occur is pay disputes. So workers or the union that represents workers, we'll go in to unions in a moment.
Okay, put a pin in that.
Yeah, but they will often call for better wages or working conditions. Depending on the sector, workers might strike for better overtime pay or to have more say on when they're shifted to work and maybe that could help them bounce that with personal life.
This is something we've seen in nurse Put another pin in that.
So essentially they are requesting more, whether that be pay or rites or whatever. It is. Like, there is a request there from the employees to the employer. But you said there that they can go on strike for these things. When someone says go on strike, like, what does that actually mean?
So we'll often hear strikes being called industrial action as well. Day to day will notice a strike happen because people walk off the job, they don't show up to work, and that could involve train worker is not showing up to the train stations so trains aren't running.
Yeah. So that's like a really clear obvious example of a strike.
Yeah.
And when that strike is occurring, workers often are instead protesting or rallying or showing up to demonstrations to renew their calls to the government or to their employer.
But that's only one version of a strike, right, Like there can be other forms of industrial action. What are they?
It can include really simple things like workers wearing campaign shirts or wearing badges around their workplace with a particular slogan. For instance, with nurses and midwives in New South Wales, they had a campaign that they called value Us and it's something that they're trying to campaign about. I'm going to use the Rail, train and Bus union as an example because this is one that we've been talking about all week and we've been seeing in the news and
they've been taking industrial action for months. And this could even include things like boundaries. They did this thing where they would have to leave at least thirty seconds between every phone call to create delays, or even running a train every second service, meaning that you have to wait longer between your trains. You might have noticed some train
workers wearing shirts around stations. You might not have, but these strikes that are complete work stoppages are the ones that we really take notice of you as an average person.
Okay, So they're going out there and they're asking for changes to be made for workers in whatever specific industry we're talking about. One of the things, and it might be a silly question, but one of the things that comes up when I read these stories is what happens to an employee who or a worker who walks off the job and who you know doesn't show up to work. What happens to those people? Do they get in trouble at work?
Well, firstly, I wanted to say there are no silly questions.
Thank you, Andthony, you can buy our book No Silly Questions available today.
But this is where unions come into play. So you've probably heard of a bunch of different unions in the news. We've mentioned the RTBU today.
Can you just pause there? What is a union?
So a union is a body that represents workers. Okay, it's often their voice it's like the middleman that talks between the employees and the employer to advocate for better working rights conditions or whatever they're asking for.
And so if we use media as an example, that MEAA is the Media Industries union, but there's a different one for all sorts of industries.
Right, every industry has their own union. So strikes are organized by the union, and the workers who take part in strikes are union members. Being a union member usually involves paying a membership fee. It could be weekly, monthly, annually, depending on the union. And the idea is that the union protects you and allows.
You to go on strike.
So you get certain protections by being a union member. So let's see's an example of you and Azara.
Let's say we're both nurses. We're not.
For this example, we are and Zara, you're a union member and I'm not, and the Nurses and Midwives Association, which is our union, they're going on strike. You could go on strike and be protected by it, but because I'm not a union member, there is an expectation for me to still be at work.
Okay, I understand. So the people who are going on strike are part of a union and therefore their employer can't come down on them for not being at work versus someone who's not part of a union, and that would be a very different response.
Exactly.
We'll be back with the deep dive after this quick note from our sponsor. You refer to the union there as almost the middleman. Can you just go into that a bit further, the middleman between who and why.
So we're going to be talking a lot about the public sector today, but I want to note that unions exist also in the private sector. So for instance, Coles and Woowarts they have a retail and fast food workers union. But we're going to be touching a lot on government or public jobs. So the union being the middleman, represents the workers or employees. That's your nurses, your police officers,
your teachers. And then on the other side is the government or if we're not in the public sector, it would be the holes or.
Will work, so the employer and so the government is involved because they are the ones that are setting the wages, for example, for the public sector.
Exactly, I'm going to use an example to make this make sense.
Okay, great, We're.
Going to look at the New South Wales nurses and midwives Association because they've been striking for months now and it really took off after over in Victoria, nurses and midwives got a pay rise of twenty eight percent over four years. Now when it comes to the New South Wales nurses and midwives, they've been asking the state government for a fifteen percent pay increase alongside other working conditions and overtime rights. But the main thing we're looking at
here is the pay increase. So then what happens is as a back and forth between the state government and the union representatives that represent the workers. This is where they're trying to negotiate an agreement in terms of the best pay outcome that the government is happy with and that the union and the workers are. So the New South Wales government came back with an offer of ten point five percent over a three year period.
Okay, so that's not what they had asked for.
No, they asked for fifteen percent. So the union takes this government offer back to their members and consults with them. Sometimes it gets put to a vote, other times it might be really clear that they don't want to agree with the government, and in the case of the New South Wales nurses and midwives they did not reach an agreement and that is when they took further strike action.
Okay, understood, So that's still a live I guess negotiation. There hasn't been a conclusion that's been reached, or at least not one that either side is happy with. Do we have any recent examples when negotiations were successful, just I guess to prove the point of how this can turn out a bit differently.
Yeah, So just this month, New South Wales police were offered a pay rise of up to thirty nine percent over a four year period from the New South Wales government. Now, mind you, not all officers received the thirty nine percent. It sort of depends on where in the ranks they stand and how long they've been serving in the force. They were also offered a couple other bonuses, such as retention payments, to encourage police officers to stay in the
force for longer. When the government made this offer, the president of the police union basically made a video announcement explaining what the offer that the government provided, and it also said that it endorsed this offer. It advised its union members that they think this is a good offer, and they basically said that we think it's the best we can get yep. And that offer from the government then gets put to a vote to its union members on whether or not they want to agree.
Okay, and in that situation it was agreed too.
Yeah.
And of course with the New South Wales Rail, Tram and Bus union it's now also been successful. The looming threat of no train services for over two days across New South Wales has been just enough for the state government to reach an agreement with the union YEP. Currently the understanding is that strikes have been postponed and.
Do we have any idea what's been agreed to in order to I guess postpone those strikes and that shutdown of the rail system.
So for this we need a little bit of context.
The Rail, Train and Bus union has been calling for twenty four hour train services over weekends. Now this is pretty unusual because workers often strike.
When they want to work less.
Yeah, but in this case they're actually advocating for twenty four hour services over the weekend. Initially, the state's transport minister, that's Joe Halen, said that twenty four hour train services would eventually lead to the failure of our rail network. However, now that New South Wales Premier Chris Mins has agreed to let trains run for twenty four hours over the weekend.
The strikes have been postponed.
So people listening this morning will be able to catch a train as normal and as.
Planned exactly, and also over Saturday.
Yeah, but it's important to note that these strikes haven't been outright canceled. It's not completely off the table because there are still details that the union and the government need to iron out, and so if another disagreement does come up and negotiations fail, we could see another potential strike.
It's really interesting and I think one of those examples we're just stepping back and trying to understand a bit of the jargon that sits behind the story is actually really helpful, and I know it will help me when I'm reading stories about other strikes, because as you said, there are so many that are still live that haven't been resolved yet. So thank you for that, Mandini, you're worried, and thank you for joining us for another week of the Daily OS that wraps up up a big week
of news. We will be back again this afternoon with your day's headlines, but until then, have a great day.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Arunda Bungelung Caalcuton woman from Gadighl country.
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