The Union thanks members at Hornsby council for sticking together and deciding collectively upon a matter of importance to themselves and their colleagues.
Council management had proposed a broader base for council’s unique (over Award) travel allowance to include all service both active duty and periods of leave, and rearranging the scheme to include contributions to superannuation payments. Despite management claiming that benefits justified the changes automatically, it also made an initial offer of two years of manual top-ups for any relevant staff over and above the new scheme payments.
Council management made clear that other market adjustments available to benefit some roles would only proceed together with agreement on the new travel scheme. While some Union members stood to gain immediately from waving through the proposal unchanged, in collective meetings members chose not to do that and instead acted in solidarity to benefit their longstanding colleagues and extract a better deal from management, ultimately one third more generous than council’s initial proposal.
Union members willingly renegotiated to extend the manual top-up from two years to three years, purely out of solidarity and in the interest of protecting their colleagues. We thank our Union members at Hornsby for their loyalty to colleagues and acting in solidarity to extract a significantly better outcome than what management first proposed. Much thanks to branch delegate Jeff Graham for his help with the democratic facilitation of all meetings for this issue and the recent Award vote.
Pictured above: Members forced an improvement on council’s initial offer, and extracted a 33% better topup than first offered
