VOTE NO - Why the AHP AHA Separate Agreement is a bad deal

The PSA urges all Allied Health Professionals (AHP) and Allied Health Assistants (AHAs) to strongly VOTE NO to the government proposal for a separate AHP/AHA agreement.

This proposed enterprise agreement represents a backwards step in your employment conditions, conditions PSA members have fought hard for over the past 30 years of enterprise bargaining in the Public Sector.

The pay offer isn’t good enough. It does not address the real wage loss members have experienced.

Others are claiming that there is no loss of conditions. This is demonstrably untrue.

There are some elements offered which are a step in the right direction and cover off some of the elements the PSA has been advocating for on behalf of members - but as a package - the current proposal simply isn’t good enough.

When we VOTE NO, all is not lost. 

We show the employer we’re not going to be sold out and we get back to the negotiating table and continue pushing the case for an outcome that offers a real wage rise, retains our existing conditions as a minimum and provides improvements that shows recognition for the work we do for the community.

This will be a long update due to the important detail it contains. We have a shorter form update available here.

AHPs and AHAs can access this and more short form information on the PSA website here.

Let’s work through some of the major issues with the proposed agreement (here) by comparing it to your current conditions contained in the South Australian Public Sector Enterprise Agreement: Salaried 2021 (the Salaried Agreement).

The Major issues 

The terms in general

As a general comment on how this document has been drafted, the wording of the clauses contained within are heavily in the favour of the employer. Employees are regularly required to meet certain steps of accountability and this is not the same for your employer. The employer can direct for things to happen and there is little recourse available to employees as they can limit and exclude things from consultation.

Employer accountability is for the most part reduced to the bare minimum and with little penalty for not meeting the terms described. Where time frames and obligations on the employer once existed in the Salaried Agreement they have largely been removed in this proposed agreement. See the differences in Appendix 1 RRR below as an example.

Salary Increases

The proposed wage rise is 13.5% over four years

4% in the first year
3.5% in the second year
3.5% in the third year
2.5% in the fourth year

The wages are not enough because they don't fix the damage of inflation and how inflation will impact us over the next 4 years.

The real value of our wages has eroded by around 10% since before the pandemic (as at the end of 2024)

 In real terms the offer is a pathetic 3.5% wage rise.

Additionally, there's a sneaky pay cut hidden in this agreement, which further subtracts from the 3.5%. 

Your ordinary hours will be increased to 38 hours per week by default.

This is a 1.3% increase in time with no change in wage, which is effectively a 1.3% pay cut. 

The actual wage increase in terms of real value is 2.2% over 4 years. 

Inequity in additional wage increases 

While the new agreement gives some AHPs an extra 4%, the PSA  believes ALL of our AHP/AHA members deserve a strong wage outcome that:

• immediately restores the real value of public sector wages, which at the end of 2024, have eroded by 10% since before the pandemic.
  
  
• protects against future inflation on an annual basis and recognises the value that public servants contribute to South Australia.
  
  
• addresses the current attraction and retention crisis across the state’s public sector by bringing wages into parity with federal and other state public servants and the private sector and ensures that current conditions are kept or improved.

The proposed wage rises are inadequate, inequitable and divisive among disciplines and the broader public sector.

Loss of employment conditions

Conditions were stripped from the proposed agreement in several places as detailed below. 

Others have said there is no loss of conditions. 

The most ironic example, at clause 2.2.6 of the Salaried Agreement, there is a commitment to 

“Existing conditions of employment applying to a party not being reduced...”

The proposed agreement does not contain this commitment. 

The proposed agreement does not contain any of the Objects and Commitments seen at clause 2 of the Salaried Agreement.

Ongoing Employment

At clause 2.2.1 of the Salaried Agreement there is a commitment to 

“Ongoing employment being the primary form of public sector employment.”

The proposed agreement does not contain this commitment. 

It does include a definition of ongoing employment at clause 14, but no commitments or otherwise about the use of ongoing employment.

Job Protection – Redeployment, Retraining and Redundancy (RRR)

The Salaried Agreement Appendix 1, RRR is our job protection. 

PSA members have fought hard to have this included in our 2017 agreement, and fought even harder to protect it when it was under threat by the Liberal government during the last round of negotiations.

• This Appendix in the Salaried Agreement currently runs 12 pages and contains 57 clauses.
  
  
• The proposed agreement reduces this down to 8 clauses spread over 2 and a half pages.

Every element of accountability on your employer has been removed.

 Every obligation to work with employees, to support employees, to retrain employees, and to do everything they can to get you into a suitable ongoing position has been removed. 

The onus is almost completely on the employee to find and be placed into suitable ongoing work. Your employer can just say goodbye.

The proposed agreement states that all your employer has to do is: 

‘provide reasonable assistance’ 

• by identifying other opportunities for employment in the Agency and the public sector; 
• give you access to the pre-publication list on iworkforsay, and 
• ‘training’.

The RRR protections in the Salaried Agreement have been developed based on the PSA’s extensive experience with dealing with Agency’s extremely poor handling of employees declared excess to requirements. 

The reductions to these hard fought conditions in the proposed agreement will see a return to the poor behaviour of Agencies members were subjected to prior to 2017.

Hours of work

The unilateral change to your hours of work is one of the biggest concerns in the proposed agreement. 

This is a new clause in the proposed agreement, clause 34. 

This clause will apply to all workers covered by this agreement and fundamentally changes the way you are employed. 

Extra 30 minutes of work per week

• This proposed agreement changes the default position for your ordinary hours of work from 37.5 hours per week to an average of 38 hours per week over a 4 week period (clause 34.1).
  
  
• This is an increase of 1.3% of your time required to be at work.
  
  
• There is no rise in your rate of pay to cover this additional time.
  
  
• Your employer ‘may elect’ to employ you on a 37.5 hour basis (34.2).
  
  
  

Shift lengths and requirement to work seven days

• 34.4 Your ordinary hours will be worked in ‘shifts’ of not shorter than 7.5 hours, and not longer than 12 hours (34.4). That is, you may be required to work 12 hours as ordinary hours at the ordinary rate of pay.
  
  
• The employer can introduce a change to seven-day rostering with 3 months’ notice.
  
  
• The employer is not required to consult with employees about a decision to change to seven-day rostering (35.5.4), only about how they are implementing the seven-day roster.
  
  
• If you need to raise a dispute about the implementation, the proposed agreement gives the employer the right to continue on with implementation despite there being a dispute. This is the opposite to how dispute resolution currently works, with the process currently needing to be put on hold until a dispute is resolved.

Minimum 10-hour break between shifts

• The current Award provides for employees to be paid double time if you are not given a minimum 8 hour break between shifts.
  
  
•  The proposed agreement states that the employer will try to give you a minimum of 10 hours break between shifts (34.4.3).
  
  
• However, if the employer cannot give you that 10 hour break, they are not penalised and you will not get compensated unless the break is less than 8 hours (i.e., the current penalty applies).
  
  
• This speaks to the change in the employer vs employee relationship highlighted at the beginning of this analysis – there is no accountability on your employer.

Consultation

Clause 34 of the Salaried Agreement contains your consultation requirements.

At Clause 34.1.4 it states that

“Workplace change, including any restructure/reorganisation (however described) that will affect employees should not be implemented before appropriate consultation has occurred with employee representatives”.

That is, if there is a change proposed in your workplace, your employer needs to consult with you about it.

• The proposed agreement at clause 11 gives the employer the discretion to decide if their proposed change meets their new definition (11.2).
  
  
• If the change meets that definition, your employer will only consult with you if they decide the change will have a “significant effect” on employees.
  
  
• This is a fundamental shift in how consultation will work and will act as a major restriction on what your employer consults with you about.
  
  
• In 2017, the PSA and our members successfully removed the words “significant effect” from the Salaried agreement because of the way your employer was gaming what they would consult on which caused a lot of disputation.
  
  
• This proposed change takes us backwards to the conditions previously seen in the 2014 Enterprise Agreement.
  
  

Dispute Resolution

There is wording in the Salaried Agreement at 35.8.1 about continuing to perform duties in a dispute. 

This wording is replicated in the proposed separate agreement at 12.11.2.

The proposed separate agreement also includes an express prohibition on industrial action during dispute resolution processes. 

Clause 12.11.1 of the proposed separate agreement states 

“a party bound by this Agreement or signatory to this Agreement must not take or threaten to take industrial action or encourage, directly or indirectly, industrial action to be taken by others;”

• This is a clear attack on workers. 
  
  
• The right to strike or withdraw your labour is an internationally recognised human right.
  
  
• The dispute resolution clause in the proposed agreement also incorporates wording about workload disputes.
  
  
• This is due to the removal of the specific workload dispute resolution process the PSA negotiated in the Salaried Agreement (clause 15.11) which required the employer to meet strict timeframes to reach resolution within.
  
  

Enforcement

• This clause in the Salaried Agreement (35.10) currently provides the ability to raise a dispute in the SAET where there is a breach on an express basis the agreement is made or a parliamentary process reduces or removes an employment benefit or condition.
  
  
• The clause was introduced after the Rann and Foley Labor government removed the additional long service leave and holiday leave loading.
  
  
• This clause is not included in the proposed agreement.

Workload Management

The Salaried Agreement contains a specific clause about workload management that works in conjunction with workload management requirements in the Health and Safety section of that agreement. 

These additional workload clauses (clause 15 of the Salaried Agreement) were won by PSA members in the 2017 round of negotiations and provide for strong protection against unreasonable and excessive workloads. 

• The proposed separate agreement weakens the requirement on your employer to include as part of consultation an assessment of the potential impact on workloads a change may have.
  
  
• The proposed separate agreement does not include the dedicated dispute resolution process currently available to employees to address a workload issue (Salaried Agreement 15.11 – 15.17).
  
  
• The alternative process proposed does not contain an obligation on the employer to meet what are currently strict timelines (resolution within 5 days).
  
  
• The proposed agreement removes an employees’ right to establish Local Workload Consultative Forums (LWCF) (Salaried Agreement clause 15.5). These forums currently facilitate consultation on issues about existing workloads or possible workload change and the monitoring of impacts resulting from such change.

Once again, the obligations on the employer have been removed. 

The attitude shift goes from an employee being able to raise issues with their workload and have them quickly addressed under the Salaried Agreement, to the Employer

 ‘will make reasonable efforts to allocate work in a manner that enables Employees to perform the types of duties described below during their shift (including reasonable overtime)’ 

in the proposed agreement (clause 44.5).

What’s missing?

Plenty is missing here, but one that stands out is the multi-classified roll allowance that was part of previous offers.

This allowance would have provided AHPs who work in multi-classified roles the difference in pay between their AHP salary and the highest salary offered for the role.

These are just some of the examples of issues with the proposed agreement. 

It is not good enough for SA public sector AHP and AHA employees.

When the ballot opens, we strongly recommend that you VOTE NO.

You can read all of the PSA’s updates and information about the proposed agreement here.

VOTE NO to a separate agreement that removes essential conditions fought for and won by generations of PSA members.

Essential, fundamental conditions about job security, workload protection, consultation, dispute resolution, and many other conditions are at risk of being ripped away from members forever. Any area where the employer has accountability to the worker has been removed or watered down.

These are conditions fought for and won by PSA members over 30 years. Once they’re gone – they won’t come back.

VOTE NO to being required to convert to working across seven days a week – with only three months’ notice.

This would make it impossible for you to plan your life – such as organising caring responsibilities, study, leisure activities and the like. And under this agreement, your roster would be implemented with limited consultation, no stopping of the steam roller during a grievance or dispute about it. 

What’s more, you will receive no additional leave to the five weeks that you are currently entitled to when working over seven days.

VOTE NO to trading an inadequate, inequitable and divisive wage rise for worse conditions.

The proposed wage rises are inadequate, inequitable and divisive. For most AHAs and AHPs, the proposed wage rises won’t even make up for the real losses to current wages caused by the cost-of-living crisis.

The PSA has been advocating for a wage outcome that immediately makes up for the loss in the real value of wages, and that provides for adequate wage rises above inflation into the future. The government’s proposal does not provide for this.

Some AHPs will receive additional allowances. The PSA believes that all AHPs and AHAs deserve wages that cover wage erosion caused by inflation and the cost of living – and to recognise and reward the hard work you all do.

VOTE NO to an agreement that has stripped out your employer’s accountability.

The proposed agreement is drafted to remove any accountability of your employer, and puts all the onus on employees. It represents a major power shift from the current more balanced relationship between employer and worker to a dictatorial/submissive employment relationship. 

VOTE NO to substandard agreements for all public sector workers.

The government is cynically treating AHPs as unsuspecting guinea pigs for the first of all the public sector agreements currently under negotiation this year. By establishing a very low bar for them all (including the salaried agreement), the government can ignore the cost-of-living crisis and continue to suppress public sector wages.

VOTE NO to a separate agreement at all costs.

The HSU – along with other bargaining agents – has long trumpeted a separate agreement as an end in itself. In other words: the content of the agreement doesn’t matter.

The PSA knows that the content of an agreement is what’s most critical. We will continue to fight for the best wage outcome for members – without trading off or losing your current conditions.

VOTE NO so you can keep, and improve on all your current conditions – and have the opportunity to win proper and equitable wage rises.

The content of the proposed AHP/AHA agreement is, with a few exceptions, disgraceful and totally disrespectful to the employees it’s proposed to cover. PSA members need – and deserve – much better.

THE BEST OUTCOMES COME FROM STANDING UNITED

We all know that PSA members working together can improve outcomes for public sector workers and the community. You and your colleagues have the power to make a real difference. But we have to be in it together to make that difference.

Ask those yet to join you in the PSA to join online today.

YOUR UNION, YOUR VOICE, YOUR AGREEMENT

Contact: youragreement@psaofsa.asn.au

30 June 2025

Please distribute to all AHP and AHA PSA members.