News

$30 A Week For What, Ian?

May 21, 2001

Mr MacDougall AC AFSM has outdone himself with his latest “Message from the Commissioner” concerning the D&D dispute. In fact it’s so good that we’ve taken the unusual step of attaching his notice to ours, just in case you missed […]

D&d Dispute Update – Wednesday 9 May

May 9, 2001

Meeting with the Minister We met last night with the Minister for Emergency Services, Bob Debus. Put simply, he didn’t give any ground and neither did we. We did at least both agree that we should continue to talk, which […]

Union Instructions Remain In Force Until We Say Otherwise

May 3, 2001

Commissioner MacDougall has this morning issued a direction that all firefighters are “to comply with all instructions given to them by their superior officers”. We suspect the primary target of this direction to be our Union’s relieving bans. This was […]

Union Instruction Amended

April 23, 2001

The Union’s officials have continued to monitor the measures which were introduced by the members attending last Friday’s stop-work meetings, and to consider the feedback provided by members since that time. Accordingly, the instruction at point 2. Four Stations to […]

D&d Negotiations Collapse Completely

April 18, 2001

The Union met with Government representatives this afternoon for what was always going to be a last ditch meeting prior to tomorrow’s IRC proceedings before Justice Boland. However today merely confirmed what we suspected all along – the Government never […]

Union Direction: All Members Attached To No. 341 Station, Kariong

April 11, 2001

We have been negotiating with the Department for close to 12 months now over staffing for the new Hazmat vans. The fact is that there was no consultation whatsoever with our Union on this question prior to the introduction of […]

D&d: The Final Hurdle? Govt. Honesty!

April 6, 2001

The dispute returned to the Industrial Relations Commission at 10am today. The Government explained its final position, which we regret to say really hasn’t changed at all from July last year. We of course again flatly rejected it.

500 Firefighters’ Jobs In The Balance

April 3, 2001

Last week, during negotiations over the D&D dispute the Department confirmed that in the first stages of their proposal for a mandatory health and fitness standard approximately 500 permanent firefighters will “move through the system”. When pressed on what that […]

Telephone Payments – No Agreement On “reasonable”

March 16, 2001

The Department has recently attempted to enforce its telephone usage policy, as promulgated in In Orders 2000/22, by serving some members with STD bills for their station. However, there has been no formal agreement reached with the Union on what […]