Every week 90% of MSAV, VPA and AHP members give their employers in excess of an additional 2.5 hours per week of unpaid time.

This data was revealed in the recent survey of members.

The survey also demonstrated that (apart from salary matters), workloads, staffing and the expectation that members would work additional unpaid hours were the matters of most concern.

Unpaid work has a number of insidious effects on members and health services. The most obvious and important of these is that members are not paid for work they perform even though our industrial agreement says you must be.

Consider the significance of unpaid work in light of the Government’s wages policy that it is aggressively enforcing in the current negotiations:

• Unpaid work represents a current saving of approximately $20 million per year. That’s $20 million worth of salaries not paid.

MSAV, VPA and AHP currently contribute 4 times more in unpaid work than the Government is offering in wage increases.

The other significant effects of members performing unpaid work relate to funding and restructuring.

Governments have started to ignore any obligation to maintain sufficient public funding to guarantee service delivery in health services while those service delivery benchmarks are maintained through escalating levels of unpaid work. The Government’s view is why fund for additional staff if the work gets done by fewer.

Probably the most harmful impact of unpaid work relates to the never ending cycles of restructuring across all types of health services. Hospital executives have been able to largely ignore any responsibility to maintain staffing at a level that reasonably matches workload simply because they assume our members will take up ever increasing workloads in an environment of reduced staff and expanding services. For the past decade our members, in good faith, have done exactly that.

While the State Government, on the one hand, demands in these negotiations that we concede “quantifiable” productivity benefits for wage increases, it refuses to recognise there has been any benefit or savings from unpaid work.