There has been a lot of conversation during our elections about a very important topic and that is money. Your Money. Your money that you pay in membership fees to your Union.
So where has all your money gone ?
The current SCoM has approved over $1,000,000 on the NSW Election alone since 2018.
And why is this significant ?
Because it’s greater than 3 times more per Union member than any other Union has spent in NSW.
And what has it gotten us?
A 4% pay rise when the Teachers and Ambos got 8 and 12% and we are still spending more of our Unions money on T shirts, flags and busses to bring people to the city to fight the government we spent all this money on to get elected !
In the lead up to and during negotiations for our current Award, inflation was running at 6 to 8%. When we accepted 4% it was the equivalent to a 2 to 4% pay cut.
It important to understand that CPI doesn’t calculate in housing prices that have risen as much as 20% since Covid alone.
Covid saw the biggest shift in wealth from the lower and middle classes to the rich in last 100 years. We need every cent right now to stay afloat and the last thing we need is reckless spending as demonstrated by our Unions leadership recently.
Here is the breakdown….
Health Services Union, 49000 members, spent $2,681,752.26. That’s $54.73 per member.
PSA, 38000 members, spent $1,164.097.10. That’s $30.63 per member.
NSW Nurses and Midwives, 74000 members, spent $1,604,817.83. That’s $21.69 per member.
NSW Teachers Federation, 61000 members, spent $480,000. That’s $7.90 per member.
Police Association, 17000 members, spent $26,000. That’s $1.53 per member.
And the FBEU?
Spent $1,043,605.31. 6000 members, 4100 full-time equivalent members. That’s $173.93 per member!
These figures were sourced from the NSW Electoral Commission. We did not vote on this expenditure – the biggest single expense in the history of our Union, apart from purchasing buildings, did not go to the members.
In relation to our size we spent far more than any other union on the NSW election.
Why????
And why did we not get the opportunity to vote on this, to have State Committee convince us that an expense like this was justified????
Unions campaigning in elections is entirely legitimate. The first time the FBEU did so was under my running mate Jim Casey, when we successfully intervened in the 2013 Miranda by-election. My team has no issue with the tactic of third party campaigning.
But when it becomes the Union’s strategy to the exclusion of anything else, without it going to a vote of the membership, we’ve got a problem. A $1,000,000 plus bill problem with a below the inflation rate pay rise problem.
And what did that million buy us from the Minns government? Considering our Award expired almost 1 month ago and we still don’t have bargaining parameters,
at the moment it looks like not very much at all.
Both the Teachers and the Nurses spent big on the NSW election. Relative to size far less than us, but big nonetheless. They also kept taking industrial action through the end of the Liberal government and have carried over into the Minns government, and it has got them results. It’s possible to campaign both industrially and politically, Wilmott/Casey 24 aim to do both.
Wilmott-Casey 24 
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