PSA Women's Unit & Staff

The Women’s Unit develops PSA policy on women’s industrial matters in conjunction with Women’s Council., and the Unit runs campaigns on topics of concern to women members and assists other industrial teams with issues such as workplace discrimination and harassment.

The unit also coordinates services for women members such as the annual women's conference and the publication of Women@Work.

The Unit is staffed with one and one half industrial positions and one administrative position.. They are::

• Shabnam Hameed, Acting Women's Industrial Officer
• Anne Kennelly, Women's Industrial Officer (on maternity leave), and
• Chrissie Joannou, Administrative staff

The unit can be contacted on:
women@psa.asn.au
or
02 9220 0906 (phone)
02 9262 1623 (fax)
or
Women's Unit
Public Service Association of NSW
GPO BOX 3365
Sydney NSW 2001

The role of the Women's Unit is essentially three-fold::

• Research and policy advice on industrial issues affecting women members - across the sector;
• Organising women members; and
• Resourcing and providing administrative support to Women Council (see Women's Council section).

The PSA has the view that industrial problems for women in the workplace are mainstream industrial problems, which should be dealt with my mainstream industrial staff - with the advice and assistance of the Women's Unit if needed.

However, there are sometimes situations in which the PSA may be asked to represent both parties in a dispute or some other special reason for the Women's Unit to be involved. For example the Unit has been working recently on a number of cases involving 'carer's responsibilities' discrimination which is a new area of discrimination law. Individual women often also ring the Unit to ask for advice about things like maternity leave entitlements, job share agreements and procedures for dealing with a complaint of sexual harassment.

The PSA Women's Unit has been involved in a lot of important discrimination cases over the years. In the 1970s and 1980s when discrimination law was really developing in NSW, this included some very high profile cases such as the case of Jane Hill who took action against the NSW Water Resources Commission for sexual harassment.

Many of the issue the Women's Unit deals with could be more correctly labeled 'equity' issues or 'family' issues rather than specifically women's issues, but they do tend to be more often issues affecting women workers.

The Unit does a lot of work on issues concerning family friendly workplaces - access to flexible work practices, carer's leave, disputes about part time work arrangements etc - and these are issues which aren't just about mothers caring for kids, but allowing men to meet their family obligations as well.

In the industrial research and policy area, the Unit is currently working a range of projects including:

• follow up to our recent win in the Librarians, Archivists and Library Technicians pay equity test case. This was a fantastic win for the union which got us an average of nearly 16% pay rises for members across all the classifications and most importantly, now provides a mechanism for unions to argue for improved pay and career paths in areas that have been historically undervalues because the jobs were done by women. But now there are whole lot of follow up issues - securing funding from Treasury for all the agencies (other than the State Library) which haven't been funded and getting regrading for library workers in agencies not covered by the award;

• Campaigning to improve a whole raft of award provisions for improved paid parental leave (for both mothers and fathers). This will include increasing maternity leave equalising adoption and maternity leave (which we have recently won) as well as introducing paid leave for dads & partners;

• Superannuation - we've recently had a win on a long standing issue where members on paid parental leave and workers compensation hadn't been paid their employer superannuation contributions due to a legal loophole. After much lobbying and work on the issue, the legislation has been changed and Treasury has issued new guidelines which not only allow members in these situations to be paid, but for members on paid parental leave who missed out, they will be able to receive backpayments, plus interest, as far back as 1994.

The Unit is involved with working with members on issues in their workplaces and helping them develop the skills to become more active union members. We do this through meeting with groups of women in their workplaces, helping with training for members - we run training courses specifically for women and are involved in lots of outside training, especially on things like workplace flexibility.