By John Foster
In a recent front-page article in the Latrobe Valley Express, Health Services Union of Australia organiser Doug Byron revealed a number of serious outstanding concerns among his members, warning that uncertainty among staff at the Latrobe Regional Hospital (LRH) was at the worst level it had ever been, and could lead to industrial unrest.
Among his members' concerns were the rolling over of current award conditions, portability of entitlements and redundancies. Citing "ongoing problems" with emergency services at both the Moe and Traralgon hospitals, Byron said, "It's worse now than it's ever been".
Approached for comment, Gippsland Trades and Labour Council assistant secretary Rod Hart said that the GTLC would continue to monitor the situation and facilitate meetings for unions.
The disillusionment and concerns expressed by the HSUA organiser about the thus far futile negotiations with representatives from the Department of Human Services and the private developers over staff numbers and conditions at the proposed "new LRH" are predicable, as are other serious, unanswered issues regarding essential community services.
Substantial sums of public money have already gone to the plethora of advertising and publishing companies, architectural, building and medical experts, not to mention the small army of predatory financial and legal "consultants". Meanwhile, the staff at our three major hospitals and the tax-paying workers and small business operators of this region and their families live with fear and uncertainty about their future source of income and a seriously diminished quality of health care services.
This situation demonstrates the priorities of politicians in this state and their senior Department of Human Services advisers. It also provides a foretaste of what we can expect from the wealthy investors and their highly paid corporate executives who plan to operate from the substantially smaller, privately owned "public" hospital in question.
The exclusion of the public, by private security guards, from the recent signing of documents in Traralgon revealed the secretiveness of the process and the elitism of the deal-makers. Yet it is the uninvited public whose taxes will help fund the new private "public" hospital, contributing to the profits of its owners.
Just how much profit they will eventually make out of this investment is deemed to be "commercial in confidence".
The careers, incomes and peace of mind of the workers whose skills, dedication and labour keep our hospitals running are being sacrificed in the deals being negotiated. The workers will not have a share in the profits, and many will not even be around when the "new LRH" eventually opens for business.
The various union "negotiators" have met delays and lack of progress on guarantees of existing jobs and conditions for their members, and on unanswered issues such as the reopening of the high dependency unit at the Moe campus and the maintenance of existing services at the Moe and Traralgon campuses.
Full public disclosure of the "hard decisions" is being delayed to try to ensure that industrial disruption is forestalled or kept at minimal levels. A "satisfactory" deal to ensure minimal disruption and cost escalation during the 18 months of construction can be expected to be worked out between company executives and senior union officers in Melbourne. They should not encounter any difficulty in attracting a ready pool of construction workers in either Melbourne or the depressed Latrobe Valley region.
Without a combined union-community campaign to ensure that not one more permanent or long-term job in this region is destroyed or one more community service downgraded, an "absolute guarantee of employment for [all] our members" will remain a fine-sounding but vacuous hope.
With both the health "industry" and the wider economic system in real disarray and financial crisis, the privatisation of the more lucrative public enterprises (accompanied by the "downsizing" or outright closure of smaller or "less efficient" public services) was introduced as a principal mechanism to "restructure the economy".
Those behind this undemocratic and antisocial change have thus far been generally successful; the gap between rich and poor in every country and region of the world has widened enormously over recent years.
However, this latest attempt to shore up an economic system that is now technically as well as morally bankrupt, is being met with increasing resistance by workers, students and pensioners in communities all over the world, including France, Indonesia, East Timor, New Zealand, South Korea and India.
The single most important lesson from these struggles is that success cannot be achieved without the unity of all those whose jobs, education and other essential community needs and individual life-chances are under attack.
Across Australia, whole communities are now fighting back, mounting successful campaigns to stop: rapacious bankers from taking farms off indebted and beleaguered families; private "developers" from helping themselves to pristine areas of wilderness and national parks; and giant local and foreign-owned companies from further despoiling our streetscapes and local environments with technological "wonders" such a mobile phone towers and invasive overhead cables.
Unimpeded access to quality health care is surely the right of every citizen of a truly democratic community, as is the opportunity to contribute to one's community with one's labour through a job that is both intrinsically and socially rewarding.
In an era of intensifying competition and resultant social division and conflict over the private accumulation of social wealth, the continued exploitation of the Latrobe Valley's "human resources" will do nothing to bring us together.
To plan to destroy yet more jobs in this region in the name of "efficiency" or "competitive advantage" on the alleged "level playing field" of the "free market", reflects the intellectual and spiritual bankruptcy of our corporate, academic and civic leaders.
Bullying and "downsizing" public sector employees such as power industry workers, those who produce and deliver a safe water supply and those who educate our children or take care of the sick may well result in some degree of"cost saving". However, the tragedy of our supposedly "advanced" society is that the social cost has not been taken into account.
With both the present political administration and the private developers using the "new LRH" as a test case for the eventual privatisation of the rest of Victoria's public hospitals, the stakes are extremely high; billions of dollars are being made available to be grabbed by greedy "entrepreneurs" and their well-paid sycophants.
The alleged "crisis" being used to drive through all the changes to our local and national communities could be eliminated overnight were our political "leaders" prepared to make the hard decision and close off the loopholes which enable local and foreign elites to legally avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes every year.
Any residents of Latrobe Valley and surrounding districts who still view privatisation as an essential and worthwhile step should consider the outcome of the privatisation experiment at the Port Macquarie Base Hospital in NSW as well as the "model" health care system in the USA, which its local exponents would like to impose eventually on the whole of this country.
For the workers and residents of Latrobe Valley to ensure the "fair deal" envisaged by Doug Byron, both groups will need to unite in a show of strength and solidarity which we have not seen for some time now, but was once a hallmark of this community.