News

UNI sends congratulations to Austrian UNICARE affiliate GPA djp who, in recent weeks, successfully completed collective bargaining for social service workers with some important improvements achieved, especially for the mainly women workforce in early childhood education and care roles.

Wage increases have been achieved across the social services and will benefit more than 100,000 employees in private health and social services, including those working with disabled children, in short and long term care, early childhood education, work retraining roles, home rehabilitation roles, and more. UNICARE affiliate union GPA djp, representing private health and social service workers, and partner union Vida have also achieved major advances in the framework law covering social service work. 

As well as the pay increases of 1.35% across the board for 2016, the legal and regulatory changes achieved include an increase in on call allowances of 5.6%; improvements in dirt, hardship, and danger allowances, with an equalisation in allowances across all grades of workers (previously lower paid workers also received lower allowances); expansion of allowances to workers in kindergartens and other childcare facilities; improvements in job specifications for school assistants; imcome jumps for early childhood educators every three years instead of every five years - which represents a dramatic increase in income for this women dominated workforce. 

Workers still have some campaigns on their hands though, with improvements still needed in rostering stability, and shared service roles, but GPA djp leaders committed to work on these issues during the life of the agreement. 

A summary of the new terms can be found here, and the full agreement can be found here.