Region 8 Pay Issues
After 8 months of pay issues, members at Keolis Downer voted this week on directing the union to push for an independent payroll audit.
This followed resolutions from each of the 3 depots pushing for the same, but audits often reveal as much, if not more, bad than good. For this reason, a vote of all members was decided on to allow for people, such as PM drivers, who are not able to regularly attend depot meetings to have a say. This ran across Wednesday and Thursday this week and was closed today. A bulletin and an SMS with the link was sent to members.
The result of the poll is that members, overwhelmingly, DO want an external audit to be done, understanding that it may reveal more overpayments than underpayments. This highlights the desire of employees to be able to trust their pay is correct. The stress being generated by these ongoing issues is unacceptable.
This still doesn’t stop the ongoing issues, which we’d expect an experienced multinational company with experience in our Award and conditions via Newcastle, to manage without problems. A meeting has been scheduled with KDNB and Downer management and the RTBU to go through all the issues individually. This group will meet every week afterwards until the issues are resolved.
The union has also requested a ticketing system be set up for employees to better track the queries and to lend the process of inquiring into each report some transparency. KDNB has agreed and is in the process of sorting that system out.
Having sat down with the company and gone through how certain payments should be made and for there STILL to be widespread ongoing issues of both over and underpayments, we need the company to take some responsibility and do their job.
While there are limits to what the union can do (we don’t run the business), we are involving ourselves as much as possible at every level to help KDNB get to the bottom of why they can’t pay people correctly.
A bulletin will follow the meeting on the 11th July, and we will update members on the push for the company to pay for an audit of wages.