Silcar Communications: negotiations continue
Negotiations for a new Enterprise Agreement (EA) in Silcar Communications are continuing, despite the fact that the company has outlined what it is saying is its final offer on many of the key matters under discussion.
Silcar presented the major elements of its EA offer at a series of employee consultations held earlier this month.
These include a pay rise of 2.5% per annum over 3 years, preservation of the current portable redundancy payments schemes and a restructured “buy-out” sum for proposed changes to working hours and overtime rates.
Over and above these “big ticket” items, however, many other issues remain to be resolved.
The aim of these negotiations has always been to see how far the conditions of current Silcar Communications employees might be aligned to those in the current Visionstream Field Workforce EA and the fact is that are many significant differences between the two agreements, not only in relation to hours of work and overtime.
The CWU and other bargaining representatives met with Silcar Communications on Tuesday 21 March for an all-day meeting designed to go through the two agreements clause by clause. The negotiators were able to agree on ways of resolving some, but not all, of the differences.
The CWU believes, for instance, that we will be able to arrive at a formula that will deal with the difference in the way travel allowance is paid under the two agreements but we are yet to resolve issues around rest and meal breaks.
The CWU expects that a further meeting to address such outstanding issues will be held in the near future. Members will be advised of developments.
