Working Womens Centre Is Closing

The NSW Working Womens Centre is facing closure at the end of the financial year. Again. In light of the proposed Workplace Relations Reforms, this is a high-level disaster for the people from whom the state has withdrawn its protection and advocacy.

For those who aren't aware, the Centre is jointly funded by the NSW DIR and the Federal DEWR to provide a service specifically targetted at working women's issues, and every time a funding round comes up, the DEWR waits until the very last minute before deciding whether or not to approve it. A staff member at the WWC told me that one year they found out 10 Hours before the centre was due to shut for the last time that their funding would be re-approved.

This is unacceptable, and leaves both the extremely dedicated staff and their vulnerable clients in distress. It is especially unacceptable when you consider that the DEWR Wageline routinely refers their clients to the service, often just upon hearing their female voices over the phone, and that they refer all women callers who are probably under state jurisdiction and have mistakenly called the federal wageline, to the WWC.

I know. I've worked at DEWR and I've volunteered at the Working Women's Centre. The first intake of volunteers at WWC was last year. They needed these volunteers to keep running, because their funding from one body had been slashed, and the funding from the other body hadn't been indexed to CPI, so they had to cut staff and redistribute their ever-increasing load.

My first shift as a volunteer was an eye-opener. The centre just doesn't deal with first-level complaints - you know, "What award am I under" and that sort of thing. It doesn't deal with clean questions. It is a last stop. The people who go through all of the processes and are finally referred to the centre are desperate. They have been sexually harassed and assaulted at work. They live in tightly-knit rural or regional communities and if complain that their boss has been coming over to their house and masturbating in their garden, it's their word against his, everyone knows, and they can't get another job in their town. They have been underpaid or unpaid for many years, made to perform duties that aren't consistent with their experience or to clean the employee toilets in their own time, put on 20 hour shifts with no overtime, made casual without their consent, put on AWAs without knowing what they were, signed their conditions away under threat of unemployment... it's all there, and they can't afford legal representation and don't know how to do it themselves. And these are the people who haven't given up after going through several departments, waiting for phone calls - I can't imagine how many people just give up before they make it through the maze of burocracy. And then the WCC doesn't always have the resources to help the ones who do make it.

PLEASE HELP contact your local member, federal or state, and lobby for the renewal of federal funds and the increase of state funds. Do it ASAP - in the next couple of days. This is one of those rare initiatives that has always had support from women on both sides of politics. It has amazing merit and should be supported simply because the people who use this service are so desperate. I don't want to hear stupid comments about how there should be a Working Men's Service - maybe there should be, whatever, but there should definitely be a Working Women's Service, that's what counts.