Following last week’s good news about the Epworth EA, another VHPA negotiated Agreement has recently come into effect at Cabrini. The three-year Agreement delivers Health Professionals a 12% increase over the life of the Agreement with 3.5% backdated to 1 October 2012 and 3.5% backdated to 1 October 2013. This means most Health Professionals will receive back pay to those dates, with the next pay rise of another 3.5% less than five months away  (from 1 October 2014) and a final rise of 1.5% from 1 October 2015, the last day of the nominal life of the Agreement. The Agreement provides a number of improvements to conditions including:

• A Professional Development Allowance of up to $500 per annum
• Inclusion of a Grade 4 classification for most relevant disciplines where these did not already exist;
• Higher on-call allowance when an Employee is required to be on-call at more than one site;
• Increase in paid parental to leave to 11 weeks for the primary care giver;
• Increase in Annual Leave Loading cap.

“This is a terrific win after a long hard negotiation,” noted Senior Industrial Coordinator Alex Leszczynski. The old Agreement was not a genuine stand-alone Agreement. That is, a number of the key clauses were not to in the Agreement and had to be found in the underlying Award and Legislation. “It is vital that our Agreements are comprehensive. An unknown entitlement often isn’t worth the paper it is printed on for many Employees,” said Leszczynski. “The members, delegates and organisers should be proud of their work. It is absolutely crucial to get these things right and we took the time to do that. This will pay off in spades over the coming years. That being said, there are definitely matters in the Agreement that we would like addressed in the next round of negotiations,” concluded Leszczynski.