BREAKING NEWS! KMART IN SECRET NEGOTIATIONS WITH SDA TO CUT WAGES BY 20% Ellie, Kmart Employee I’m Ellie, I’m a long-term casual worker at Kmart Roselands, and I’m on the RAFFWU bargaining team fighting for better conditions for Kmart workers. As any Kmart team member can attest to, working at Kmart is often extremely demanding. Stores are almost always understaffed, workers are frequently burnt out, and the productivity expectations set by higher-ups who don’t have to witness the toll taken on store workers, are sky-high. I’m working with RAFFWU because I think all Kmart workers deserve better. I’ve seen so many workers have to look for other work because their fluctuating income from casual work has been too unstable to cover their bills. I’ve commiserated with so many workers overwhelmed by the amount of work they have to get done in nowhere near enough time, attempting to make do by informally working through breaks or past rostered hours and pushing themselves to their limits. In my time at Kmart, the vast majority of team members I’ve met have been extremely hard working and committed, making miracles happen despite frequently being under-trained and under-resourced. We do this all while on very little more than minimum wage, and with most team members being casual workers and/or on junior rates, we’re often barely even making a normal minimum wage. Kmart workers deserve to be able to make a predictable enough income to cover their cost of living. We deserve safe workplaces; workplaces where we have enough staff to actually meet the demands of customer traffic without being harassed for factors out of our control, where queer workers genuinely feel safe to be as out as they want to be, where there are enough team members working to physically carry out the workloads required without pushing people past safe working capacities. We deserve to get paid fairly for the work that we do regardless of our age or ability status. If you're a Kmart worker and you want to be represented by a fighting union that wants to get you paid better, to make your workplace safer, and to fight for your interests, join RAFFWU and get in contact to chat about what the bargaining team is fighting for! Kmart has announced in negotiations that it wants to replace casual hours with a dodgy casualised form of employment where workers will be paid 20% less but be given minimum leave rights. The hours can be offered while workers are at school, other jobs or university. They can be offered when you are cooking dinner for your kids. It’s utter nonsense! It’s simply casual work but paid 20% less! We know SDA salivates over these kind of attacks on workers and Kmart has been recruiting hard for SDA for many years. Don’t let SDA and Kmart wreck our wages even more! 19 Kmart Bargaining Team Zoom Meeting; Ellie, Bill, Deklan and Josh
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