Friction over the Abbott government’s moves to open-up employment assistance and welfare support services to the non-government and private sectors providers is intensifying as the clock counts down for bids to provide help to disabled Australians to find jobs.
The Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) has hit out at the Department of Social Services (DSS) for putting a disability employment contract out to public tender, a move which the union says will leave jobseekers with disabilities worse off sacrifice 1300 public sector jobs.
The work for Disability Employment Services – Disability Management Service (DES-DMS), which helps people with temporary or permanent disabilities who don’t need long-term support find and stay in jobs, was previously held by CRS Australia – a division of the Department of Human Services – and bids close on Monday August 4th.
CRS Australia is ineligible to bid for the work.
The contract represents a substantial chunk of employment services for job seekers with disabilities: 47 per cent of the scheme nationally. The DES-DMS has more than 75,000 current participants.
The tender does not include the Employment Service Support side of the business, which is geared more towards clients with a permanent disability who need ongoing, long-term support in the workplace.
Fifty-four non-government providers currently deliver, through competitively-won contracts, 53 per cent of the DES-Disability Management Service business. Around $300 million was spent on the DES-DMS program in the 2013-14 financial year.
But the increase in work being given to non-government providers has angered unions. CPSU Deputy President Lisa Newman slammed the “brutal market reallocation” of CRS Australia’s contract, which is due to expire in June 2015.
“The CRS often handles the most difficult cases that the private sector is not equipped to deal with,” Ms Newman said.
“They employ more allied health professionals than are generally found in private sector competitors and that means the quality of the service they provide is far in excess of the private sector.”
Ms Newman said private sector companies were not required to employ qualified allied health professionals or bound by the public service code of conduct, both of which underpinned the quality and dedication that CRS showed in its work.
A spokesperson for DSS said that “contracted DES-Disability Management Service providers are expected to employ staff who are able to deliver services in accordance with the contractual requirements. These contractual arrangements have not changed.”
However Ms Newman cautioned that jobseekers with disabilities would miss CRS’ holistic approach and would faced slipping standards of service provision once services were jettisoned from CRS, she said.
The impact would be particularly severe in regional areas, where the disabled may only have one or two providers to choose from.
“Our members have said that their clients have been very upset to lose their case managers. Any kind of change for people that are vulnerable is always traumatic,” she said.
The CPSU said it is trying to get as many as possible of the scheme’s workers redeployed, some into the broader DHS, some into the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and others into the private sector.
It’s an undeniably big shift, but some disability service providers have an entirely opposite view of the impact of the new contract, asserting that CRS has historically enjoyed unfair advantage over private and not-for-profit providers.
The chief executive of National Disability Services, Dr Ken Baker, whose organisation represents around 800 non-government disability service providers, some of them private, called the move to put services into the market “a good decision by government”’.
He said CRS had enjoyed a competitive advantage for years.
“CRS is able to offer its employees the superior employment conditions that flow from guaranteed financial support from the Commonwealth. This reduces competition in the sector and acts as a barrier to wider reform of DES arrangements,” Dr Baker said.
He argued that the non-government sector had a good record of providing a more efficient and flexible response to people with disabilities than the government sector did.
“They [NGOs] certainly are more mission-driven and embedded in local communities. [They] and have these networks among employers that provide pathways to employment,’’ Dr Baker said.
“CRS have been in the business a very long time and certainly there are some very talented and skilled people there but they’re encumbered by the fact that they are an arm of government and there is a layer of bureaucracy.”
But Dr Baker criticised Canberra for failing to include disability employment services under the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS), which he said provided individually-tailored design for disability services that was world class.
DSS tender documents suggest the department is expecting bids from a mix of private and not-for-profit providers of different sizes and contracts will run from March 2015 until March 2018.
CRS Australia began life as the Civilian Rehabilitation Scheme in 1941, later becoming the Commonwealth Rehabilitation Service before being renamed CRS Australia in 1998. Its original mission was to help injured men and women from the armed forces and people on invalid pensions return to work.
DSS directed questions over the extent of job losses to the Department of Human Services.
(Note: This article has been updated from a previous version to include comment sought from the Department of Social Services)
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