Immigration detention staff strike over redundancies as Serco exits

Immigration detention workers are striking nationally over the transition from one private prison conglomerate to another.

Workers at nine onshore Australian immigration detention centres went on strike for four hours to 8.30am on Monday, with another four-hour action planned for Monday afternoon.

This follows two-hour strikes on Friday.

The dispute is centred around what the United Workers Union (UWU) calls a “huge and avoidable mess” – the outgoing operator being “unable to deal fairly with workers who are seeking legitimate redundancies in a contract changeover”.

Outgoing detention centre operator Serco says all employees will be paid their legal entitlements.

Detention centre controller Australian Border Force has been contacted for comment.

The UWU says it has made concessions over “business continuity” during the handover, but Serco was holding out on relatively small redundancy offers.

The union argues Serco telling staff to resign is an attempt to avoid paying redundancies, and Serco should be paying redundancies because workers are entering a greenfields agreement with a new provider.

“It’s a stinging indictment of Serco that a multibillion-dollar corporation is unable to deal fairly with workers who are seeking legitimate redundancies in a contract changeover,” UWU allied industries director Godfrey Moase said.

“In some centres, the contract transition is occurring on March 6 – less than two weeks away – and detainees, workers and the community can’t afford to be impacted by a continuing struggle with the outgoing contractor.

“It’s a debacle of Serco’s making that workers are facing threats of being dragged through the courts.”

The Management and Training Corporation won Australia’s $2.3bn immigration detention contract in December.

The American company is the third largest private prison operator in the US.

As of December, there are 979 people in Australia’s immigration detention centres. Of those people, 321 have been held for more than one year.

There are six immigration detention centres across the country. UWU members working at these six, plus three “alternative places of detention”, are striking.

The concerned parties will head to the Fair Work Commission later on Monday.

A Serco spokesperson told NewsWire workers going from Serco to the new operator “are simply changing shirts, not jobs”.

New operators, Management and Training Corporation subsidiary - Secure Journeys - will start running the centres from March. Serco has offered to pay the new operator a lump sum equivalent of each workers’ leave entitlements.

Internally, Serco has set up a transition unit to find workers new roles should they want to stay with Serco, with the “preservation of redundancy entitlements if the new role does not work out”, the Serco spokesperson said.

Serco also promises workers who are made redundant and do not go into a comparable role with the new operator or with Serco will be paid redundancy.

On top of these redundancy agreements, the union wants a 15 per cent pay rise. The union did recently get a 3.5 per cent pay rise from the new operator.

Serco offered 5 per cent and a $750 retention bonus, but the union is still pushing for a 15 per cent rise.