Thousands of APS contractors left without vaccination leave, quarantine pay

Employment agency Hays told a senate inquiry on Friday its 2500 employees contracted to federal government departments through labour hire agreements had no access to vaccination pay or pay while in isolation awaiting a Covid test result.

When asked by Labor senator Tony Sheldon, the firm's managing director Nick Deligiannis said his staff did not receive the paid vaccination leave granted to other permanent public servants but were paid higher hourly rates to make up for it.

"Regardless of the reason for not being able to be at work, the nature of the temporary arrangement that we have with our employees is that they're paid an hourly rate, which has a casual loading attached to it," he said.

"That offsets that they don't have benefits that would be attached to a more permanent arrangement, like sick leave or annual leave."

He said the firm had received $380 million in revenue from the federal government during the 2020-21 financial year.

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Services Australia also revealed about 13 per cent of its workforce was contracted through labour hire firms on temporary contracts.

Since 2012, Services Australia's permanent ongoing workforce has dropped from 34,000 to about 27,000, with the difference being made up from the labour hire.

General manager Michael Nelson said around 5350 workers within the department are on contracting arrangements or in non-ongoing roles.

He later said the number of contractors was closer to 8000 when probed by Labor senator Jess Walsh, who also asked if that would breach the agency's average staffing level cap.

Mr Nelson said: "Factually, absolutely, yes it would."

The department said the reliance on labour hire workers has increased since the start of the pandemic, as a result of an increase in claims and provided services.

"Over the last little while the peaks have been really high in terms of the level of demand that we've experienced therefore we've had to scale up quite significantly to meet that," Mr Nelson said.

Officials from the public service commission and the Finance Department admitted there was no central body counting how many public servants were hired under temporary contract agreements.

Community and Public Sector Union national secretary Melissa Donnelly said the union had estimated up to one in five public servants were in insecure work.

"We estimate that up to one in five of the total workforce of APS agencies are engaged as labour hire and contractors, with some agencies double that. Our estimate is that there are as many as 20,000 labour hire employees engaged in the APS," Ms Donnelly said.

"In addition, at 31 December 2020, there were 17,203, or 11.6 per cent of non-ongoing or casual APS employees.

"Together this adds up to a workforce where more than 37,000 workers, 22 per cent of the workforce - more than nearly one in 5 workers - are in insecure work."

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