Police Union condemned over pay rise tactics
Jun 4th, 2009 by admin
The Road Safety Council has condemned police in Western Australia for refusing to issue traffic fines because of a pay dispute.
Police are pushing for a 15 per cent pay rise over three years, but have been offered 9.5 per cent.
The Union has directed its members not to issue traffic fines and to only issue summonses for serious driving offences.
The Road Safety Council’s Grant Dorrington says the directive is unacceptable.
“The message is keep the roads safe and then still deal to get your pay rise though some other form of communication,” he said.
A spokesman for the RAC, Matt Brown, also says it is unacceptable.
“Road safety should not be a bargaining chip in an industrial pay dispute,” he said.
“We’re calling on individual police officers to ignore the directive of their union and to make road safety their top priority in the coming days.”
The Opposition Leader, Eric Ripper, has refused to say what would be an acceptable pay rise for police.
“I’m not in charge of the books and I don’t have all of the information available to me,” he said.
“But I do think it’s very hard for the Government to tell the police that they should get less than teachers or TAFE lecturers given that those settlements were reached after the Government knew about the global financial crisis.”