Around 30,000 New South Wales (NSW) public sector health workers, covered by the Health Services Union (HSU), are this week voting on a pay offer from the state Labor government that will deliver further real wage cuts and do nothing to address dire conditions in the hospital system.

The proposed deal contains a nominal pay increase of just 3.5 percent this year, with 3 percent rises to follow in 2025 and 2026. Workers throughout the NSW public sector, including nurses and midwives, have been presented with the same offer.

This is yet another wage cut in real terms. The latest Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) figures show the inflation rate at 4 percent over the year to May, having increased each month since February. The so-called “cost-of-living” relief in Labor’s offer—a $1,000 one-off payment—only applies if inflation exceeds 4.5 percent, virtually guaranteeing that wages will go backwards in each year of the deal.

Furthermore, official inflation figures understate the real cost of living for workers, with increases in non-discretionary items such as food, fuel and housing far above the 4 percent figure.

Despite this, the HSU bureaucracy has adopted a “neutral” position, presenting the offer to members without comment. This amounts to a tacit endorsement of Labor’s deepening attack on the real wages of health workers, including many of the lowest-paid employees in the hospital system.

Gerard Hayes, NSW secretary of the HSU, told members on social media, “it’s now in your hands,” and “It’s your voice—make sure to use it.” In other words, workers are on their own.

Hayes and the HSU bureaucracy are attempting to push through a “yes” vote as a pretext to impose the Labor government’s austerity agenda without any organised opposition from workers.

The union leadership is seeking to ram this through quickly and quietly because it is conscious that workers are hostile to the proposed deal.

One worker wrote recently on the union Facebook page: “not happy about the NSW government offer of 3.5 percent then 3 percent year after. Plus 85 percent salary [packaging tax benefit] then 100 percent 2025. This is a joke right. Of course I voted NO! … NSW government can get stuffed.”

At an online HSU meeting in early June, another worker asked: “Do we think knowing that CPI [Consumer Price Index] from March 2023 to March 2024 was 3.6 percent [that] a pay rise of only 3.5 percent is adequate? … We should be asking for 8-10 percent pay rise. Regarding 100 percent salary packaging, this has taken forever to get sorted out. This has been 2 years in the making and from what I have understood won’t be sorted until the end of the next financial year. This is pathetic. This should be backdated to when the promise was made.”

The HSU bureaucracy is using the promise of a long-awaited increase to salary packaging benefits, which allow health workers to pay for certain expenses out of pre-tax income, as an additional sweetener to promote a “yes” vote.

The latest government offer states: “The full benefit of salary packaging will be provided to members in two tranches: 85 per cent as of mid 2024 and 100 per cent as of 1 July 2025.” That is, 85 per cent of the tax benefit of salary packaging will go to the worker, and 15 per cent to the employer, NSW Health.

In the lead-up to the 2023 election, the HSU promoted a supposed written commitment from Labor leader Chris Minns to increase this to 100 percent if the party took office.

Without so much as a reference to the government’s broken promise, the HSU has now lumped this in with the wage offer, giving members no option to say “yes” to salary packaging and “no” to a real pay cut.

Public sector allied health workers covered by the HSU are simultaneously voting on a single-year, 3.5 percent increase, purportedly to leave the way open for future “award reform.” The union leadership has been promoting this for several years as the only way to improve wages and conditions for this section of the workforce.

The promise of award reform was employed last year by the HSU bureaucracy to ram through a flat $3,500 nominal pay increase that hit allied health workers with an even larger real wage cut than the Labor government’s initial offer.

Concerned that workers would not accept Labor’s initial 4 percent pay increase offer, the HSU bureaucracy scrambled to cook up a revised proposal that would prevent industrial unrest without costing an extra cent, effectively turning one section of the membership against the other in order to satisfy the Labor government’s demands.

The government-union offer follows years of real wage cuts imposed both by the current Labor government and the previous Liberal-National administration, with the total collaboration of the HSU and the other public sector unions which have repeatedly blocked industrial action opposing the attacks.

The unions have also overseen the broader assault on the hospital system, resulting in dire conditions for workers and patients alike. The situation in the workplace has continued to deteriorate, with staff shortages and uncovered absences creating snowballing stress. As one worker said after an earlier stop-work: “If you take a sick day off, you feel terrible. You feel like you are letting people down.”

This has been intensified further since the start of the COVID pandemic. Hayes and the HSU were among the first to call for isolation measures to be scrapped as part of the “let it rip” policies demanded by big business and governments. In August last year, the HSU lauded the NSW Labor government’s ending of mask mandates in public hospitals, declaring in an email to members on the day of the changes that the reckless decision was “a milestone in health.”

While the HSU ballot is framed as merely a question of wages, the union bureaucracy is seeking to push through a “yes” vote as a means of suppressing a fight for improvements to any other conditions and against further cuts to public health spending.

The Health Workers Rank-and-File Committee urges HSU members to vote “no” to the Labor government’s real-wage slashing offer, but warns that this is only the first step. Health workers need to take matters into their own hands and build rank-and-file committees, politically and organisationally independent of the union bureaucracy, in hospitals and other health facilities.

Such committees will be the only means through which workers can democratically discuss and develop a fight for demands based on their actual needs, not what governments or union bureaucrats say is affordable or possible.

To take this forward, these workers need to link up with other public sector workers, including nurses and midwives, who all confront the same cuts to real wages.

A unified struggle of public hospital workers across the state would be a powerful start, but the assault on wages and social spending is by no means confined to NSW. This pro-business austerity agenda is the policy of the Labor government at state and federal level, across the country, and of the ruling class worldwide.

To fight this, what is required is a political struggle against Labor and the unions and a fight for a socialist alternative to capitalism, under which even the most basic public needs, including health care and decent wages, are subordinated to the profit demands of big business and the banks.