Why Amber's low-paid job is still better than the public service

Amber Vine took a big pay cut when she stopped being a public servant to take one of the toughest jobs imaginable.

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She now deals with troubled people with damaged psyches in the Alexander Maconochie Centre and Goulburn prison - but she wouldn't trade it for a desk job in Canberra for the world.

Amber Vine, left, of the Australian Services Union, and scenes from a recent protest in Civic. Pictures by Steve Evans, Karleen Minney

"I used to be a federal public servant," she said, "and I've taken a 50 per cent pay cut. I don't know what an EL1 is making now but it's definitely more than I am making."

She was speaking as her union held a publicity event in Garema Place in Canberra to highlight how she and her colleagues have been squeezed because public funding hasn't kept pace with the rise in the cost of living and also the need for their services.

The Canberra rally was the culmination of a series of events, starting Newcastle, Sydney and Shellharbour.

Amber Vine works across the Canberra region for Relationships Australia, and one of her tasks is to help people who have suffered severe violent and sexual abuse heal. The anger caused by the abuse they suffered has often led them to unleash that anger on others, including family. Many are behind bars.

"My current role is in working with survivors, supporting survivors that have experienced childhood institutional sexual abuse," Amber said.

"I work with people that have carried trauma since the very, very early years, members of the stolen generation that were removed from their homes and placed in missions and various other institutions and experienced sexual abuse often many times."

The Australian Services Union of which she is a member has just asked the Fair Work Commission to increase the minimum rate for the job across the "social, community, home care and disability service" sector. It's a formal process which the union hopes will yield a rise next year. About 300,000 people are covered.

Amber Vine of the Australian Services Union. Picture by Steve Evans

But the employing organisations are sometimes financially stretched, so the argument the union makes is that state, territory and federal governments should promise to fund whatever increase emerges.

"If we were to win a pay rise, that would then be reflected in the award which is mandatory for all of those organisations to pass on to their workers," Angus McFarland, secretary of the ASU in NSW and ACT, said.

"We want the ACT government and the federal government to commit to fully fund the outcome of this decision.

"We can't have a situation where the workers supporting the homeless end up homeless themselves."

The union was seeking a rise of around 25 per cent. "An entry-level caseworker, for example, would be on about $750,000 to $80,000 a year, and what we're asking for is an increase taking it up to about $100,000 a year," the union official said.

It's not just, he said, about pay and paying the bills. The jobs had got more demanding. "It's about the violence, the trauma, safety planning, mental health, child protection, housing, all of these things, an intensification of the work."

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