Minimum wage earners have been awarded a pay rise of $26 a week by Fair Work Australia (FWA), prompting CEO of ACAA, Rod Young, to ask "how do we actually extract even more cost savings from aged care service provision to meet the basic wage decision?”
FWA’s ruling brings the minimum wage to almost $570 per week and provides a boost for aged care’s lower paid staff. The problem is: can an already over-burdened, financially unstable aged care industry afford to pay the extra wages without having to cut back on already stretched services and in turn face more media criticism?
As reported in last week’s Village Manager, the Federal Government has given aged care providers a 1.7 per cent annual funding boost not even close to the CPI increase of 2.9% in the March quarter.