Queensland charity 'mercy community' will close a range of social welfare programs in order to fund the repayment of millions of dollars to staff who've been underpaid by the group. Close to two thousand current and former employees are affected.
Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00 Well, Mercy Community is one of the oldest and largest social welfare care providers
00:07 here in South East Queensland, so this is going to impact quite a few people.
00:11 Now it's estimated roughly 1,700 both current and former employees of Mercy Community that
00:17 were specifically in either the Family and Young People Division or the Disability Support
00:22 Division who were either employed on or after the 1st of December 2013 have been impacted.
00:28 The charity estimates that this historical underpayment equates to roughly $9 million.
00:33 Mercy Community has also attributed the bungle to the incorrect industrial award being applied
00:38 many years ago.
00:40 So in order to remediate those workers we've heard from Chief Executive Justin Lorenz who
00:44 says that they will have to scrap a number of social welfare programs.
00:48 Now among them is the Romero Centre here in Brisbane that provides support to asylum seekers
00:53 as well as several residential care and kinship and foster care support programs.
00:59 Currently in South East Queensland, Mercy Community provides support to 80 people in
01:03 social housing and more than 730 kinship and foster carers as well.
01:08 In a statement that was issued yesterday, Mercy Community says that they won't know
01:11 the exact number of redundancies until they're able to conduct extensive consultation processes
01:17 with those impacted employees.
01:19 We've also heard from the Child Safety Department here in Queensland who says that they're aware
01:23 of Mercy Community's decision.
01:25 They say that no child will be left behind but a significant blow to the many thousands
01:30 of people that access Mercy Community's services here in Queensland.
01:33 [BLANK_AUDIO]