The PSA is constantly looking for opportunities to advocate for our members’ interests. We work with different people and organisations who share our goals to support strong public and community services and to create valued, safe and secure work where workers can have a voice and participate to make work and services better for all.

Public and Community Services Working Conditions Survey

In 2021, the PSA’s Public and Community Services Working Conditions Survey included new questions on caregiving, childcare arrangements, and unpaid work. Nearly 12,000 PSA members completed the Survey, we are really pleased the Ministry for Women have been able to use the data to better understand the contribution women, and in particular wāhine Māori, make through their unpaid and volunteer work.

Caregiving

Overall, 41% of PSA members had held caregiving responsibilities, either paid or unpaid, within the past year. The added pressures associated with care work highlights the importance of flexible working arrangements. In 2021 only a minority of caregivers had access to flexible work options, and women reported less access than men:

• 44% of male caregivers and 37% of female caregivers were able to take time off occasionally for special events involving their families.
• 34% of men and 26% of women were able to change their hours so they could regularly attend family-related activities.
• 6% of men and 6% of women were able to regularly work fewer hours, e.g., to move from full-time to part-time work.
• 31% of men and 23% of women were able to sometimes work longer or shorter hours to spend more time with family members when needed.

Childcare and education

When PSA members who used childcare during working hours were asked who travelled with their children to childcare, women were more likely to say “myself”, and men were more likely to say “my partner or other member of my household”.

The most common types of childcare used by PSA members were formal arrangements for preschoolers
(such as Early Childhood Education), and before- and after-school care arrangements for older children, such as those offered through schools or other formal providers.

Volunteer work

The Survey asked PSA members about their degree of involvement across a range of volunteer activities, differences noted were:

• Women were more likely to have regular involvement in healthcare or social support.
• Men were more likely to regularly spend time hunting or fishing, or looking after the natural environment.
• Both Pacific and Māori members were more likely than European members to volunteer in healthcare and social services.

As an outcome of this survey the Ministry for Women have been able to use this data to better understand
the contribution women and wāhine Māori, make through their unpaid and volunteer work.

Wellbeing of community support services during Covid-19

Recently we teamed up with Professor Katherine Ravenswood from AUT to highlight the issue of wellbeing for community support workers during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Community support workers who work for publicly funded community providers and NGOs often don’t enjoy decent working conditions. Many do not have guaranteed hours of work each week, they do not have paid rest breaks and often experience violence and harassment at work.

Professor Katherine Ravenswood and her team wanted to better understand the challenges of community support workers during the pandemic and the impacts it had on their health and social wellbeing. They used a “community-based participatory research approach”. This meant that PSA members who work in community support services interviewed other support workers and contributed directly to the information for a comprehensive analysis.

Among other things the report recommended that well-being centered employment and procurement practices must be adopted and community support work must be recognised and valued as complex. We will use this evidence to advocate for change to create decent work and better services in the community sector.

Professor Katherine Ravenswood also wrote an article about the importance of the disability support workforce. She says that in order to provide high quality individualised support for disabled people, and enable them to live good lives, requires the provision of decent working conditions, workforce planning and development. She concludes that support workers’ voices need to be included in the development and implementation of delivering disability support to ensure good lives for all. Our members have said this for a long time. Now they have evidence-based research backing them.

Evidence-based research helps inform decisions, it fills our basket of knowledge and enables us to speak to the issues that matter with data to strengthen our case to continue to advocate for community support workers. We encourage all members to take part in these surveys in the future.

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