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Local Employment

Number of Staff Employed to date = 2,654

78% of these are local community members

Local Employment — A Housing for Health team wearing the informal uniform of the Yellow Hats

People will be living in the houses long after the Housing for Health project is finished. Healthabitat sees the necessity of working with the residents and requires that over 70% of all project staff are local Indigenous people. The proportion of local community staff is over 78% of all staff on Australian projects from 1998.

Healthabitat stresses to each participating community that the Housing for Health program is a health improvement program with real jobs and real wages offered to local community people.

Community members... ...who are also house residents, undertake the following types of paid work on HfH projects:

Careful planning of each project

Local residents, often through a community organisation, will decide when the project should occur. Times will avoid difficult work periods such as tropical wet seasons, hot desert summers or school holidays. The local community involvement will help to negotiate with different skin (or clan) groups and improve access to houses. There will be local knowledge about infrastructure services (power, water and waste) and local housing faults caused by the environmental conditions (eg high levels of mineral salts in the water will mean more plumbing repairs).

On the tools training of new staff

Healthabitat takes highly skilled community workers at the end of one project to assist in training new community staff in the next project. This enables the sharing of skills and common experiences and greatly boosts the self-esteem and status of the skilled local staff members.

Testing and fixing houses at Survey-Fix 1 and 2

This work is the grinding, dirty day to day work of testing and checking 250 items in every house. This process greatly raises the awareness of housing function (or the lack of function) in the participating community staff and the residents. Local staff are trained and encouraged to fix around 50 of the 250 items in each house that they are legally able to work on during the Survey-Fix visit.

Assisting licensed trades with the major fix work

Local residents who have worked on Survey-Fix 1 are often engaged by the licensed trades to act as trade assistants both during the Survey-Fix weeks and for the major fix works. Local staff can speak the local language/s, know the residents and are keen to have meaningful employment. There has been a trend that local trade assistants to the licensed trades go on to undertake and complete apprenticeships and trades courses.

Entering data using the on-site office

This work gives young women particularly, an opportunity to play an additional important part in each project. The data is entered from each Survey-Fix Team’s completed survey sheets. These are regularly returned to the ‘on-site’ office and entered into the Housing for Health database which immediately produces work lists for the licensed trades to complete. Local women working in the temporary office are seen as directing the trades to complete urgent housing repair work. This raises their status within the community and often leads to employment opportunities in the health clinic office or store when the Housing for Health project is completed.

Talking with householders in their own language

The effort required to achieve the high participation rate by local residents in the projects is rarely understood by government agencies or bureaucrats. Healthabitat has consistently looked at ways to engage, encourage and make the workplace safe for local Indigenous people to be actively involved in all aspects of the work. The residents see an immediate improvement in the function of their houses and this builds trust allowing more complex and time-consuming work to continue. As well each householder is provided a simple report on the condition of some critical parts of their house before and after the Housing for Health project.