RTBU Take Transport for NSW to the Industrial Relations Commission Over Atrocious Safety Failures

Media release, 5 December 2025: The Rail, Tram and Bus Union NSW (RTBU NSW), has lodged a major dispute with the NSW Industrial Relations Commission over serious and escalating safety failures inside Transport for NSW during its current restructure.

The dispute is over concerns the restructure is disproportionately harming vulnerable workers including culturally and linguistically diverse workers, women and people with disability.

This is the first significant test of the strengthened dispute-resolution powers introduced by the NSW Labor Government, which were developed to hold employers accountable when they expose workers to catastrophic psychosocial harm.

Transport for NSW (TfNSW) has directed workers across the state, including parents and carers, to return to central Sydney offices while the organisation implements its ‘slash and burn’ restructure. Despite repeated warnings, TfNSW has continued to drive unsafe organisational change without proper controls, consultation or risk migration.

Workers across TfNSW claim the organisation has ignored their reports of:

• Acute stress
• Burnout
• Psychological injury including self-harm ideation

Branch Secretary Toby Warnes said the agency’s behaviour represents “one of the most serious psychosocial safety failures we have seen in a major public sector employer.”

“Workers are breaking under the pressure of this restructure. TfNSW has knowingly created a dangerous environment, ignored every warning, and continued to push ahead at full speed. The human cost is enormous.”

Evidence gathered by the RTBU shows the restructure is disproportionately harming the most vulnerable workers, including:

• Culturally and Linguistically Diverse (CALD) workers
• Women
• Workers with disability
• Lower paid and lower status cohorts
• Regional workers

These groups face heightened exposure to job insecurity, forced competitive processes, discriminatory structural barriers, and unsafe workloads all of which amplify psychosocial risk.

“The people with the least protection are copping the worst of it,” said Mr Warnes.

“This restructure is entrenched inequity. TfNSW has failed in its legal duty to protect the very workers the law recognises as being at higher risk.”

Under the Work Health and Safety Act, employers must identify hazards, implement adequate controls, and protect all workers from psychological harm. The RTBU argues TfNSW has breached these obligations at every level, creating a workplace environment that is alarmingly toxic, foreseeably harmful and entirely preventable.

The Commissioner has strongly recommended TfNSW delay the implementation of the Workplace Presence policy until the restructure is complete- and has also directed the organisation to supply its risk assessment, with consideration to the cumulative impacts of the restructure and Workplace Presence.