The Public Service Association (PSA), which represents the workers, says action will commence with a series of rolling stop-work meetings across the state and escalate as necessary.

The action comes after alarming new statistics showed three in four children reported as at risk of harm from October 1, 2022 until September 30 last year received no visit from Department of Communities and Justice caseworkers.

More disturbingly, a recent report found low staffing numbers are believed to be among the reasons for some of the deaths of children in child protection in 2022.

The sector is experiencing an unprecedented attraction and retention crisis with one in four positions unfilled in some regions of the state.

The Department’s own figures show the vacancy rate for caseworkers has increased by 250 per cent in the year, and year on year, with the state losing more caseworkers that it is employing.

The caseworkers that are left are relatively inexperienced and coping with the extra workload of colleagues who have left.

One in four child protection staff are in their first two years of employment with the department.

PSA General Secretary Stewart Little said Premier Chris Minns needs to intervene.

“The most vulnerable kids in this state are at risk of serious harm, or worse, because child protection workers just can’t cope, they’re understaffed, exhausted and see no other option than to take industrial action,” Little said.

“Premier Minns needs to immediately recruit another 500 child protection workers to address the attraction and retention crisis in child protection, otherwise the system will collapse. I can't put it any more plainly than that.

Little said the Minns Government ‘didn’t create this mess but it’s now their responsibility to fix it’.

“To not act now would be a massive moral failure,” he said.

“People in child protection don’t take action lightly, they know how important every single minute of their work is.

“But they just can’t go as the system crumbles around their ears.”

In Victoria, things don’t appear to be much better.

In December last year, The Age newspaper reported that the child protection system is “plagued by burnout”, with young workers being employed and then quitting in droves, leaving the most vulnerable children in the state without oversight amid a surge of investigations and substantiated allegations of abuse.

At that point in time it meant more than 2800 vulnerable children were waiting for a child protection worker as hundreds of job vacancies meant the share of cases with no active caseworker had hit a five-year high.

“This is clearly a system that is really hard for the workers,” Victoria's Commissioner for Children and Young People, Liana Buchanan, said.

“What we need to also keep in mind is that the implications for children can be devastating, if not dangerous.”

The Community and Public Sector Union petitioned the Victorian Government to introduce a suite of reforms to recruit and keep child protection staff.

Requests included a retention bonus for people who stay at least two years, paying for students to pick up social work courses and reach new agreements on maximum caseloads and how best to manage unallocated cases.

In response, a spokeswoman for the Department of Families, Fairness and Housing said the State Government had invested more than $3 billion over four years to improve the child protection system, including recruiting more workers.