Week 11: 11/12 August
Summary
Two full days of bargaining concluded on Wednesday 12 August, bringing to an end a two-week back-to-back block of bargaining.
The Team dealt with a lot of matters at the table, but rather than a chronological report, this report is divided into fundamental points of negotiation, and matters with specific or technical focus.
A central issue is academic and intellectual freedom. The NTEU argues that recent university policies have excessively regulated staff speech and contributed to an increase in complaints against staff, many of which it considers vexatious. The union is seeking stronger protections for academic inquiry, public expression, and participation in governance debates, provided such conduct does not involve harassment, intimidation, or vilification. It opposes management’s preference for vague terms such as “responsible” and the requirement that staff always meet the “highest” ethical and professional standards, arguing that enterprise agreement provisions should be clear and enforceable.
On artificial intelligence, little progress was made. The union criticised management’s approach as overly enthusiastic, with little consideration for possible risks to staff or the University generally, little willingness to include protections, and insufficiently consultative. We note the release of an AI management framework without consultation through established channels during the bargaining process.
Regarding change management, the NTEU is seeking evidence on the effectiveness of extended redeployment arrangements and has indicated willingness to put forward a revised counter proposal if supported by data. Otherwise, it prefers to retain existing protections rather than accept management proposals that would weaken them.
The issue of decasualisation remains significant. Members have reaffirmed three key bargaining positions: maintaining a minimum proportion of traditional balanced academic roles combining teaching and research, limiting new employment categories, and ensuring any reforms lead to genuine reductions in casual employment. The Union remains dissatisfied with the university’s implementation of existing decasualisation commitments.
Additional discussions covered professional staff broadbanding, development funding, vacant positions, secondment arrangements, disability and workplace-adjustment policies, review committee procedures, and academic workloads. The NTEU continues to advocate for evidence-based workload models linked to expected work standards and stronger requirements for the updating of outdated faculty workload policies. Overall, negotiations remain active, with substantial differences still separating the parties on several key issues.
The “big picture issues”
1. Academic and Intellectual Freedom
This matter lies at the heart of the University as a research institution and one where real knowledge is debated and contested. Some members will be aware that the Union has been engaged in this issue in detail over the last few years, with management (in 2025) introducing a raft of new policies that regulate what professional and academic staff can say, including placing elected union officials under personal financial threats over the actions of their members.
Our volunteer cases team has been constantly dealing with speech related complaints made against staff, absorbing large amounts of time, and a large number of these complaints have been unwarranted or vexatious in nature.
Through the log of claims the Union has sought to clarify and strengthen the key rights to academic freedom (focused on the ability to inquire and report on inquiry without threat or harassment) and intellectual freedom (the right of all staff to hold and express views, and participate in political and governance debates). Importantly, the Union recognises that – at times – these views will be unpopular, such as those of the members of the Freedom Rides, a momentous moment in the history of the University.
The Union is not a radical libertarian organisation, encouraging members to yell fire in crowded lecture theatres. As such, our proposals have focused on:
- the reduction of ambiguous language in the Agreement regulating speech – such as “responsible” – in favour of clear and defensible expectations: ethical and professional,
- a clear statement that ethical and professional academic and intellectual freedom by all staff cannot be subject to disciplinary or adverse action by management, and
- appropriate rights to the use of campus space for speech-related activity.
This is all wrapped in the clear statement that the expression of views that might be unpopular or controversial will not be done in such a way as to harass, vilify, or intimidate.
This produced spirited discussions at the table, with management insisting that all conduct must meet the “highest” ethical and professional standards. This absolute declaration is clearly nonsensical – as most staff engage in communication as a key part of their work, this would require that almost every moment of the day we would be required to be operating at the highest (not high, not above average, but highest) level of performance for freedom of thought rights to be protected. A further issue with this wording is that the concept does not have a universal understanding. What is the highest ethical standard for one person is different to that of another person. People may face misconduct allegations over difference of interpretation of what is the highest ethical standard. In addition, management appear committed to the use of ambiguous language in the clause – “responsible”, again what is considered a responsible use by one person would be considered irresponsible for another. The Union team struggled to develop an understanding of situations where something would be both ethical and professional, but not “responsible.”
We will return to this item to see management’s response to these concerns, but the union maintains: the Enterprise Agreement, to be a functional document that guides behaviour, and particularly behaviour related to our most core functions, should not be “vibe coded”.
2. AI
Taking about vibe coding, break out your cool-aid.
Management maintain their “move fast and break things” approach to AI at the University of Sydney. As a result, little progress was made on the subject of AI. Members might have seen that management has – belatedly – released its AI management paper to staff (it never bothered to consult with the Joint Consultative Committee on this document). This and change management is presented as the panacea to any concerns about AI.
Stay tuned for big news in this space from the NTEU.
3. Change Management
There may be a glimmer of light on this matter and the NTEU is seeking data from management about the utilisation of the now-expired right to extended redeployment. The data will shed light on success timings of staff whose roles have been identified as redundant, but they have found new ones within the University.
The Union has indicated to management that an evidence-based revised extended redeployment option added to our change management counter proposal would see the NTEU supporting change.
If not, the Union has indicated that we are comfortable with the status quo, as we clearly cannot and will not be able to convince our membership that management’s proposal to gut the current protections could be recommended to our membership in any final draft Agreement.
4. Decasualisation
At the members meeting on the 10th of August the Bargaining Team (through the Branch Committee) asked our members to clarify our position on our decasualisation proposals and their relationship with managements proposals to create new categories of employment (Teaching Associates and Industry Education Specialists) and modify the existing PhD Fellows.
Overwhelmingly members – in what can be also seen as an expression of ongoing confidence in the Bargaining Team – provided clear direction for the team to negotiate on our and management’s proposals. In that any discussion must require:
- A hard floor on the number of “balanced” 40:40:20 academic roles. These roles presently and traditionally have made up the majority of academic positions at the University of Sydney. They are, in essence, the embodiment of the institution: a storied university with a key focus on excellent research, excellent teaching, and the explicit recognition that teaching must be informed by research and done by people with an intimate understanding of research practice. The proportion of these roles to the overall number of full-time equivalent staff at the University has been falling, and with no floor, will continue to decline, thereby undermining the importance of the research-teaching nexus;
- That any consideration of proposals from management must be within existing categories of employment. This sounds technical, but the NTEU has put forward proposals to improve the working conditions of existing education-focused staff and those cannot be lost in the negotiation process. The proliferation of categories of employment also creates ambiguities and incompatibilities in employment – something management itself recognises in its proposals to simplify Schedule 1’s treatment of casual academic rates and job descriptions;
- That any negotiation must lead to genuine decasualisation. The follows the extreme displeasure of the Union that management has failed to undertake all best efforts – as promised – to meet the existing decasualisation provisions of the existing Agreement, something members will know the Union is currently contesting in the Fair Work Commission.
This and related considerations of the NTEU proposals and management’s proposed new positions were presented by the NTEU in an attempt to determine if there is a space between our very different proposals where a compromise can be landed. At present, management has not agreed to the three “red lines” of the Union’s membership, and the team indicated that it was not empowered to bargain outside of those core guardrails.
A wide range of important focused issues
A wide range of other matters were also discussed at the table, including:
- That Schedule 1 discussions were removed from the Agenda for this session by the NTEU as we are waiting for key data from the University to allow our subject matter experts to assess their proposals in detail;
- Technical matters associated with review committee processes;
- The University’s Professional Staff Package Proposal, which included:
- The Union is willing to agree to a pilot of broadbanding for professional staff under the proviso that the pilot is designed and only proceeds with the agreement of all parties,
- An increase in the funding allocation to the Professional Staff Development Fund (presently proposed as one-off, but the Union introduced an annualised or similar measure),
- A detailed discussion of our unfilled professional staff roles proposal, where it appears the Union and management may meet in the middle on timelines for agreed actions around unfilled roles, and
- A considerable discussion of changes to the “secondment scheme”. This will be subject to all-professional staff consultation from the Union before we formalise a view for the Bargaining Team to put back to management.
- Disability matters returned briefly as management wanted to report on the status of the – long overdue – Workplace Adjustments Policy. This remains pending, but the Bargaining Team would note that Enterprise Bargaining is not the Joint Consultative Committee and while matters outside of the Agreement are relevant to our considerations, the Unions key concerns will not be resolved in other fora, and;
- This point was similarly picked up in the detailed discussion on Wednesday afternoon regarding academic workloads – the Union proposed alternative wording related to our key claim that academic workload policies must be predicated on evidence-based assessments of the time required to do the expected work, to the expected standard of our employer. Management weirdly object to the Agreement articulating an explicit relationship between workload and the “required standard” of work quality. Management argued this was “too subjective”, which does not align with the attempt of management to use the Academic Excellence Framework to make clear the performance expectations of academic staff. Additionally, the Union is attempting to introduce wording to resolve the problem of the failure of management to update workloads policies – members will know that the FASS policy is now 7 years old, and the Dean has delayed putting a modern policy forward. Management proposed to attempt to resolve this issue outside of the Agreement process – the Team note that bargaining is not a meeting of the Academic Workloads Monitoring Committee where such a resolution could and should have occurred years ago and having failed to do that is largely uninterested in non-Agreement resolutions to management intransigence over workloads policy processes.
