We had a rather frustrating first meeting with management on 27 July, in which they indicated they were not prepared (or ready) to discuss any of their claims yet, and that they just wanted to question the two unions about our claims. We were clear that this did not comprise good faith bargaining.
The second meeting on 10 August saw management reject our claim for a single agreement and outline in a little more detail their claims on:
- Fixed term employment: they seek to remove the categories of fixed term employment, thereby opening up the use of this category of insecure employment to a range of new areas contrary to the Higher Education Awards, which were recently amended by the Fair Work Commission to further limit the use of fixed term categories of employment in the higher education sector;
- Academic misconduct/serious misconduct: to remove this clause from the EA and place it in University policy thus removing the strong protections to due process and dispute rights that our NTEU has won;
- Overtime payments: management seeks to remove the minimum engagement timeframes for Professional Services Staff overtime, thus removing hard-won union protections, which ensure that overtime makes financial sense for employees rather than costing more in travel and other costs than would be gained.
Our bargaining team provided further details on a number of our claims and introduced our clause on 17% superannuation for casuals (clause tabled), which is a claim recently won by NTEU members over at University of Newcastle.
This week we tabled a clause on AI ahead of next week’s meeting.
If you want to know more about our Log of Claims, or haven’t yet signed the Majority Support Statement, be sure to head over to our bargaining page!
