The public opinion jury isn’t out in the case of university managements treatment of staff. It’s back – and management lost.
But Craig Laughton makes the case for their appeal as well-intentioned employers. Mr Laughton represents 34 of the public universities with the outliers being members of the Group of Eight which prefer to go it alone, with recently mixed results in the courts and Fair Work Commission.
As executive GM of the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (AHEIA), he appeared Monday before the Senate committee inquiring into university governance to argue three points:
- Wage theft: “a term that gets bandied around very loosely” generally isn’t, because it requires criminal intent when most causes are because university payroll staff do not understand their own systems or their universities enterprise agreements. “We need to first modernise the awards and simplify our industrial agreements ….as they stand right now the provisions, negotiated over a couple of decades ago, are proving to inhibit what we're talking about, from a wage compliance perspective,” he said.
- VC’s pay: Mr Laughton held the all-lobby line that VCs run big organisations and must be paid market-rates, but he backed what is a done deal in management messages to Education Minister Jason Clare’s review of governance, an “independent third party with transparent remuneration committees to set the salaries of VCs and senior executive staff.”
- Council memberships: “stakeholder voices do matter, but quotas are not indicators of good governance. With union membership in universities at a relatively low 10.5%, we need to make sure that we've got balanced councils and senates with diverse expertise”
“Good governance is compromised when representation is based on quotas rather than competencies needed to govern complex billion-dollar institutions,” was the pitch and getting his estimate on the record of National Tertiary Education Union membership, plus a few small other points, was expertly done.
There was another issue that neither his organisation, nor the NTEU have demonstrated enthusiasm to have on the agenda – the possibility of multi-university agreements under the government’s newish IR rules.
Mr Laughton explained the problem for his members because the Fair Work Commission has a no-disadvantage test which forbids anybody losing a benefit under a new agreement and that not all unis have the same terms across the board. “The risk we'd run from a multi-perspective is that it would, arguably, be like a high tide floating all boats, which would increase the cost structure.”
And his expert take-out summed up why it is easier to argue university IR as a morality play.
When asked how the differences between the industrial award and individual enterprise agreements apply, he pointed to recent cases on casuals’ pay worked out in the courts, “quite frankly, (they) don't really help anyone in the sector, because they don't give us any guidance on how to continue to pay, particularly the most vulnerable—casuals—in the sector. It's very confusing.”
ord