Enterprise bargaining round nine underway which does not sound too bad – boxers slug it out for 12.
Except university management-union rounds regularly take two years and always begin the same way – with unions announcing staff are impoverished and exhausted while managements say their offer of nothing over three years with a signing bonus of zilch is all they can afford. And the contests end when both sides struggle to stand and will accept anything that looks vaguely feasible.
As usual, the National Tertiary Education Union has come out swinging, with same-ish demands at the eight universities where bargaining is underway or imminent.
The headline call across the sector is already apparent, a headline 20%, flat pay rise across three-year agreements. The union is also digging in to stop managements cutting staff, with limits on employing people under fixed term contracts and forced redundancies, especially through multiple restructures.
There are also demands for limits on the span of hours that staff can be required to work. This particularly applies to support workers required to be around early and after hours to cover classes. (They are also the people who tend to be underpaid by bureaucrats not across scales in their university’s enterprise agreement, but that is another umpteen stories). Plus there are demands for more flexible work provisions, which means working from home for casuals.
For academics there are calls they must approve any new academic workload model and can restrict management using student assessments against staff in performance reviews.
There is also a push to extend 17% super (a long-establisher perk for continuing staff) to casuals.
It is all standard stuff, building on previous agreements but what is new is AI anxiety. Union negotiators will want managements to agree to compulsory consultation on the use of artificial intelligence and specific protections for job security and professional autonomy.
“We are living through the ‘generative AI moment’. This has numerous academic implications, as we’re all aware. But it also has legal and industrial implications, which fall within the purview of our agreements” the Western Sydney U union argues.
Observers suggest that NTEU branches will all use a template for system-wide claims that includes a common end date, in September 2029. Industry agreements were mainly too late for Round Eight and a common end date could create the opportunity for multi-university bargaining in the next round.