University of Newcastle moves to all staff ballot after negotiations stall

UON and the unions have been in negotiations for 15 months, since the agreements covering academic and professional staff expired last September.

UON made a revised offer on Monday last week - including a 9.5 per cent pay increase over three years plus six additional days of paid leave - and asked for the unions to respond by close of business Thursday.

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National Tertiary Education Union Newcastle branch members voted to reject the offer, ahead of a six hour meeting between UON and unions last Friday.

Branch president Associate Professor Terry Summers wrote to UON on Saturday "we were a fair way away on pay and some other things and we had to sort those out to give us a way of moving forward".

He said an independent bargaining representative and the CPSU made proposals but these were rejected.

He said UON and the unions met briefly on Monday and UON advised them of the decision to proceed with the non-union ballot, to run from December 13 to 15.

Vice Chancellor Professor Alex Zelinsky AO told staff by email on Monday afternoon that negotiations had reached an "impasse".

He said staff had told UON they wanted the matter settled before the end of the year.

"We believe that all staff members should have the opportunity to fully consider what has been offered and decide whether to approve our new agreements," he said.

He said UON "genuinely believes that the combination of the revised salary offer together with other key benefits provides a platform for stability and supports our sustainability over the next three years amid significant changes in our external operating environment".

He told staff in a prerecorded video that when monetised, the package represented an increase of 13.1 per cent for full time staff and 16 per cent for casual staff.

He said the revised package included an increase in superannuation for casuals from 10.5 per cent up to 17 per cent and meant staff had a total of 30 days paid holidays every year.

"We have put an offer forward that we can afford and that means we can weather the difficult times ahead," he said.

"The university has no plans to undertake a program of redundancies to finance this offer."

Dr Summers said negotiations had been a "long and sad game" and urged staff to vote no.

"If they accept it, it's going to make it a lot worse for them and the students," he said.

"I don't think they've really been engaged in addressing our concerns, in fact they've stripped out some conditions out of the agreement including some important protections around job security and workloads and certainly I don't think they were ever keen on giving us a payrise that was anywhere near cost of living increases."

He said in a statement that after cutting jobs and returning its 12^th surplus in a row - ahead of a forecast deficit of at least $23 million for 2022 - UON had resources to ensure "greater job security, safe workloads and a fair pay rise".

He said staff should reject UON's proposal because the pay offer was less than inflation and below that in agreements at other universities; and the professional staff agreement introduced an "increased and unreasonable" span of hours.

He said the academic staff agreement failed to protect staff from work intensification and several conditions and protections had been removed, including abolishing internal committees "which provide procedural fairness and natural justice making it easier for staff to be sacked".

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