News

Summary of changes to new Enterprise Agreement

The following is a lengthy and quite detailed summary of amended working conditions created in negotiations towards the next Enterprise Agreement.

This does not indicate final agreement. With much agreed in principle it is still possible for the parties to adjust or withdraw their positions. However, interim agreement has been reached in a significant number of areas and it is likely agreement will remain.

Information is available in relation to the following issues:

• Leave
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment provisions
• Advertising of Professional Staff positions
• Professional Staff Development Fund
• Workload
• Reclassification
• Performance
• Conduct
• Disputes
• Change Management
• Redundancy
• Flexibility
• Medical Retirement and Independent Medical Examinations
• Casual Minimum Engagement
• Leave Loading for HEO10
• Management mental health training
• Right to disconnect
• Vet Clinic Schedule

 Leave

• Compassionate leave extended from two to five days
• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural leave extended from 5-7 days
• Waiving of the requirement for staff to provide supporting medical documentation for periods of menstrual or menopausal related leave absences of less than 5 days duration
• Introduction of Natural disaster leave five days
• Emergency Services leave  from three days to 10 days per annum
• Domestic violence leave for casuals 10 days

Annual leave

• Applications for annual leave should be initiated via Workday (rather than via a discussion with your manager) in order to assist tracking of annual leave request rejections.
• Limitations on management applying annual-leave blackout periods, which should assist the unions to reduce the use of this problematic operational trend.
• Statement incorporated that the University will not unreasonably refuse annual leave requests.

Negatives

• Refusal to make initial request of annual leave via Workday mandatory.

Parental leave

• Close to agreement: some details still to be established.
• Reduction of primary caregiver leave qualification period from two years to one year of service
• Easier access for fixed-term staff to primary caregiver leave
• Dropping of requirement for 12 months between periods of parental leave
• Retention of incremental progression when taking parental leave related leave without pay.
• Requirement to return to work for at least 26 weeks after taking 22 weeks parental leave discontinued.
• Option for simultaneous sharing of Primary Care Giver Leave where both parents work for the university.
  • We believe that this was agreed by the university. They are now denying this. We have provided evidence of agreement and await their response.

Work on Concessional leave / annual closedown days

• Agreement that volunteers are sought prior to involuntary staff rostering.

Other leave conditions

• 30 days leave for gender transition and affirmation
• 50-day Personal Leave pool to now accommodate leave requirements in the following context:
  • Menstrual & menopausal issues (without requirement for medical certificate at all for periods of leave of less than five consecutive working days)
  • IVF and other forms of reproductive health
• Gender transition and affirmation (for leave required beyond the new 30 day category)

Negatives

• Rejection of pandemic leave clauses
• Rejection of cessation of pregnancy leave prior to 20 weeks
• Rejection of care leave in relation to premature births

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment provisions

• Agreed dedicated Joint Consultative Committee for Indigenous employment.
• Agreed to language allowance
• Recognition of cultural load
• Cultural leave extended from five to seven days.
  • Still outstanding:
    • University desire to reduce short-medium term parity employment targets from current 3% target as they argue that the 3% parity figure is not achievable over the life of the Agreement despite being an historical target.

Advertising of Professional Staff positions

• Currently all Prof Staff positions must be advertised internally in the first instance
  • At HEO1-5 appointable internal candidates must be appointed before advertising externally
  • At HEO 6-10 this is encouraged, but not necessary
• Original university claim All Professional Staff positions can be advertised internally and externally at the same time and managers can consider external applicants at the same time as internal applicants.
• Current (amended) university claim:
  • Vacancies at HEO1-7 are advertised internally in the first instance and managers must appoint before going external if an appointable internal candidate is available.
  • Vacancies at HEO8 and above – managers are encouraged to advertise internally in the first instance but this is not necessary.
• Current position of both unions – internal advertising requirements set out above must be extended to include HEO8.

Additionally, parties still in discussions regarding placing limitations on the length of time positions can be held vacant, however it looks as though the University will ultimately reject this claim.

Eligibility lists

• Related to advertising of Professional Staff positions
• Staff who were deemed appointable for a vacant position after an interview, but were not the successful candidate will be automatically considered for that position (or a substantially similar position) should it arise within 12 months of the unsuccessful application.
• This was agreed in principle, but the University has now made it dependent upon the unions adopting their HEO8 and above simultaneous internal / external advertising claim.

Professional Staff Development Fund

• Close to agreement.
• Issues in wording of clauses
• Negotiations continue in relation to University claim to stop rolling over unspent elements of the fund.
• Annual increase from $2 million to $2.2 million – specifically to cover creation of a fund administration position to address issues of transparency and accountability associated with the fund.

Performance and development

• Inclusion of requirement that reviews are conducted relative to staff opportunity.
• Requirement to include business as usual activities in annual performance review
• Measures to increase casual participation in P&D reviews as casual staff cannot be converted without a P&D process.
• Requirement for manager to raise Professional Staff Development Fund opportunities in P&D discussions with staff at HEO1-6 level.
• Requirement to consider staff disability in relation to P&D expectations an review.
• Explicit information in relation to appeal options if you disagree with your manager’s review.

Negatives

• Refusal to make casual P&D participation mandatory.

Still under discussion:

• Clauses designed to limit the capacity of the University to hold individual performance against overall unit metrics are under discussion.

Workload

• Requirement to have regular workload reviews with Supervisor – requirement to take reasonable steps to resolve issues.
• Access to a Professional Staff Workload Review Panel where workload issues go unresolved at the local level.

Reclassification

• Currently if you are reclassified to a lower HEO level you retain your higher wage level from prior to reclassification, however all incremental steps etc are frozen until future pay rises cause your pay at the lower classification level to catch up with the pay rate you are receiving at the higher level.
• The University has agreed to waive this condition so that you retain your previous higher HEO level after being reclassified to a lower level and you are eligible for incremental step improvements and pay rises at the higher level. (this is not available to those whose previous aligned position was at another University.)

 Conduct

• Requirements for improved bullying and harassment training
• Requirement for a risk mitigation plan
• Improvements in policy review requirements, including union involvement.

Negatives

• University rejection of CPSU NSW model sexual harassment clauses.
• The result is that sexual harassment processes at the university have not been improved appreciably and, notwithstanding the improvements above, sexual harassment is not distinguished from other forms of harassment in relation to University response. This is problematic as there have been issues of University responsiveness in the past which we were specifically seeking to address via our claim. We believe that the University should be more pro-active in this area.

Negatives

• The university refused to consider CPSU NSW clauses aimed at ensuring that confidentiality was respected during general investigations into workplace conduct.

Disputes

• University has dropped its claim that would have potentially allowed it to continue activities disputed by the unions while the dispute was being resolved. Disputes can occur when the unions believe that the university is breaching the Enterprise Agreement.

Change management

• Specific requirement for potential workload effects of proposed change to be examined and mitigated in change processes;
• Greater definition in what is required during Preliminary Change processes.
• Requirement for change managers to explicitly consider the consequences if their proposals on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment retention.
• Requirement for ensuring existing staff Position Descriptions are up to date where a change process may result in staff being mapped to a new structure.
• Options for staff to request that a manager from a different work unit conduct the post-change review after implementation of a change plan.
• University must address situations where work from disestablished positions is not successfully accommodated in the new structure.

Redundancy

• Redundancy table in current clause 34 of the Agreement is removed. This is replaced by the table currently in clause 35, which itself remains unchanged. This will be a positive, but only in very rare cases of very long (ie 10 years or more) single research or project related contracts.

Negatives

• Rejection of CPSU NSW redundancy equity clauses – an attempt to bring professional staff redundancy payments into alignment with Academic staff payments.
• Rejection of averaging of redundancy payments across career – retention of system where redundancy pay is calculated based on your employment fraction when redundancy occurs, ignoring any fractional changes across complete period of service.

Flexibility

• Working from home & remote working explicitly included as clause in Agreement
• Improvements to working from home flexibility designed to require more robust operational reasons to be present for staff to be instructed to work from campus. Requests to work from home will not be unreasonably refused.
• 12 months new staff qualification period for flexible working arrangements dropped

Disability action plan

• The university will ensure an evidence and data based disability action plan based on the lived experience of people living with disability and will report annually to the Joint Consultative Committee regarding progress.

Medical retirement and independent medical examinations

• Greater qualification necessary to require a staff member to undergo an independent medical examination – having taken 20 days or more of sick leave in any year is no longer enough in and of itself. There must be a reasonable conclusion that the staff member’s core work cannot be performed, their health is at significant ongoing risk, or they are risking the health of others.
• HR must be consulted prior to the decision being made.
• Communication with the staff member in relation to this process will be improved.
• Notice of enforced medical retirement extended from 4-8 weeks (depending on prior service) to a blanket six months (or where a fixed-term staff member has less than 6 months remaining on their contract, the remainder of the contract).
• The university will ensure that the staff member is informed they can arrange a support person to be present for any meetings in relation to the above processes.
• The Agreement will stipulate that refusal to undergo a reasonably directed independent medial examination will not result in termination by misconduct (and associated penalties) although it may still result in enforced medical retirement.

Casual minimum engagement

• Remains at three hours, however, if the staff member requests, that three- hour minimum engagement can be worked incrementally over a period of time longer than three hours (eg. an hour per day across three days) provided the engagement itself is not less than three hours.

Leave loading

• The university has dropped its claim that would have seen leave loading for HEO10 Professional Staff abolished.

Mental health training

• Requirement for supervisors to undergo training to assist them to gain good mental health outcomes in regard to ‘people management’.

Right to disconnect

• The Agreement will make clear that staff are not expected to engage in work-related communications outside of work time except in cases of emergency (or where under on-call provisions or similar).

Vet clinics schedule

• Still under negotiation, but unions to reject current Uni claims.

Length of agreement

• Still under negotiation

Salary

• Still not agreed