Margaret Gardner sets a context for enterprise bargaining

The university’s salary expenditure for 2022 will be up 10 per cent on 2021, due to pay raises under the previous enterprise agreement and salary increase increments she stated in all-staff message yesterday. Staff numbers are also up 4.5 per cent year to year and the university is recruiting for 450 positions.

Professor Gardner also pointed to demands on the university’s two most recent  operating surpluses, which she did not specify but were, $259m in 2020 (CMM February 8 2021) and $305m in ’21 (CMM May 3 2022). Some $286m is committed research funding. “Not all of a surplus is free to spend on any of our needs,” she says.

And then there is income. Funding for domestic students and fees from internationals are expected to decline on 2021. Plus inflation, “which our revenue is not increasing to match.”

And yet with all this, “we expect to begin negotiating a new EBA this year, which will provide increased salaries.

But perhaps not as much as the campus branch of the National Tertiary Education Union  wants. Last week the union called for an extra 4 per cent, on top of the 1 per cent just paid under the old Enterprise Agreement. The union‘s national leadership is calling for 5 per cent per annum for three years in new enterprise agreements at all universities (CMM July 11).