Enterprise bargaining is beginning – management wants to keep things simple

Newly arrived DVC Global ,Kent Anderson says, “we want to reduce complexity in our employment framework without reducing entitlements to staff.”

It’s intriguing high-ground to occupy at the beginning of bargaining, not publicly engaging with the National Tertiary Education Union’s log of claims (notably a 12 per cent wage rise over the thee-year agreement) and calling for an agreement that suits local circumstances. Professor Anderson says he looks for agreements with the two unions (CPSU as well as NTEU) that are “closely aligned to the university’s values, employment policies, work unit plans and our strategic plan.”

One way to do this, he says is for the new academic and professional staff enterprise agreements not “to simply duplicate employee rights already enshrined in legislation.”

As to reducing complexity, perhaps Professor Anderson has an in mind an industrial dispute before he arrived at the university – over a failed management attempt to make professional staff take accrued leave as a savings measure (CMM November 26 and December 7 2020). Sorting out the industrial law implications ended up in the Fair Work Commission which found in passing that the NTEU and management, “had a high degree of difficulty” in working out how relevant causes in their own Enterprise Agreement apply, (CMM September 6).