Enterprise bargaining is on at Macquarie University, although you wouldn’t know it given the absence of the usual rhetoric and rituals of wage negotiations. This is because management and the National Tertiary Education have signed-on to the Fair Work Commission’s New Approaches programme. This can involve FWC brokering meetings between parties to talk through issues and objectives and look for common-solutions rather than start with antagonism and escalate bargaining from there. At Macquarie FWC Deputy President Anna Booth has facilitated meetings on a new enterprise agreement for academics, with discussion of workplace conditions now set to start. However the union is sticking with the traditional approach for the separate general staff agreement.