• With an expiry date of 30 April 2025, the increases work out to be 3.63%, one of the leading annual increases in the sector. The Bargaining Team was hoping to see more backpay included, unfortunately that was not possible.

The Agreement includes a provision that no staff member (other than staff on call) will be expected to monitor university systems (including email) outside working hours.  This has been included to stop work encroaching on personal time, and to make it clear to managers that they should not be expecting responses outside working time.

The Agreement includes an additional 3 University Holidays at the end of year close down.   Staff will now enjoy 3 full weeks of each January and February but will only be required to take 6 days of leave to do so.

Where a staff member and the University agree, you can substitute a Public Holiday for a different day.  As an example, this can provide a great benefit for a staff member who does not want to celebrate invasion day.’ No staff member can be required to change days.

The Agreement provides much improved leave for staff who go through the traumatic experience of losing a baby late in the pregnancy of during their period of parental leave.  The time they can take has increased form 8 weeks, to their full parental leave entitlement of 26 weeks.

The Agreement has increased the amount of paid Family and Domestic Violence leave for ongoing and fixed-term staff from from 10 days to 20 days per year.  It has also introduced 10 days of paid Family and Domestic Violence leave for casually employed staff.

The Agreement will provide 10 days paid leave per year for staff to use for gender affirmation purposes.

The Agreement provides improved access to training for union delegates to ensure that they are in a better position to assist you.

Members would be aware that in the Agreements which staff overwhelmingly rejected in December management sought to strip much of the consultation requirements.  The new Agreement includes a new and improved consultation process that will require management to consider and provide information on workloads, to explore other options ahead of redundancies, and includes a review mechanism that will genuinely review the outcomes and hold managers to account.

Again, staff will recall from the non-union ballots in December that management was attempting to strip the critical review committees from the Agreement.  While the process has been changed somewhat (they will no longer be conducted as an adversarial process to ensure that people psychosocial welfare is protected) they have the same scope and responsibility in they will determine the facts and make recommendations.  This retention of these processes is critical to maintaining job security.

While not strictly a new condition the Agreements have introduced 10 days of Life Leave.  Life Leave replaces 10 days of personal leave and provides staff with a far wider opportunity to access these days.  For example, it can be taken as Grand Parent Leave, or any other purpose that is significant to a staff member.  Unlike other forms of leave it cannot be rejected.

The Agreement contains a new provision specifically stating that leave cannot be unreasonable rejected.  This will assist staff who have had their leave rejected for what appears to be no valid reason.

The existing Agreements allowed for conversion form Fixed term and Funding Contingent Staff only where they had been selected through a competitive and open selection process.  This ruled out many staff who had been appointed on nomination or other methods but had still provided high quality work for the University.  There are some thresholds to cross, but they will be able to be converted where they can demonstrate they meet the requirements of the role.  As they will have been in the role for at least 12 months the NTEU does not believe this should be an issue.

The Agreement makes it easier for Casually employed Professional Staff to be converted.  It lowers the threshold for application, and places limits on the reasons for which conversion can be rejected.  Further, a staff member who is converted will have their service as a casual recognised for the purposes of accessing Parental Leave.  This may not benefit a huge number of people, but it is a massive benefit for those who are.

The Agreement will see the creation of 14 full time equivalent (FTE) roles aimed at providing employment opportunity for current precariously employed staff.  As a number of these jobs maybe be part-time this will provide the opportunity for many of the long-term career causals to become ongoing University employees.

The new Agreement introduces a provision that requires that University to clearly allocate a total amount of hours for certain duties, and not individual piece rates.  A casual employee is to stop work when they complete these hours and the University must either give them more hours if there is work remaining or have the work finished in other ways.  The clause makes it very clear; wage theft is not acceptable, and staff are only to work the hours for which they are paid.

The new Agreement provides Professional Staff a much-improved right to work remotely.  The new provision allows remote work applications to only be rejected where the work cannot be performed under the proposed working arrangements.

The Agreement includes improved provisions to govern over work for Professional Staff.  Management must ensure that the work allocated can reasonably be performed in the time the staff member has available and that no staff member has an unreasonable workload.  The review process requires that management consider the impact of vacant positions, secondments and staff leave on workloads.

The new Agreement retains staff access to Flextime.  Management has argued that the Award, which must be followed, does not allow for Flex hours to carry over from one period to the next.  While the NTEU strongly disagrees with this interpretation management would not change the clause.  As such staff retain the access to Flextime but not the carry over. 

The NTEU will be reviewing these practices here and in other Agreements and will be seeking to ensure that carry over is reintroduces in the next Agreement in 18 months.