Recent
media reports about enterprise bargaining at Australian universities have
concentrated on salaries and on impending industrial action, but there are
complex reasons why agreement has not been reached more quickly. Some of the
delays are attributable to the NTEU’s industry-wide bargaining approach, but
what is really at issue are competing views about how Australian universities,
and particularly their academic staff, should be managed.
Although a number of universities have been prepared to make concessions – particularly by offering quite generous pay rises - they have not been prepared to accept the entire NTEU vision for their academic workforce.
This
vision, which underlies many of the union's core claims, is one in which
academic staff are largely self-directed, determining not only when they do
their work, but to a very large extent what they do. Under these arrangements,
academics would have only limited accountability to their employing
universities for how they do their work.
Proposed
NTEU workload clauses tend not only to limit the amount of teaching and other
work that can be required of academics, they also limit the ability of
universities to direct the mix of work to be done. They rely on individual
academics deciding what they will do, and
then having a right of appeal when that does not meet with the agreement
of their Head of School or Dean. They also reject the idea that universities
should be able to base the teaching load of individual academics on whether or
not they are actively engaged in research, claiming a “right” of academics to
do research but opposing any scrutiny of whether they are actually doing it or
not.
The NTEU
has also opposed performance management schemes that would be common in other
industries, claiming that they should only be used for developmental purposes
and at the initiative of the staff member, not of the university. This view
rejects the idea that the university can identify individual shortcomings and
require academics to undertake further development or that it can take these
shortcomings into account in deciding an academic’s pay or career progress.
Along with
this go elaborate consultation and dispute settlement provisions, the primary
purpose of which is not to ensure that staff are consulted or that disputes are
settled, but that any change is difficult and slow. Redundancy processes and
entitlements being pressed by the NTEU tend to be both complex and expensive
and are again aimed at making it as difficult as possible for universities to
engage in structural adjustment.
This
approach is no longer tenable, if it ever was. Universities are being required
to enter into “mission-based compacts” with the federal Government under which
they will be required to meet agreed outcomes to receive funding. These
compacts will involve the identification of a more diverse range of
institutional missions, which may involve significant changes in their
strategic direction.
Universities
typically want workload provisions that, as well as providing recourse for
individuals claiming to be overworked, enable them to address the
underutilisation or inefficient utilisation of their staff. Many of them also
believe that it is inherently unfair to cap teaching loads at the same level
for academics who are heavily involved in research and those who do little or
no research.
Universities also want to be able to address these and other staffing issues through performance management and redundancy schemes that don’t turn a blind eye to obvious staffing problems. Clearly, they do not want to be hurried into agreeing to restrict their capacity to manage their institutions at a time when doing so is becoming critical to the very survival of their institutions – and consequently to the jobs of the academic staff employed by them.
