Coronavirus: University staff cop pay cuts to save jobs
The National Tertiary Education Union has agreed to help protect jobs by accepting temporary pay cuts for university staff.
The National Tertiary Education Union has agreed to help protect jobs by accepting temporary pay cuts for university staff in response to the massive budget shortfall facing universities this year.
An agreement between the union and university leaders will allow universities to cut pay by as much as 15 per cent for one year at institutions that are judged to be suffering a severe financial impact because of the COVID-19 travel bans, which have kept more than 100,000 international students away from Australia this year.
But in return for pay cuts, universities will lose the ability to stand down workers without pay, and staff who are stood down must be paid between 30 per cent and 50 per cent of their salary. The agreement also gives more rights to casual employees and requires universities to exhaust all options before making staff redundant.
Releasing details of the deal on Wednesday, NTEU national president Alison Barnes said there were no perfect options in the crisis, particularly when the federal government had declined to offer universities a rescue package. She said the agreement was likely to save 12,000 jobs that were otherwise at risk
“Without this agreement, we faced mass sackings which would have seen careers derailed and livelihoods destroyed,” Dr Barnes said.
The agreement, called the national jobs protection framework, still has to be ratified by the NTEU national council.
Individual university leaders will have a choice as to whether they adopt the agreement at their institution.
“Individual universities will now need to look at the details and decide if they will take part, based on their own unique circumstances,” Universities Australia chair Deborah Terry said.
Charles Sturt University vice-chancellor Andy Vann, who led the university negotiating team, said each university needed “to work out whether the package is going to assist them to make the financial savings that they now need to make”.
If a university chooses to implement the agreement it must then be approved by NTEU members at the institution and passed by a vote of all staff. It would vary the terms of the university’s enterprise bargaining agreement for one year — extendible by six months — and require approval by the Fair Work Commission.
Universities Australia estimates that universities will suffer a revenue decline of between $3bn and $4.6bn this year.
The agreement sets up a national panel, made up equally of university and NTEU nominees, which will assess whether individual universities have suffered a low, high or severe financial impact.
Universities in the high and severe category will be able to implement the temporary pay cuts — up to 15 per cent for the severely affected — but only if senior management accepts higher pay cuts.
The agreement also has clauses aimed at protecting casual lecturers and tutors, who are the most vulnerable of all university staff. It requires universities to ensure that work previously done by casual staff stays with casual staff, and that casuals, who are already poorly paid, will be exempt from the temporary pay cuts.
It also restricts universities in their ability to make external appointments, instead of transferring an existing staff member to a vacant role.
The agreement will also defer pay rises and allow universities to reduce the work of their staff to a nine-day fortnight.
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