Sue Bull, Ballarat
In the first action of its kind, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has launched a class action on behalf of 700 academics and general staff at the University of Ballarat claiming that their employment contracts are misleading. The legal firm Maurice Blackburn Cashman began the class action in the Federal Court on February 15 and may seek damages of up to $7 million.
The NTEU members argue that the university is offering individual contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements — AWAs) that will diminish and compromise working conditions. They accuse the university of breaching the Workplace Relations Act by supplying false and misleading information last year to induce staff to take up the AWAs.
"We think that if people are going to be accepting AWAs and losing the protections they have under the collective agreement, they ought to know exactly what it is they're getting into", NTEU Victorian secretary Matthew McGowan told ABC Radio National's The World Today.
All new staff employed at the university are only being offered AWAs. Ballarat NTEU branch president Jeremy Smith, who is the principle claimant, told Green Left Weekly: "It's unprecedented in Australia that a major regional employer would offer AWAs only to staff that it is endeavouring to recruit. This gives the lie to the federal government's claims that its Work Choices legislation is about free choice. At the University of Ballarat, for new staff, there is no choice. You sign the AWA or there's no job."
The legal action, which involves an injunction to stop the university administration from continuing to enter into AWAs, is the latest round in a dispute that began over 12 months ago. Unions at Ballarat University have been trying to negotiate an enterprise agreement that provides wage increases and some improvements in working conditions.
The university has steadfastly refused to come to the negotiating table with anything reasonable, claiming it doesn't have the funds to grant these. This was despite, as Smith points out, the unions being prepared to compromise on a number of issues. Meanwhile, most staff at other Australian universities have achieved satisfactory enterprise agreements.
In mid-2005, Ballarat University vice-chancellor Kerry Cox stopped negotiations and offered staff a non-union agreement. The agreement was resoundingly defeated when it was put to a staff vote, but Cox proposed a second non-union agreement. That too was defeated.
Beginning last December, the university began to offer AWAs to existing staff that eroded current conditions, including reducing redundancy entitlements and watering down or eliminating appeals under disciplinary proceedings. Smith said that NTEU members have decided that this situation can no longer continue.
From Green Left Weekly, February 22, 2006.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.