UQ academic staff vote against enterprise agreement
University of Queensland academic staff have rejected a draft enterprise agreement.
Final counting today by the Australian Electoral Commission confirmed that 62.4 percent of respondents (986 out of 1582 valid votes) voted no, compared with 37.4 percent in favour (592 votes). Almost 42.4 percent of UQ academic staff voted in the ballot.
The University offered its 3730 continuing and casual academic staff 2.5 percent salary increases per year over three years.
The union claimed 15 percent over two years, which the University predicted would result in significant jobs losses. Before the ballot, in principle agreement had been reached between the University and the NTEU on most matters other than salaries.
The draft agreement required a majority acceptance consisting of 50 percent plus one of those who actually cast a vote, to be adopted for the next three years.
University Senior Deputy Vice-Chancellor Professor Ted Brown said the ballot outcome meant that although the academic enterprise bargaining process had dragged on for far too long, there still was no resolution.
"The University will now consider its options following the rejection of the agreement," he said. "These could include maintaining the present situation, with a roll-over of the 1997 agreement, offering Australian Workplace Agreements to all academic staff or paying the 7.5 percent salary increase outside an enterprise bargaining framework.
"Unfortunately, this would not provide for salary packaging to be available to academic staff."
Professor Brown said University management would expect to meet with the union negotiating team at an early date.
The University decided to put its draft enterprise agreement directly to academic staff, following nine months of unsuccessful negotiations with the academic staff union, the NTEU. The ballot opened on October 18.
A provision of the Workplace Relations Act allowed a draft agreement to be put directly to staff without first obtaining union endorsement.
Professor Brown said the University would rather have reached agreement with the NTEU before undertaking the ballot. It had worked successfully with three other unions to settle the general staff agreement on August 31 this year.
Further information: Professor Ted Brown, telephone 07 3365 1316.
