Earlier this week we met online with members in CALE to provide an update of our 13 February letter to management and get their feedback.
The meeting raised the issue that management is using the NTEU dispute as an excuse to not appoint casual academic staff for the upcoming semester. It is management’s decision not to appoint these staff and is a poor excuse for their own mismanagement.
Our suggestion to CALE management in our 13 February letter is to democratically elect members of staff onto a steering committee that will oversee democratically elected task based working groups and from this develop a workload model to allocate work in semester 2. There is nothing in this dispute that stops management hiring casual staff to do the work that needs to be done.
While we await managements formal response, the enterprise agreement clearly states that ‘work shall continue in the normal manner’ until the dispute is resolved.
It appears that management are applying pressure to you by suggesting that, because of budgetary issues, you will have to do the job and take on these extra responsibilities. This is just not the case. Despite budget concerns no employee is expected to exceed 37.5 hours a week. Therefore, we will be writing to CALE management today to express the error in these kinds of statements.
We will also be contacting TUSA to provide them with the context around this dispute and the message that that any shortfall in tutorials or lectures is not an outcome of this dispute; it is a management issue of failing to meet their obligations to the students.
To be clear, our dispute is about compliance with the Enterprise Agreement over workload allocation, not management's inability to manage a budget. That’s their problem.