22 November 2024

ANU staff reject pay sacrifice proposal

| Ian Bushnell
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Distinguished Professor Genevieve Bell.

The NTEU says the result was a vote of no confidence in Vice-Chancellor Professor Genevieve Bell, but she remains undeterred. Photo: Andrew Mears/ANU.

ANU staff have overwhelmingly rejected the financially troubled university’s proposal that they forgo a December 2024 pay rise of 2.5 per cent.

The National Tertiary Education Union said 88 per cent of staff voted against the plan, which the ANU said would have saved $15 million and prevented some job losses.

The NTEU said the resounding ‘no’ vote now meant the pay rise would now proceed as previously agreed under the Enterprise Agreement.

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NTEU ACT Division Secretary Dr Lachlan Clohesy said the vote should never have happened, and the result was a significant setback for Vice-Chancellor Genevieve Bell’s leadership.

“The union has been central to winning, and now defending, the pay rise for ANU staff,” he said.

“On issues relating to pay and conditions, university staff trust their union over university management.”

Dr Clohesy said the blocking of international student caps by the Coalition and the Greens had changed the financial calculus for the ANU.

“Now that plans for international student caps have been torpedoed, there is no continuing rationale for job cuts or pay cuts at the ANU,” he said.

NTEU ANU Branch President Millan Pintos-Lopez said the result was a clear vote of no confidence in the ANU management.

“Enough is enough: the university’s leadership need to reflect on their approach,” he said.

“I urge all university executives to take the end-of-year period as an opportunity to go away and reconsider how they’ve been running the ANU and how they’ve been treating staff.

“We need a new leadership style, or we need a new leadership. It’s up to them which path they take.”

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However, Professor Bell said there would be no change in ANU’s plans to reduce spending by $250 million per year, including $100 million on salaries.

“We will continue to review our financial situation and budgetary targets on an ongoing basis, taking into account feedback received through our consultative processes, our statutory obligations, our progress in achieving savings, our revenue, the significant financial challenges and external factors affecting the university,” she said.

“We will keep working with our community to address our financial challenge.”

An ANU spokesperson said the university would work to find these savings in other ways, with all options on the table to return ANU to financial sustainability.

A total of 4782 staff participated in the vote.

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William Teach7:15 am 22 Nov 24

Quite right too. We’ve all seen how temporary pay deferrals become permanent or lead to cheaper redundancies. If the uni was serious that it was all about protecting jobs, they’d be willing to offer a few extra conditions:

– management also takes a cut in pay and conditions, perhaps to the top of the covered grades.
– the deferral is to be repaid, with interest, as soon as any worker paid above the lowest covered worker gets any pay rise
– any future redundancy will be calculated as if that deferred pay had been paid as originally agreed.

Dr Alison Barnes, the NTEU national president:

“There are more than 300 senior university executives getting paid more than their state premier. The average vice-chancellor gets paid almost double what the prime minister takes home.

There would have been more than a few socialists in the group that voted, who ordinarily talk incessantly about helping others, and yet when push came to shove and they were asked to sacrifice only a little, what’d they do but look out for themselves – so as to help make life more *luxurious amidst the left-wing mess they’ve helped create; and which will only get much worse as time goes on; that being the unavoidable consequence of building life upon sand, which practically no society before us has been stupid enough to fully try.

And that’s not to absolve the ANU’s leadership from culpability, Bell’s Stanford qualifications and futurist vision saying it all: that the drunken staff and drunken ringmasters deserve each other.

*I’m thinking now of a communal toy set up on public ground near the bike path in Curtin. It’s easy to imagine you’re a socialist warrior when you’ve got a 2 million dollar house to house your fancy wine.

With the amount of executive staff earning very high salaries for the responsibility they are having, staff members should not forgo their pay increase. Also, the redundancy payouts of the staff who will get made redundant would also be lower if the pay increase is foregone. Article about executive staff salaries is unfortunately behind a paywall https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8824777/university-executives-salaries-exceed-state-leaders-pay/

Given the number of staff and academics focussed on fiscal, domestic, international security and defence, you’d be quite surprised how off your views of the majority of us at the ANU are. The fact that the bloat at the top keeps growing and people forget that only certain levels of employees can approve significant spend; the majority of staff know where the good decisions sit and it was not in staff salary cuts for an EBA signed 11 months ago. But a lovely sit and play in Curtin would be nice. Most staff don’t get paid enough to pay for staff parking. But thanks for your “educated” opinions.

You are making a terrific case to take over from others on here as ‘chief dribbler’. What an absolute load of vitriol and rubbish, grounded in nothing but a strange fantasy world that you live in.

Barmaleo Barmaley2:30 pm 22 Nov 24

For your information, 12 people in this university are paid over $500,000 and 82 people are paid over $300,000 a year. Wrong policies and decisions of some of these high-paid people lead to the budget hole. Nevertheless, none of them bears responsibility for the poor management. It is the capitalism in all its beauty: “Privatize profits and share losses”. Don’t worry, Vasily, the ANU is no exception here. Losses will hit the low-paid ANU staff anyway – through cut jobs, reduced financing and nearly three times increased parking fees next year. Decisions on all of that were already made. There was no voting on that, nor on whether the executive management should bear responsibility for wrong decisions.

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