I talked about the Australian Workplace Agreement (AWA) hoo-hah a couple of months ago. The University set 28th September as the cut-off date for receiving a bribepay rise if you applied to sign an AWA.
Thing is of course, if you remain covered by an EBA you get a pay rise this week anyway. A group of us sat down at coffee and looked at the AWA terms in respect of pay increases, and it turns out that there is no advantage in signing an AWA (surprise!). The offer for signing the AWA was 5% soon and 5% in a couple of years, but the existing agreement awards the same percentage increase over the same amount of time. Although 5% is more than the 3% we get this week, we get another 3% (and I think the third) while AWAers would still be waiting. There wasn't much in it overall but for anyone staying longer than six months they'd be worse off just in terms of pay rises under the AWA.
The only argument I can see that might sway people to sign an AWA is the issue of performance-related bonusses. For a grant-funded academic whose performance is measured by published peer-reviewed papers in international journals, that whole concept is of course laughable.
I went back and read the VC's email, and I think I was wrong in my previous assessment. Reading between the lines, the VC's office does not want us to sign; but of course they can not say that straight out with Ghengis Howard watching. In that light, the NTEU's posturing:
The University should be standing up to the Federal Government and not allowing the Government's ideological warfare to interfere with the core activities of our University - teaching and research
is vaguely ridiculous.
It seems that the AWAs are not being taken up in droves, as it happens. The VC's office sent out a rather confused email on Friday basically offering to half-backdate the AWA uptake bribe, if only we'd sign by Christmas -
I would like to provide some retrospectivity of the monetary increase for staff, who sign and return their AWA sometime this year
Sounds pretty desperate to me. And the thought has just presented itself that this is going to be a whole Uluru of extra work for the HR and payroll monkeys who have to implement these half-arsed case-by-case agreements. I wonder if they're covered by AWAs?
Which brings me on to my last anecdote in this sorry affair. I signed a new contract on Wednesday. That's right! I'm here for two more years, folks! With the EBA there was the AWA form, which I naturally ignored. The conversation with the helpful chap in the Faculty HR office went something like,
"You don't want an AWA then?"
"Nah."
"Yeah."
which just about sums it up for me.
