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Episode Four: Professionally Speaking w/ Michelle & Adam
182 Plays2 years ago
In our last episode for the year, Kate & Tony speak to Branch Vice President (General Staff) and bargaining team member Michelle Giovas and National Councillor Adam Fernandes.
Both are professional staff at Monash, and together we discuss the issues that are most important to professional staff, and what the union is arguing for in bargaining to address them.
If you have questions about the process you'd like answered, drop us an email at myunionwroteaneba@gmail.com
You can stay up to date with everything happening with bargaining and at the branch by following us on social media:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NTEUMonashBranch
Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/nteumonash
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Transcript
Introduction and Context
00:00:13
Speaker
G'day, everyone, and welcome to My Union Wrote an EBA. This is a podcast to chronicle the progress towards a new enterprise bargaining agreement at Monash University and is brought to you by members of the Monash branch of the NTEU. We're here to take the old agreement and hashtag change it. And unlike our namesake, my dad wrote a porno, do everything we can to avoid being fucked in the process.
00:00:35
Speaker
Those involved with the podcast would like to acknowledge that it is being recorded on the unceded lands of the Kulin nations, on whose lands we live, teach and work. We would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional custodians and elders, past and present, and to the continuation of the cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
Meet the Negotiators
00:01:01
Speaker
Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Adam Fernandez, your usual representative here at the Monash Branch. I'm here to give you my update on where our VC salary is at since our last agreement has expired. It has been 167 days since the last agreement expired. And since then, our vice chancellor has been paid $548,929 nearly enough to buy a house, even if it's a small hovel in the middle of the city.
00:01:32
Speaker
The university has for 51 days refused to put forward an offer for a pay rise for staff, again telling us that their offer is likely embarrassingly low.
00:01:43
Speaker
Great, thanks so much, Adam. So lovely to have you here today, because today we're going to be talking about the clauses in the EA negotiations that are relevant to professional staff. And we have two wonderful guests who are also professional staff members to walk us through it, Michelle and Adam. I might just start off by getting you to introduce yourself, Michelle, as our exceptional lead negotiator. So Michelle, how did you get involved in the union and what's it like being the lead negotiator?
00:02:12
Speaker
Hi, well, my name's Michelle Jovis, and thank you for those lovely questions. I'm a HU7, a professional staff member working with Buildings and Property Division. And I've always been a union person. I just had a family that believed in unionism. And all my working life, I've been a union member, and I've always spoken out for people, always been active.
00:02:39
Speaker
In previous workplace, I was president of our union. And in my history is that I joined bargaining the last round in 2019. And I wanted to use that experience for this round of bargaining and to claw back some of what we've lost. And what's really crucial is ensuring that we get a decent pay rise for all staff and we get better job security.
Union Roles and Strategies
00:03:05
Speaker
Awesome. Thanks, Michelle.
00:03:06
Speaker
And Adam, we know a lot about you from the intros in the bargain watch segment, like the one that we just heard, but let's take this opportunity to get to know the real Adam. What's your deal? Whereabouts in the university do you work and how did you become involved in the union? So I work in the campus community division, which looks after all the student engagement kind of programs that's aimed at students. More specifically, I am the click coordinator for the non-residential colleges,
00:03:34
Speaker
here at the Clayton campus and it's a role that I truly enjoy and I've been doing it for the last 10 years. I've been involved with the union since I guess since I finished probation nearly 11 years ago. A colleague of mine reminded me that I needed to join because I told them I would but I was still on probation and then I announced
00:03:54
Speaker
on Facebook that I finished probation and they sent me the join link straight away. And I very quickly after that got involved with branch committee. And yeah, I guess I walked myself up to secretary and now I'm also the division president as well. So Monash has two presidents. We're very grateful for all Adam's hard work, enthusiasm and organization. And it's really helpful to everybody. So thank you Adam.
00:04:25
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And the same for you, Michelle. So Michelle, you've actually been busy this week in a bargaining meeting. And we just wanted to get an update of what's been happening in the bargaining room. So in our intro, Adam just mentioned that the university still refused to put forward a pay offer. How did they justify that in the room? Well, there is no way you can justify it, at least for staff.
00:04:52
Speaker
We had a financial briefing and the university is in surplus, about $800 million surplus funds, although they are forecasting to go negative in 2023 and a little bit more negative in 2024, although past forecasts have
00:05:11
Speaker
been found to be very conservative. So, you know, we're not too sure about that. But what's been the practice in the past is that once everything is agreed to, or in principle agreement,
00:05:24
Speaker
and you don't have much leeway for actual bargaining for say horse trading, then the university comes along with a pay offer that was basically the same as what they wanted at the start with no improvement. It's a bad way of bargaining and we wanted to change it up and to have it front and centre of bargaining. We don't understand why there isn't a budget for wages.
00:05:48
Speaker
We've got it on the agenda and I think we're going to be speaking to it every single meeting that we have because it's so important. And at the moment, we all know that prices are going up astronomically, but our wages are going backwards. So we're, I guess at least 4% behind what we should be. So we're really pushing for wages and there is no excuse as far as the bargaining team is concerned for Monash not to be prepared to talk about wages.
Monash's Bargaining Tactics
00:06:17
Speaker
And so when they're sort of, I guess, stonewalling you in terms of putting forward any kind of, um, notion of what a pay rise might look like, what's the response that we give to them? Like, what is the case that the bargaining team makes to them to try and get them to, you know, be human? Well, I think we have an understandable sense of outrage, but we try and, um, keep that general and we just explain the facts. We just explain how, um, CPI is risen.
00:06:48
Speaker
by almost 8%, how our wages have not risen, and also telling stories about how people are feeling and the issues that they're having, trying to pay their bills and trying to work or have a proper work-life balance and to try and deliver teaching. What do you think their refusal to put forward and offer means? Are they just being obstructionist about it, or are they just doing it for the sake of it, or is there something more to it?
00:07:17
Speaker
I think they're being painful. I think they're being obstructionist. And I also think that it's a little bit tormenting the team so that we lose our cool. And I do everything I can to ensure that doesn't happen, but it's just a tactic and it's worked for Monash in the past and they just keep going with it. I think to add to that,
00:07:45
Speaker
Monash management are being brats about all of this. I think they're genuinely trying to test us to see how much power we can use to compel them to basically make them do things. The payerizing, I think in that respect, I think they're being strategic as well. They know that the moment they disclose their shitty pay offer, we're going to use that against them. We're going to use that to build power. And I think
00:08:12
Speaker
They're being a little bit clever by withholding it until the very last minute. And every time, basically, every day we don't come to an agreement, it's money saved. So in addition to the fact that the Vice Chancellor is earning a lot of money, the fact is March is also making a massive savings by simply not coming to a pay agreement. And that's, you know, something to keep in mind because the last round of negotiations took over two years.
00:08:41
Speaker
So yeah, this is a huge savings exercise for them. And I guess finally, Michelle, just on this, that sort of doesn't seem like good faith bargaining to me. Is that something you'd agree with? Yeah, I'd agree. And the main reason for that is apart from not letting us know when a pay offer will be made, they are also not really allowing our casual representative to like to be paid for his work.
00:09:07
Speaker
And I think that's an example of not bargaining in good faith. And we argued that point strongly on Tuesday, but that's not something that Monash management agrees with. So that we'll just keep trying and try to bring them to the table and be letting them know what we expect and that we are bargaining in good faith. On behalf of our members, we want the best deal we can possibly have and we're upfront about it. Yeah. And it's really disappointing to see that
00:09:37
Speaker
They haven't moved on paying Scott over that break. It's really only two or three meetings and they're, you know, refusing to pay that really kind of shows their hand and how they, how much they respect their staff members. Yeah, I think in reality, it'll work out to about four meetings because we've got time. We've had the meeting on Tuesday that it wasn't paid for. We've got our next meeting on the 25th of January.
00:10:02
Speaker
And we've got another one, I can't really remember the date, early Feb and then on the, I think it's the 14th of Feb. And the other thing is that we want to do, we want to go to weekly meetings and the university holding out for fortnightly meetings is also showing a failure to act in good faith and a failure to put the resources and the effort into coming up with a good agreement as soon as we possibly
Professional Staff Challenges
00:10:26
Speaker
can. It kind of just seems like another example of the university incentivising unpaid work from casuals and
00:10:32
Speaker
taking advantage of our willingness and our engagement in the things that we're doing at the university and trying to find ways of not paying us for doing that.
00:10:41
Speaker
which is okay. I would absolutely agree with you there. You know, if anything, you know, we've run massive wage theft campaigns against this university. And I think if anything is telling about Monash's attitude towards unpaid work done by casuals, it's the fact that they're willing to let Scott, our one of our bargaining team work unpaid as a casual on what we consider core business. I don't think there are any, you know, you have to force them to part with their millions of dollars.
00:11:11
Speaker
So yeah, this is just another example in a long list of examples by this university. Yeah, for sure. So the reason we've got you both on today to the podcast is to talk about professional staff issues at the university and the issues that are central to bargaining that most affect professional staff.
00:11:29
Speaker
So professional staff make up a huge amount of staff at Monash and cover a huge array of different roles and jobs throughout the university. Adam, could you start us off at a really basic level by giving us an idea of the kinds of roles the professional staff have across the university? Sure.
00:11:50
Speaker
Oh, there's a lot and the variety is actually kind of mind blowing. So you can find professional staff doing things like coordinating student volunteer programs, delivering training around things like respect on campus, a queer allyship training. There's a lot of professional staff attached to maintaining buildings and properties.
00:12:13
Speaker
supporting our students and academic staff to deliver things like learning, teaching and research, managing venues of things like more sports, and then running the libraries as well. And that's just to name a few. Managing critical incidents such as stalking and harassment are also things that staff do. That's around the clock. That's 24-7. So there are staff that are expected here at Monash to be on call and to come back to work at the moment's notice.
00:12:41
Speaker
Professional staff are clearly integral to the day-to-day operations of the university.
00:12:46
Speaker
But their centrality to the university is sometimes not given as much attention as the issues of academic staff, which is why we're so glad to have some really great professional staff members such as yourselves involved in bargaining and to make sure the professional staff members are being looked after in the clauses that the union puts forward. Before we get into the specific clause points that affect professional staff in the union claims, we wanted to ask, what are the main concerns of some of the professional staff members out there?
00:13:15
Speaker
Two interconnected issues, twin issues, I guess, if you will, that really profoundly impact professional staff. The first one is restructures. And I say that because with our core business being learning and teaching, professional staff always bear the brunt of restructured proposals year in and year out. And because of those restructures, it impacts another core issue that's at the heart of professional staff, and that's workloads.
00:13:44
Speaker
Every time they cut away stuff from departments and areas, the remaining stuff are expected to pick up the work because the work never really goes away. They just find clever ways to tell us that the work is going away. And they tell us that basically when we get sudden increases in work lies, it's cyclic, we know that. We're expected to fill it with casual professional stuff we step in.
00:14:09
Speaker
but there's never really sudden increase in work. The work's always at a high level. So then that of course impacts, you know, mental health and wellbeing, work-life balance. So there's all of these interconnected things that unfortunately that stem from the fact that they can get rid of us quite easily.
00:14:27
Speaker
A lack of a voice is another issue as well. And finally, the increasing corporate environment where we're simply expected to be told to do our jobs and we just do it and stop asking questions. So that's something that different areas will connect with more intensely than others. So my area, we are allowed to ask questions and critique and have a voice and make
Work-Life Balance Issues
00:14:52
Speaker
changes. Other areas, not so much.
00:14:54
Speaker
And with the pandemic, we had the introduction of working from home arrangements. And at the moment, that's pretty limited, but we're also looking for opportunities where staff can work from home 100% if they want. And that's a radical shift. And I think what we've also found is that there's an abuse of the existing system where some areas staff are refused the opportunity to work from home on a Monday or Friday with the
00:15:25
Speaker
the supervisor saying, oh, you're just treating it as a long weekend. And that's so insulting, so disrespectful. And we've demonstrated this over the last two years that we can do it and we can do it well. So we're really trying to strengthen that as well. That would be my area that you're talking about, because if we fall sick on a Monday or Friday, we're expected to get a certificate from our doctors. We can't take a sick day without a certificate on Mondays and Fridays.
00:15:54
Speaker
Can you imagine? That's ridiculous. Yep. Nope. That's awesome. As it turns out, Adam, it wasn't your area, but it was a research area. Well, now there are two. Yeah. Oh, I think there's a lot more than two. I guess there's a lack of respect and a lack of trust and a lack of loyalty to hardworking staff that we need to fix the culture. It's just sort of really disrespectful as well. Like the assumption from your manager that
00:16:21
Speaker
Oh, if you're not going to be there on a Monday or a Friday, or if you just want to work from home on a Monday or a Friday, that, oh, you must be like gallivanting around the countryside on a three-day weekend. Like, it's just kind of a bit petty, really.
00:16:36
Speaker
Michelle, one of the other things that, so you gave a really good presentation last week at the mass members meeting that touched on a bunch of the stuff that we've been talking about. One of the things that you talked about in that that you haven't, that I just want to ask you about, and which is one that I think is perhaps particularly salient for professional staff, but also something that other staff members across the university, regardless of where they are,
00:17:00
Speaker
would benefit from is the right to disconnect. Can you talk a little bit about that and what we're hoping to achieve? Well I guess over the pandemic people were working from home and they were working the hours that fitted in with their carer duties or other things that were happening in their lives and so you would find that people would be answering emails late at night or reading their emails late at night and when you
00:17:29
Speaker
in bedtime reading, if you will. But, and when that happens, you sort of feel an obligation to respond or, and I think there was the expectation that you would respond in some of those instances. And what we want to do is to formalize that and to bring it back into normal operating arrangements and not have the expectation that if your manager
00:17:53
Speaker
sends you an email after 6pm and demands a response by start of business the next day that that's not acceptable and that we go back to, even though we have working from home arrangements, those arrangements don't extend to unreasonable responses so that you're just not expected to be
00:18:19
Speaker
if you're working from home, that you're not working from home for the 24 hours of the day, that it's normal hours of operation. Yeah, as someone who got home from being out last night at nearly midnight and felt compelled to reply to an email that had come in while I'd been out, yeah, those sort of bright to disconnect is an important thing for all of us, I think. I think sometimes
Casual Contracts and Conclusion
00:18:40
Speaker
it's wise to actually not respond straight away in an angry fashion. So I find myself, it's good to sleep on things.
00:18:47
Speaker
That's one of the things that I always tell my students when they get their feedback for their assignments is wait 24 hours before you email me. So that way you don't regret calling me an asshole in the heat of the month. They can call it to you calmly the next day. Measured. I suppose the other thing that is probably good to mention when it comes to professional stuff as well.
00:19:08
Speaker
is that a whole heap of professional staff are also on casual contracts. So a lot of the stuff we spoke about last week with both Scott and Gavin apply to professional staff as well. Well, thanks so much for coming and talking to us today, Adam and Michelle. It's so great to hear from professional staff members and to have professional staff members.
00:19:29
Speaker
present and active in the negotiation process. And we'll be sure to keep everybody updated on issues that affect professional staff as they come up in the process of negotiation. So you might see Michelle and Adam back, I guess, on the podcast. But thanks so much, you too. Thank you. Our pleasure. And if there's anybody out there, professional or otherwise, that has any questions that they want answered on the podcast, feel free to reach out to us at MyUnionRoadedEBA.
00:19:57
Speaker
at gmail.com and we'll get someone onto it. Preferably during business hours. Enjoy your break, everyone. Hopefully you get a nice long break and we'll see you all in the new year. All right, folks, that's it for this episode. Thanks to Kate, Danny, Adam, Bernard and Pod Daddy, Sophia for all the work they've put into this and we'll catch you next time.