The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) today asked its members at the University of the Sunshine Coast (USC) to lift the ban they had in place on releasing student results. The ban was lifted in good faith when the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Professor Greg Hill, committed to finalising negotiations with urgency, sending a member of the Executive to the bargaining table to expedite negotiations and committed to three days of negotiations next week.
"Management created chaos when they tried to break our results ban on Tuesday by removing our members as course coordinators in the system and pushing results through. Unfortunately, some of those results were inaccurate or incomplete," said NTEU Queensland Secretary, Michael McNally. "So, the Branch decided to reach out to the Vice-Chancellor and offer to lift the ban completely if he agreed to urgently finalise negotiations for a new Agreement," McNally added.
"The Vice-Chancellor rang yesterday afternoon and we discussed the outstanding issues in bargaining, and we agreed to try to finalise negotiations ASAP," McNally said. "This morning, the University scheduled bargaining meetings for Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday next week. On the back of these commitments and in good faith we have asked our members to release all remaining grades," he added.
"This is a win-win for our members and the University," said NTEU USC Branch President, Shirley Callaghan. "We were taking this action as a last resort to get management to negotiate properly," Callaghan said. "Now that we have a commitment from them to finalising negotiations, we can lift the ban."
"We have had a great deal of support from students and we really appreciate their patience," Callaghan said. "In the end, if we have good working conditions students have good learning conditions. We need USC to be able to attract and retain the best support staff, teachers and researchers, so we couldn't accept an Agreement that wasn't up to scratch," Callaghan added.
