Six institutes of technology and polytechnics (ITPs) have been renegotiating a multi-employer collective agreement (MECA) for academic staff with the Tertiary Education Union for almost a year now, but are stuck on some big issues. I thought it was time to have a look at why, so I’ll start off with the convoluted back story (and thanks to the TEU for their excellent site and public record of the negotiations). I have some opinions on all of this but I’m trying as always to separate the analysis and opinion.

MECA Back Story

• The MECA agreement is important because it is the only significant one in tertiary education. It only covers 1/3 of ITPs but influences negotiations at other ITPs and is important to TEU as an example – like most unions they prefer to set industry-wide conditions.
• Most of the ITP agreements (MECA or not) have considerable similarities, including maximum teaching days, teaching hours, high leave allowances and annual increments. Employers usually look at those and see inflexibility and low productivity, while employees see security and fairness.
• Employers have not done much about the employment agreement issues over the years because (a) ITPs don’t always work together well (b) the ITPs have focused on other goals and (c) the TEU has been pretty effective at getting the ITPs to roll over the agreements.
• At the start of 2009, the ITPs were facing the ending of various transition funds in 2011, while some had also lost lucrative out of region courses due to regulation. Then the Minister of State Services put out tough pay expectations for state sector agencies and subsequent comments by the State Services Commission led people to believe that a zero pay increase was the starting point. Ministers reinforced this point. All of these issues influenced the MECA ITPs when they entered their negotiations and they took a much tougher stance than previously. Key points in their offer on 6 August 2009 are provided below.
  • A 1% salary increase with no back-dating.
  • A 24 month term from the date of signing (Note: the MECA expired in March 09).
  • All discretionary leave at the employers’ discretion.
  • Increase to number of teaching days from 185 to 204 (Note: 204 is the maximum number of days worked – the MECA has 9 weeks leave plus up to 12 days of public holidays).
  • A working party to identify ways to improve productivity through more flexible hours of work.
• TEU members turned down that offer, but by December they were offering 0% pay increases (for 4/6 ITPs) as long as other conditions were kept. The employers turned that down.
• This month, the employers and TEU discussed more options, including the employers offering a 2% pay rise on signing and another 2% in a year’s time. The TEU’s members rejected that option and called for facilitation by the Employment Relations Authority. The TEU also raised the spectre of ITPs being able to offer individual employment agreements to staff, which is apparently possible a year after a collective agreement expires – March 1 2010.

What Next?

What interests me is how the negotiations have developed from an initial focus on pay rates and whether Ministers were pressuring ITPs into zero or low pay rises into a very clear tussle over specific conditions. In the long term, I don’t see how ITPs can succeed while they have such restrictive employment arrangements. They face constraints on total teaching hours (reducing the ability to have staff focus mainly on delivery, rather than content development), while the discretionary leave cannot be relied on to support development plans. 

The sticking point right now seems to whether the employers can or cannot require staff to use discretionary leave. ITP staff on the MECA get four weeks discretionary leave (in addition to five weeks annual leave) and this leave is at the discretion of the employee (except in the first two years where 3 weeks can be required for PD or at any time if there is a performance problem). Employers would like to be able to require that academic staff do particular things (ie work in industry for 2 weeks pa, or do specific professional development) while employees would rather keep their current flexibility. I think it is unlikely that employers will back down easily on this one, but neither will the TEU.

If MECA negotiations stall, will the employers seek to attract people to individual agreements? Well, I have no idea, but if they do I can’t see them having quick uptake unless they come up with a very different employment model ie they’d need to really show what innovation they could do without MECA constraints. Changing MECA conditions will create some preconditions for innovation, but good management and staff buy-in will be required to make it succeed.

Finally, there is a distinct possibility that this could all blow up publicly. The parties are still working fairly quietly, but after a year of negotiations, people could get fed up and do some interesting things.

Disclosure: My life is complex. I worked for the ITP national body last year, including the six MECA ITPs, but had no direct involvement in this issue. I have a sister in law who chairs a TEU branch and an uncle in law (if such a term exists) who advises the MECA ITPs over their negotiations – they bear no responsibility for my words.