Unisa managers and academics are lining up for a legal confrontation.
Negotiations between the university’s bosses and the main academic union over new conditions of employment failed last week.
Management has said it will implement the new conditions from next month, but the Academic and Professional Staff Association (Apsa) has vowed to contest this in court if management does not resume negotiations. Apsa has told the Mail & Guardian that management had terminated the negotiations. Unisa has denied this.
Apsa’s argument against the new conditions is that academics, who make up 95% of the union’s membership, will be disadvantaged. The conditions will apply uniformly to all staff (including support and administrative employees) and this does not adequately recognise the particular professional requirements of academics, the union argues.
In a letter to staff last week, vice-chancellor Barney Pityana justified the need for conditions in terms of the merger in 2004 of the former Unisa, Technikon South Africa and the distance education centre of Vista University. ‘This resulted in an institution with no less than three different sets of employment conditions and about seven separate recognition agreements,†he wrote.
He noted that the National Education, Health and Allied Workers Union at Unisa had agreed to the conditions, but that ‘negotiations with Apsa … have been unproductive. Management had eventually to judge that no further purpose would be served by negotiations and a dispute was declared. A subsequent effort at mediation was similarly doomed to failure.â€
Apsa represented a minority of staff, Pityana wrote, and ‘cannot be allowed to hold the entire institution to ransom for much longerâ€. Consequently, the new conditions ‘will be extended and applied to all university employeesâ€, and implementation will commence on August 15.
But Nic Coetzee, assistant general secretary of Apsa, told the M&G the union objected first to the new remuneration system. ‘This moves employees from a basic salary plus add-ons such as medical aid and housing allowance to one overall salary package.â€
One problem here was that the controversial downgrading of some academics came into play, Coetzee said.
The M&G has recently reported on academics’ anger at receiving letters from management placing them in the university’s new post-merger structures, but also, in some cases, changing them to a lower post grade, which is linked to remuneration.
‘We might not be worse off now, but could well be in a year’s time,†Coetzee said, ‘when salary negotiations are conducted in the light of unilaterally imposed changes in post grades.â€
The new conditions also eroded or even removed work resources that academics specifically need, he said. For instance, the conditions imposed standard working hours, from 7.45am to 4pm, doing away with both flexitime and recess leave.
Recess leave, he explained, currently stood at 50 days per year, and academics usually used it for attending conferences or pursuing their own research, often off campus. The conditions also reduced financial assistance to staff for formal study.
Apsa general secretary Johan Jonker wrote to members last week saying that management had terminated discussions. Unisa’s implementation of the conditions would be ‘unilateral†and so ‘legally contestableâ€, he told members.
If management refuses to resume negotiations, the union will seek an urgent court interdict, Coetzee said.
‘Unisa did not terminate the mediation with Apsa,†Unisa spokesperson Doreen Gough said. And ‘Unisa is not prepared to discuss the merits of the new conditions of employment in the media,†she added.
‘Unisa process is ‘systematic, transparent and participative’â€, Page 26