Discussions took place on Tuesday with management to develop a draft agreement that could be considered by members. Over the 12 months of negotiations your support through coming to union meetings, the strike ballot, the 24 hour strike and the rolling stoppages forced management to increase their salary offer and to remove their extreme working conditions claims.  After two weeks of industrial action both unions re-entered negotiations.

We needed to establish whether the action had shifted management’s position. After the initial strike and the two week industrial campaign management had dropped some of their harsher working conditions claims and had increased their salary offer from 3% to 4% (12% over three years). They claimed that there was no more money on offer. We needed to test that claim.

What we knew then and we still know now is that ABC funding is stretched. But we also know that management always seem to find money when they want to fund a new program or to pay out a Managing Director who leaves before his terms expires.

We therefore needed to ‘shake the tree’. What we found was the industrial action let us make headway on a number of conditions issues, but no more money was flowing. We succeeded however in getting management to change the way the increases are paid by ‘front end loading’ the increases. This has the effect of putting more money in members’ pockets.

We pushed management into putting their best available offer on the table and to give you the chance to decide. The choice is to accept the money and conditions on offer or to re-start the campaign and keep it rolling well into the new year.

Members will need to decide whether the draft is acceptable.

A summary of the core agreement issues follows.

Copies of the full text of the draft agreement will be available soon.

Meeting times and venues will be announced shortly

Core elements of the draft agreement

• 2006 5% (including the 3% paid administratively) with a 2% increase in December 2006
• 2007 4% July 2007
• 2008 3% July 2008

The agreement would operate for a period of 2 years and 4 months expiring on 31 March 2009.

We were successful in blocking all attempts by management to decrease working conditions.

We also managed to win a number of improvements, including:

• better protection for shift workers on short turnarounds,
• penalty for excessive consecutive night shifts;
• access to the PM system for fixed term employees;
• introduction of a purchased leaves scheme;
• improved travel conditions on long haul flights;
• introduction of consideration period in redundancy situations;
• introduction of new test of ‘reasonableness’ in misconduct matters;
• improved protection for members facing medically related termination;
• review of international posting conditions;
• retention of a fair system for dealing with disputes over the agreement threatened by Work Choices legislation.

Performance Management:

We were only partially successful in addressing concerns about performance management. The critical faults with the PM system remains salary capping. We did not achieve our objective of breaking the link between advancement between bands and the Job Plans. We were successful however in getting management to agree to joint review of the Work Level Standards, i.e. standards that underpin the system. The review will ensure that the standards used to judge the value of jobs accurately reflect the range of duties performed and skills exercised in jobs. The importance of the review lies in the central role performed by the standards. While promotion may be capped by the Job Plans, the agreement stipulates that the Job Plans must be consistent with the Work Level Standards.

We succeeded in removing the artificial cap in Band 6 so members will now be able to advance to the top of the band with a rating of ‘meets’.

We succeeded in building in fairer rules for dealing with unsatisfactory performance.