NATIONAL Tertiary Education Union has today abandoned all joint processes with ANU management regarding the future of the School of Music. 

Today the ACT Division Secretary of the union, Stephen Darwin, wrote to staff, “We no longer have any confidence there is a genuine desire to negotiate and we are concerned about the increasing intransigent attitudes being adopted about future staffing of the School by ANU management representatives.”

Mr Darwin said it had been “extremely frustrating that ANU management representatives have been persistently incapable of reasonable negotiations over critical matters of staff redeployment, future resourcing and position descriptions.”

The NTEU, he said, had invested enormous energy and resources attempting to secure a “shared model” between management and the staff of the School. This has not been respected or responded to in a way that reflects the genuineness of our efforts.”

The union, he added, had made futile attempts to have the Oversight and Joint committees discuss the real implications for staffing the school under its new curriculum and the role of current staff.

Mr Darwin said he believed the union had achieved improvements by forcing transparency on the change process, including redeployment and rejecting exclusionary criteria.

The energies of the NTEU, he said, would now move to ensuring  equitable redeployment and re-skilling for all remaining school staff. “We will be preparing to fight any cases where redeployment processes are flawed.”

He urged School of Music staff seeking direct transfer, redeployment or redundancy to keep in contact with the union office for advice on their rights and advocate on their behalf.

Summing up, he said, it was a case where staff had faced “irresistible forces” and “brutal methods.”