UNIVERSITY of Newcastle staff have voted to move towards industrial action, plus been offered a slice of cake depicting the organisation's $185 million surplus.
National Tertiary Education Union Newcastle branch president Dan Conway said members voted on Wednesday with an overwhelming majority - one person didn't vote - to apply to the Fair Work Commission for a Protected Action Ballot Order, the first official step to protected industrial action.
"Members and staff more broadly are fed up with the treatment they've received over a number of years now," Mr Conway said.
"I think the mood is there for people to take strikes, the members are saying they want to quickly move to taking actual strikes."
Vice Chancellor Alex Zelinsky said industrial action "will likely impact on our students as well as our staff".
"I note the CPSU is not pursuing this action," he said.
"Nevertheless, the university remains committed to work with both the NTEU and the CPSU to reach an agreement through the enterprise bargaining process.
"Our aims in this round of enterprise bargaining are to help strengthen benefits and conditions that work for individuals as well as the institution, while ensuring our university remains financially sustainable for the long-term."
Mr Conway said the industrial action was intended to ensure members were taken seriously in their efforts to achieve better pay and conditions.
The agreements covering academic and teaching staff and professional staff expired last September and the union and UON have been negotiating ever since.
He said the union had tabled the bulk of clauses related to its claims, which include a 15 per cent pay rise over three years to keep up with inflation and improved capacity to enforce workload provisions, including that academic staff can seek a model of 40 per cent research, 40 per cent teaching and 20 per cent administrative work.
A number of clauses also address casualisation.
"We would have hoped that we would have made far more ground on reaching agreement," he said.
"I acknowledge our last meeting was perhaps the most productive meeting we've had in the past nine months and hope that continues."
Mr Conway said there were "numerous issues at play" and staff "feel like they've been cheated for a number of years".
"Management have admitted that they knew in 2020 they were going to make the surplus that they did last year and moved to sacking staff regardless of that," he said.
"In addition to that, the staff that are left there are now left picking up the pieces from a change that never really needed to happen."
Mr Conway said "anger was one word for" how members felt about UON's 2021 $185 million surplus.
"Some people are quite literally disgusted by it.
"The argument that we can't use the money is fine for some of that money and we accept wholeheartedly that some of that money can only be used for the purposes it was given.
But ultimately a vast majority of the money including income returns can be used as management see fit, they just don't see fit to use it for staff."
