Your union recently concluded consultation/negotiations with regards to what the anticipated re-structure initiatives will look like; we have fielded a few enquiries since the business’ bulletin to all staff and wish to clarify a few points.
The application for VR
- Only those who are in an impacted area of the business will be able to apply for VR. That means the existing, open ended EoI process will be closed and any pre-existing EoIs contained within it will be, or already have been, effectively discarded;
- If you have previously expressed interest in VR under the old scheme and are notified that you are impacted, you will have to submit a new application for VR if you choose to do so; and
- All impacted employees will receive an estimate of their redundancy entitlements and have two weeks in order to consider making an application for VR or not, subject to their current financial positions and financial advice sought throughout the 2 week consideration period. For the avoidance of any doubt, this is not to say that everyone who receives an estimate will be made redundant – the provision of the estimate up front will provide impacted employees the opportunity to seek any and all financial advice they deem necessary throughout the 2 week consideration period. The USU has sought that those who have their superannuation invested with EISS have access to a representative of EISS for the duration of the 2 week consideration period.
Determination of those to be offered VR
The business and the combined unions thrashed out the following scenarios with regards to determining who does or doesn’t get offered a VR. For the purposes of these scenarios, we’ll assume that there needs to be a headcount reduction of 5 FTEs in any given impacted area of the business:
- 5 applications received – those 5 applicants will be offered VR;
- 10 applications received – the business will conduct an assessment of all 10 applicants and determine the 5 to be offered VR and the 5 who will not be offered VR; and
- Less than 5 applications received – the negotiated outcome of this scenario is to mitigate as far as is practicable against someone who doesn’t wish to be offered a VR from being offered one.
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- Where re-balancing can be achieved when having regard for matching labour to business requirements, then the business will undertake a re-balancing initiative. That is to say that that the business will identify where the volume of work is either steady, decreasing or increasing and balance the numbers of FTEs accordingly. This may result in people performing the same work, but in different locations, having the following principles apply.
The principles of the re-balancing are:
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- Impacted employees have the opportunity to apply for VR and/or express interest in a transfer to another location; employees will be able to list in order of preference their preferred location;
- EoIs for transfer will only be sought from those in locations & roles impacted by change; and
- Expressing an interest in a work location won’t necessarily result in a transfer being offered.
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For more information, please don’t hesitate to contact your organisers: Troy Dunne on 0419 403 076 or tdunne@usu.org.au or Paul Sansom on 0409 076 633 or psansom@usu.org.au
