Tertiary Update Vol 16 No 12 Union members at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi will be voting on a 2 percent pay rise next month. Four days of negotiations between the two unions, TEU and TIASA, and the whare wānanga concluded successfully last week with a two percent offer backdated to 1 January this year. [...]

Negotiations at Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi will resume next week, following a stopwork meeting by union members last Friday. One of the big issues that remains unresolved in the negotiations is the wānanga’s claim to delete an existing compassionate grant from its collective agreement. The grant awards one-twelfth of an employee’s salary for each [...]

The uneven way the Tertiary Education Commission distributed its $38 million level 1-2 funding available for tender means some polytechnics will probably have to cut courses and restructure or reorganise say TEU national president Sandra Grey. WITT is the first polytechnic to speak out about the funding , telling the Taranaki Daily News this morning [...]

Steven Joyce is talking about privatising more level 1-2 tertiary education funding before he even knows if the first portion of privatised funding will deliver results for New Zealand. Level 1-2 tertiary education courses overlap with secondary school education and often provide foundation literacy, numeracy, and skills education to help students to move into tertiary [...]

Tertiary institutions are in a constant state of restructuring says TEU deputy secretary Nanette Cormack. Last week TEU’s national council heard that there are 59 reviews affecting 500 jobs currently underway across 17 different tertiary education institutions. “500 members are about 5 percent of our membership. When one in twenty people are having their job [...]

Tertiary Update Vol 14 No 25 Ministry of Education statistics show the average surplus as a percentage of revenue at public tertiary education providers climbing dramatically from 1.9 percent in 2006 to 5.2 percent last year. In 2006 public tertiary education providers made a combined surplus of $66 million on revenue of $3.5 billion. Last year the [...]

The employers at the five Ready2Go polytechnics (Whitireia, Wintec, BOPP, Unitec and NorthTec) have now finally agreed that they are indeed ‘ready to go’ and have agreed dates to negotiate with their respective TEU members. The first, Whitireia begins negotiations tomorrow (Friday) and the last gets underway on 3 August. Weltec has joined these five polytechnics in [...]

Further earthquakes, this time in the midst of exams for many students and staff, have shaken Christchurch and its many tertiary institutions. The University of Canterbury was still working last night to assess the structural integrity of all its buildings and was in the process of rescheduling and relocating many exams. The vice-chancellor reported that [...]

Tertiary Update Vol 14 No 12 TEU members at Te Wānanga o Aotearoa are dismayed that their employer is offering them less annual leave than members of both the wānanga’s in-house union, TUIA, and kaimahi on individual agreements. Kaimahi at the wānanga are entitled to the legal minimum of four weeks annual leave. But kaimahi [...]