The rules provide for one member from each branch to be funded nationally. We are aware that a number of branches may not yet be able to identify a Pacific member to attend and we expect that there will be more than one member from a few of the branches who will be keen to participate, so we are taking this into account in the planning. Branches of course are able to fund participants themselves – and are indeed encouraged to do so.

TEU Travel Policy

This policy applies to all members of the Tertiary Education Union and may be changed from time to time. This policy is current from March 2011.

1)         Introduction

TEU travel policy is based on the following principles:

• Travel to and from meetings, Conference etc. of the union is part of the democratic processes of the TEU
• It is recognised that members give of their own time and commitment when travelling for TEU
• All travel, accommodation and meals are paid for by members’ subscriptions and therefore these costs need to be approached responsibly
• TEU has a commitment to using the most economical travel and accommodation arrangements as possible balanced with an understanding of members’ needs and a level of convenience to individual members.

2)         Air Travel

Standard travel bookings at the lowest economy class will be made to arrive on the day of the meeting in time for the start of the meeting and will depart after the finish of the meeting.

Fully flexible fares which are charged at a premium price will not normally be used and need prior approval from the National Secretary.

Where hardship or difficulties would be caused by unsuitable departure and/or arrival times e.g. hazardous early morning travel in winter; availability of childcare; alternative arrangements will be considered. These arrangements, which may include overnight stay before the meeting, need the prior approval of the National Secretary.

Where members wish to travel prior to a meeting or stay after a meeting for personal reasons, TEU will accommodate these requests as far as possible on the basis of the lowest economy fare. Members will be responsible for all additional costs associated with such stays, including travel to and from private accommodation to the meeting.

Travel for scheduled TEU national meetings set at the beginning of the year e.g. Council, Sector Groups, Te Toi Ahurangi, National Women’s Committee and Conference will be booked at least four weeks before the meeting. Standard bookings will be made unless members advise the administrator to the contrary. This is to ensure that the lowest possible economy fares can be purchased.

The administrator will send a reminder email to all those travelling at least five weeks prior to the meeting.

Flights other than for scheduled meetings and Conference must be approved by the National Secretary before any bookings are made.

Where Branches are sending observers to meetings, Conference etc National Office will book travel for these observers on request and charge the relevant branch.

If for exceptional reasons members make their own booking, the same principles of lowest economy fares purchased at least four weeks prior to the meeting must apply. Fully flexible bookings require the approval of the National Secretary. A copy of the receipt/itinerary must be sent to the administrator at National Office as soon as possible.

3)         Changes to bookings

Changes to bookings incur significant additional costs including a fee for the change (usually $50.00 minimum) as well as the cost of an upgraded fare in many cases.

As a rule, all changes made after the booking has been made will be a personal cost payable by the member.

Members will be required to provide a credit card number prior to any changes being made.

In an emergency or exceptional circumstance, members must seek approval for changes from the National Secretary who may approve the costs to be paid by TEU.

Where changes are necessitated by TEU (e.g. a changed meeting time or a cancellation) or imposed by circumstances beyond the individual traveller’s control (e.g., weather) TEU will meet any additional costs involved.

4)         Travel by train, car etc.

Where travel by air is not applicable, the same principles of lowest economy fares should apply.

Travel from Hamilton to Auckland, Palmerston North to Wellington and return will not normally be by air.

Travel may include train or private vehicle. Where a private vehicle is to be used, prior approval must be sought. Where two or more people are travelling by private vehicle to the same meeting, they should travel in the one vehicle.

All mileage must be recorded and claimed on the appropriate form. Reimbursement will be at the rate of 62 cents per kilometre.

5)         Taxis, Shuttles to and from home/airport

The use of shuttles and/or shuttle bus is the preferred means of travel to and from airports. This will keep costs to a minimum.

In most instances, the administrator will organise shuttles and/or taxis between the airport and the meeting. Travel should be shared wherever possible and may include waiting a short while for members on another flight. When a shuttle/taxi has been booked, particularly for a group, unless there is an emergency, members may not order separate taxis. Members will arrange taxis and/or shuttles between their home and their home airport.

Where shuttles/taxis are not pre-booked, taxi vouchers will be provided. Please note that you should use the recommended providers to avoid extra charges.

In some cases, it may be more convenient as well as economical to use a private vehicle to get to and from the airport. In this case, TEU will pay airport parking charges. The administrator should be advised before any shuttle bookings are made. GST receipts should be submitted on the appropriate form.

6)         Alternative travel

Members travelling on TEU business who wish to use an alternative method of travel for personal reasons will be asked to make their own arrangements. Costs will be expected to be no more than the equivalent net cost of return economy air travel.  If necessary an advance will be made for such travel. If the planned travel does not take place, then any advance will be required to be repaid to TEU.

7)         Accommodation

TEU National Office regularly seeks deals and specials for accommodation some of which include continental breakfast, to keep the budget to a minimum.

TEU National Office will therefore book accommodation for members coming to national meetings when an overnight stay is required, based on the deals and specials that are available.

Any special requests for accommodation should be made three weeks before the meeting and will be considered by the National Secretary. However, approval may depend on costs.

If members do not require accommodation they should notify the administrator when requesting travel. If for any reason, booked accommodation is no longer required, members should notify the administrator at least 24 hours before in order to avoid being charged for such accommodation.

TEU will pay for the room and continental breakfast. Where an evening meal is not otherwise provided, members are entitled to a reimbursement of up to $40.00 on production of GST receipts.

Morning, afternoon tea and lunches are almost always provided at meetings.

Members are responsible for all minibar, alcohol, phone, internet and other miscellaneous charges. One personal phone call may be made while away overnight on TEU business. All charges must be paid for when checking out of the accommodation. Any variation to this needs prior approval of the National Secretary.

Where Branches are sending observers to meetings, Conference etc National Office will book accommodation for observers also and charge the relevant branch.

8)         Staying Privately

Where accommodation is required for a meeting, members may choose to stay privately. In this case, a staying privately reimbursement of $50.00 may be claimed. This also covers travel to and from private accommodation.

Where an evening meal is not otherwise provided, members are entitled to a reimbursement of up to $40.00 on production of GST receipts.

9)         Travel Insurance

TEU has a travel insurance policy covering persons travelling on TEU business within New Zealand, which requires a detailed schedule to be forwarded to the insurance company on a regular basis.  This schedule is completed by National Office for bookings made by National Office.

Travel insurance covers only the period of the meeting and cannot be extended to additional stays for personal reasons.

In a case where members make their own arrangements, the administrator must be notified to add details to the schedule and ensure that travel cover will apply.

10)      Claims

Any delegate who incurs reasonable expenses while on TEU business can expect TEU to meet those expenses.

Claims can include any additional child care expenses necessitated by travel to meetings.

Claims must be made on the appropriate TEU Expense Claim Form and submitted to the Finance Officer as soon as possible after the meeting. Visa and other receipts with GST numbers must be provided before any reimbursements will be made.

11)      Traveller Profile

When members first make a travel request, they will be asked to complete a traveller profile with contact details, seating preferences etc. It is members’ responsibility to provide updates as needed.

12)      Special Note

Any special requests outside of the above provisions may be considered. However, members must seek prior approval from the National Secretary. (The administrator is unable to approve such requests).

The administrator is currently Sue Wang sue.wang@teu.ac.nz

The finance officer is currently Trina Coombes

Policy authorised by Council 04 March 2011

Sharn Riggs

NATIONAL SECRETARY

“There is no evidence that shifting funding to favour younger students getting degrees will have any impact on the economy at all. In fact Treasury’s focus on degrees at the expense of other qualifications will take away opportunities from some New Zealand families who most need education to lift themselves up and contribute to New Zealand’s economy.”

Dr Grey was responding to Treasury’s advice to government ministers, which was released today.

“Treasury thinks it can pick winners and invest only in them. This denies opportunities to all other ordinary New Zealanders,” said Dr Grey.

Dr Grey says Treasury’s desire to shift research funding to favour research that private firms ask for is effectively an attempt to privatise our public research institutions.

“We should not research things only because a private firm thinks it can make a profit. Often there is a crucial need for research that is not solely in the interests of private companies.

“If Treasury wants a vibrant growing economy and communities, it needs to invest equitably in all types of education and research,” said Dr Grey.

For more information:

Sandra Grey, TEU national president, 021 844 176 or 04 801 5098

Stephen Day, TEU communications officer, 021 2900 734 or 04 801 4792

http://www.teu.ac.nz

At least nine New Zealanders have joined a global boycott of Elsevier, the world’s largest scientific journal publisher. The protest has rapidly gained momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education by Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company’s journals, including refereeing papers. Protesters accuse Elsevier of charging too much and supporting laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company pay-wall.

Employees of the universities of Auckland, Lincoln and Otago have signed the pledge as well as one staff member at NIWA.

Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the USA’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine, told the Chronicle, “The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities. Then they charge us to read it.” Mr Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.

According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money buying things they do not want in order to get a few things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed US law that could prevent agencies like the US National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available.

However Elsevier rejects the complaints saying, globally, the amount of research that is published is going up every year but library budgets are not keeping pace.

Also in Tertiary Update this week:

1. WITT gains from PTE closure
2. TEU negotiates improved Canterbury timetable
3. University of Auckland pushes Teach First
4. Student loan debtors escape on OE

Other news

Wintec settled a collective agreement with its academic staff late last year. NorthTec is now the only one of the old ITP MECA polytechnics not to settle a collective agreement with its staff. NorthTec wants an employment agreement which allows it to direct staff to work any days, evenings and weekends. Tutors have not had a pay increase since November 2008.

“The government should be focusing on creating jobs and getting money into the pockets of low and middle income people by stimulating the economy rather than an inflexible deficit target,” says CTU Economist Bill Rosenberg. “We have had over 150,000 unemployed and 250,000 jobless almost constantly now since mid 2009. The unemployment rate at 6.6 percent is barely below its financial crisis peak in December 2009.” – CTU

Lower Hutt is in danger of losing its last provider of adult community night classes. Hutt City Workers’ Education Association (WEA) president Maurice Payes confirms a funding squeeze has forced the group to lay off its two part-time workers, who are owed wages. Four Lower Hutt colleges abandoned running adult community courses in 2010 when the National Government cut $13 million out of the $16m annual Adult Community Education (ACE) budget. That left the WEA as the last provider – Hutt News

United States President Obama brought his campaign for college affordability to an audience of Michigan college students last week, pledging that his administration would be “putting colleges on notice” over rising costs and issuing a call for continued public support for higher education by states so that the USA does not become a nation where education is reserved for the well-to-do – Chronicle of Higher Education 

The Taranaki Daily Newsreports that student enrolments at WITT are up by 50 percent compared to this time last year and chief executive Richard Handley is attributing PEI’s demise to part of that increase.

PEI announced its closure last month after it failed to secure significant funding from the Tertiary Education Commission because of its below par course completion rates.

Mr Handley told the Daily News that there would be would be teaching jobs at WITT available for many of the staff at PEI who lost their jobs last month.

“PEI staff are now being identified by WITT as internal staff when they apply for jobs so there is more opportunity for them to be employed.”

He said many teaching jobs were only advertised internally if there were skills within WITT to cover the position and under the changes that would include former PEI staff.

“We have advertised seven jobs externally and extended the application closure date to allow PEI staff time to apply and we also have about five internal jobs they will be able to apply for.”

Mr Handley said he welcomed all interest from PEI staff and students and where appropriate PEI staff were encouraging their students to enrol with WITT.

TEU national secretary Sharn Riggs said there were real benefits for ex-PEI teachers who found jobs at WITT, because they would now have the choice of belonging to a union that offered a collective agreement that protected working conditions and pay.

“Those staff have been through a lot but now, hopefully, with the chance to belong to a strong national union they will have greater job security and protection.”

She also applauded WITT’s CEO on his decision to treat these staff as internal applicants.

Last week the Christchurch Press reported that academic staff were up in arms over changes to the way timetables are set, “forcing lecturers to work longer hours and through their lunch breaks”.

TEU members raised concerns about the way the timetable was cutting into family-friendly work hours, crucial to ensuring equity for staff with care-giving responsibilities. The University of Canterbury assistant vice-chancellor, academic, Hamish Cochrane said the proposed new timetabling system represented an effort by the university to reduce class clashes. The system would see a significant reduction in the number of courses that clashed and would provide students with more choice when selecting courses.

TEU representatives made a series of recommendations to the assistant vice-chancellors aimed at matching union member needs with the new timetable system, and resolving some of the problems around equity and terms and conditions of employment that members raised with TEU over the past week.

The agreed recommendations now mean that existing conventions concerning the hours during which staff are available to teach (such as family friendly hours of work) will be passed on to the timetabling team and kept on file for future iterations of the timetable. Dr Cochrane has assured the TEU that any changes to existing work conventions will be negotiated with the staff members concerned.

Teach First NZ says similar schemes operate overseas, including in Britain, and it would help cover shortages in hard-to-staff areas such as South Auckland. However, the Herald on Sundayreported that two South Auckland principals are critical of the plan saying it was insensitive and not the right way to tackle inequality in education.

MIT’s director of external relations, Stuart Middleton also expressed concern about the proposal saying:

“It is also somewhat ingenuous to put the Teach First programme forward as a key contribution to lifting the value of low decile schools. There is little evidence that low decile schools need bright young novice teachers any more than any school does.”

The report identifies that nearly 60,000 former students who have completed their study since 1999, left the country and have not yet returned to New Zealand.

The report, Going abroad: What do we know about people going overseas after tertiary study?, concludes “a large proportion [of student loan borrowers] had been away for longer than three years and was still based overseas at the end of our data series. And there were few distinctive characteristics of those who returned that mark them out from those who stay away… More than half of those who stay overseas for an extended period see their loan balances rise, not decrease, over time, as interest and penalties outweigh any repayments.”

TEU national president Dr Sandra Grey says that for New Zealand it does not matter greatly whether student loan borrowers return from overseas or not, so long as they are happy and their education is serving them well, wherever they reside.

“But we do need to be wary that large debts may be either encouraging young Kiwis to head overseas, or discouraging them from returning once they have left. Having an education should not become something that makes it harder for New Zealanders to feel as if they cannot live in their own country.”

TEU national president Dr Sandra Grey says the data is yet another signal to the minister of tertiary education that he needs to change his approach.

“It’s pretty self-evident that investing in tertiary education helps protect people and countries from economic troubles. It is a shame our current government has chosen to systematically cut hundreds of millions of dollars from tertiary education since 2009.”

“New Zealand has great tertiary education institutions, great students and great teachers. With a little more belief and support from government we could lead New Zealand’s recovery from the economic downturn. Instead, because of savage government cuts we are also mired in our own internal downturn,” said Dr Grey.

For more information:

Sandra Grey, TEU national president, 021 844 176 or 04 801 5098

Sharn Riggs, TEU national secretary, 027 443 8768 or 04 801 4732

Their livelihoods are under threat.

Their employer has threatened to sack them unless their union accepts every one of the employer demands in collective bargaining negotiations.

That’s not negotiation. It is intimidation and bullying. Worse still, it’s being done by a company that is owned by the people of Auckland.

These employer demands would mean workers having no security with their rostered shifts.

That means not knowing whether you’ll be sent home after three hours or told to work a 12-hour shift. Or not having any work at all.

That’s not flexibility. That’s ruining a worker’s family life for an irresponsible business model that won’t deliver for Auckland.

Ports of Auckland (POAL) management want to contract out port workers jobs and create a totally casualised workforce.

Casualisation is harming New Zealand. Employers demand workers to be on standby, on call, working a few hours here or there. Even where there is already a lot of flexibility, workers are expected to give up any hope of a structured and healthy life.

At the heart of the dispute between the Maritime Union and the Ports of Auckland management is a fundamental issue: whether you as a worker should know what hours you will be working from one day to the next.

The current collective employment agreement at Ports of Auckland allows for flexibility. Up to a quarter of the current workforce can be employed on a casual basis and another quarter as permanent part-time workers.

The Maritime Union agreed to more flexibility and to an ongoing productivity improvement process. Workers are seeking only a modest 2.5% pay increase. At present the base rate of pay for a stevedore is $27 an hour or around $56,000 for those on a 40-hour week. Ports of Auckland have shifts over a 24 hour period, 365 days a year.

In September 2011 Ports of Auckland congratulated its workers for achieving the “best ever” crane moves per hour on the port for the previous month.

But the employer walked away from mediation – and CEO Tony Gibson plans to sack these workers and contract out their jobs.

This is not only distressing for the workers and their families but it is damaging to the Port, which is owned by the people of Auckland.

There is an agenda being promoted to sell the port off or contract out port work and leave the Council simply owning the land.

A Government Commission has just published an unfinished report that calls for the ports to be privatised and de-unionised. This is not a coincidence.

Ports of Auckland belongs to the people of Auckland. It must remain a public asset that benefits all of us and treats its workers with fairness and respect.

More info and to help with the campaign see www.munz.org.nz