UON and the National Tertiary Education Union Newcastle branch came to this agreement following the resolving of a leave dispute lodged in the Fair Work Commission last April, after UON directed staff to take five days leave and three concession days. UON recredited the leave taken.

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Branch president Dan Conway said the agreement was a "good balanced outcome for all".

"We are pleased to have reached a negotiated outcome with university management regarding their capacity to direct staff to take annual leave," Mr Conway said.

"Staff are very happy to have certainty around how leave might be directed in the future.

"Many staff felt directions to use their annual leave entitlements during Christmas closedowns has always been excessive.

"What the settlement does is create appropriate limitations on such directions and also requires management provide additional concessional leave if directing more than three days."

UON can direct staff to take this leave during what has been agreed will be a maximum nine day shut down - exclusive of public holidays and university holidays - during dates that fall between the last 14 days of December and first seven days of January each year.

No employee will be required to work during this time unless to attend to critical operational matters, in which case they will be given time off in lieu at the rate of 1.5 hours for each hour worked.

UON met with representatives from the NTEU and the Community and Public Sector Union on September 17 to start negotiations for the next enterprise bargaining agreements, which expire on September 30 but will remain in place until they are replaced.

Speaking about reaching consensus with the NTEU about the end of year close down, UON Deputy Vice-Chancellor Global, Professor Kent Anderson, said it "will make sense to include these types of post-COVID clarifications" in the new agreements.

"COVID-19 has fundamentally changed our environment and our focus is on achieving flexibility, sustainability and adaptability in our enterprise agreements," he said.

"We want an appropriate balance that works for our staff and students.

"The university wants to reduce complexity in our employment framework without reducing entitlements for our staff.

"We'll achieve this by ensuring our new enterprise agreements are more user-friendly and not duplicating enshrined legislated entitlements.

"The pandemic has highlighted the lack of flexibility and adaptability in our current agreements. As such, we will seek the inclusion of provisions that allow us with consultation of staff to balance leave in a sustainable way."

The NTEU's log of claims seeks to negotiate a single enterprise agreement to cover all staff, instead of one for academic and teaching staff and another for professional staff.

It has called for a "fair and reasonable pay increase for university staff that shares the healthy university surplus among all staff, (not just senior staff) and which recognises the continuing increases in staff workloads/productivity and quality education goals" and for salary rates and allowances to be increased by 12 per cent to December 31, 2024.

Its claims include hours-linked caps on academic workload, protections against "excessive, unreasonable, or un-compensated overtime" and the "right to switch off".

Its claims under organisational change and redundancy include protections against work intensification; improved internal redeployment, entitlements and processes; improved post-implementation of change review processes; a strengthening of change clauses and that "no individual staff member should be subject to organisational change affecting their employment more than once during the life of the agreement".

Its claims under job security include that retrenchment only occur where the work is no longer required to be performed by anyone and that UON maintain a pool of fulltime staff "available to move around the university as required to provide administrative, professional, or operational backfill and other forms of operational support to minimise the reliance on casual and fixed term staff".

There are also improvements to contingent staff clauses and fixed staff and casual staff provisions.

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