National Tertiary Education Union SA secretary Andrew Miller said talks had been held with the university since March last year, with management offering three per cent more pay per year while the union wanted five per cent.

“We’re after safe workload, secure jobs and fair pay – we’ve been really consistently telling them that with the rising cost of living and skyrocketing inflation, we wouldn’t accept any lowball salary offers,” he said.

“They’ve consistently made lowball salary offers despite all that.”

The Fair Work Commission has approved a protected action ballot for UniSA, with voting to open on November 10 and close on November 18.

Union members can vote on eight bands of industrial actions, which include sending all emails in uppercase without punctuation for specified periods of 24 hours and escalate to indefinite stoppages of work.

“The annual report from the university this year showed there was an operating surplus of $52 million,” he said.

“The university is traveling pretty well financially, its net assets have risen from $99 million to $1.4 billion, so they’re not crying poor, and yet they offered three per cent per annum pay rises.

“According to the Federal Budget papers last week, inflation is running at 7.3 per cent and is expected to go higher, so they’re offering pay cuts in real terms – the staff and members at UniSA are furious.”

The union is also pursuing clauses in an agreement that would limit or reverse casualisation of the university’s workforce, which Miller said is an endemic issue across the country.

A similar bargaining agreement reached by the NTEU in Sydney saw 150 workers offered more permanent positions.

“One thing we’ve gone after in this round of bargaining is to try to decasualise the higher education sector in universities because they’re so exploitative of casual and fixed term labor,” Miller said.

“A five per cent per annum pay rise is still below inflation, and we lowered it to that point or, or made that benchmark, because we recognise that we’re really fighting hard for better job security.”

Miller also said the ramifications of the result of this dispute will be far-reaching.

“What happens at UniSA will set the tone for enterprise bargaining at Flinders and Adelaide. UniSA is shaping up as a big contest because everyone knows that if union members can get two or three really good agreements up in different places around the country it sets the benchmark for what will happen sector-wide.”

UniSA said bargaining has been occurring in good faith and constructive progress has been made.

“The university has continued to award staff pay increases during this period and continues to be well served by the existing Enterprise Agreement, ratified in 2019,” a spokesperson said.

“We look forward to further constructive dialogue and the timely resolution of this process to provide clarity for our staff members going forward.”