Swinburne loss a major blow for NTEU
In a disturbing development for university workers across the country, Swinburne University management has won a staff ballot to endorse a non-union collective agreement.
The new agreement removes academic workload protections, caps on casual staff numbers and the requirement to consult the union about major restructures. In the context of recent campus closures and lay-offs – and with more restructures foreshadowed by management – the agreement represents a significant setback for staff.
The National Tertiary Education Union also lost a ballot last year at Charles Sturt University, where another union on campus, the CPSU, supported management’s proposed agreement. But the Swinburne result is more significant because there the NTEU is the sole staff representative and ran a vigorous “vote no” campaign.
The NTEU’s campaign involved a committed layer of union activists getting the word out to members and non-members alike – previously passive members were brought into union activism, and new members were picked up during the campaign. In the end, the union mobilised 974 “no” votes – exceeding the total number of union members at the university. But management scraped past with 1031 “yes” votes.
Swinburne Vice-Chancellor Linda Kristjanson resorted to usual management tactics to get a “yes” vote out – offering a $1,000 sign-on bonus, threatening to lower the 3.1 percent pay offer if the ballot went down, and including hundreds of ex-employees in the ballot (mostly casual workers who have not worked at the university in some time). The NTEU has lodged a challenge with the Fair Work Commission.
Regardless of the legal outcome, the vote reveals the serious challenges facing unionists in higher education. The massive expansion of the sector over recent decades has caused union density to plummet. Nowhere has the NTEU succeeded in sustaining membership rates amongst the increasingly young and casualised university workforce.
The national “growth team” introduced by the union in recent years has helped arrest a decline in absolute numbers, but not in density. With its small but active casuals’ network, the Swinburne branch has done more than many others to address this problem, but it is no exception to the overall trend. Vice-chancellors feel less compelled to heed a union of declining weight, and will no doubt be further emboldened by the outcome of Kristjanson’s gamble.
Any serious recovery in the fortunes of the NTEU will rely upon encouraging a more active membership confident to recruit their workmates and combat management arguments as they come up. The vibrancy of the vote no campaign at Swinburne demonstrates the potential to draw wider layers of the workforce into union building. But to sustain this activist workplace culture, we cannot just fight rearguard actions during bargaining periods; we need constantly to be trying to mobilise members against every cut, restructure and management attack.
