Sydney Uni staff fight off attack

Delegates from the National Tertiary and Education Union met at a National Council meeting in Melbourne over the weekend of 4-5 October. Alex McAuley spoke with Alma Torlakovic, a member of the Sydney University branch committee, about the enterprise bargaining agreement that branch has recently secured.

What has the Sydney University branch gained?

We have won some significant improvements in our conditions. After a very hard fought campaign, we’ve won the creation of 172 Indigenous staff positions, 40 new early career fellowships, 80 ongoing scholarly teaching fellow positions, 20 days’ domestic violence leave, increases to partner leave and an extra 12 weeks’ redundancy benefits for general staff.

How does this compare with what management originally offered?

We’ve pushed back pretty much every attack from management. When we started bargaining a year ago, management set out to destroy the union by removing the NTEU from the agreement, pushing the union off campus and limiting staff access to union resources. Management also wanted to slash sick leave by 60 percent, increase academic workloads and make it easier to push through restructures without consultation.

When we look at the balance sheet from a year ago, the union has actually come out stronger, with wins, and we’ve been able to build a more active branch.

How did the branch deal with management’s aggressive strategy?

The union fought a really strong battle in the campaign. We had a series of seven strikes. Every strike effectively shut down the campus. We had serious picket lines where quite often we had to fight off the police as they tried to let scabs into the campus. We had the support of students as well on the picket lines and during the demonstrations that we held.

We had some preparation for bargaining from a campaign against a whole swathe of redundancies targeting academic staff last year. We had regular mass meetings and big protests on campus during that time, and it was quite easy to continue this campaign into enterprise bargaining.

What sort of advice do you have for union activists at other universities?

The first thing to say is that this can happen anywhere. Sydney Uni had not taken a strike in 10 years, at least. We didn’t have the picket tradition that other unions have, and we simply hadn’t had the experience of shutting down the campus. But we went in knowing we had so much at stake – the whole union was under threat. Because we refused to back down and because the branch leadership took the lead, it meant that members felt confident to take the action we did.

We recognised that the only way members would come out was if they felt like they owned the campaign. So from day one we had meetings that debated our demands. This meant that when we went out on strike, we were defending things we knew directly affected our daily working lives.

We tried to make every member more active than they already were. We had accumulated over the years a whole bunch of activists – people who are active in their individual workplaces and departments who had indicated to the union that they were willing to put up a poster in their tea room, hand out some leaflets or organise a local area meeting. Our approach to this group was to empower them and give them the support and resources they needed to pull members in from their areas. So for example a strike would be voted upon, we would have the official material from the union office but as well as that people began to initiate things themselves. They started making YouTube videos to promote the strike.

People made their own posters. They translated leaflets into different languages for the international students. At the pickets people made their own banners. There was a whole range of activities that reinforced the grass-roots nature of the campaign.