It was standing room only at a public meeting in Footscray in which more than 100 people heard about the campaign to defend jobs and courses at Victoria University. Management wants to sack up to one quarter of all academic staff.
VU Council and management claim that the changes are financially necessary and will lead to an improved “student experience”. In reality they are an attack on staff conditions and a fundamental threat to the only university in Melbourne’s western suburbs.
The plan is to replace experienced teaching and research academics with teaching-only staff on lower wages, lumbered with higher workloads and reduced retrenchment provisions. A further 50 staff will be moved to so-called “education-focused” roles, with higher teaching hours and limited research and career opportunities. The new arrangements look suspiciously like an intensified workload model that was proposed by management last year and overwhelmingly rejected in a staff vote.
Speakers at the 27 April meeting, hosted by the community campaign group Friends of VU, included Ged Kearney, president of the ACTU, and Colleen Hartland, Greens MP. In a statement read to the meeting, Electrical Trades Union state secretary Troy Grey described VU attempts to “cheapen the workforce” as “CUB mark 2”, referring to Carlton United Breweries’ much publicised and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to gut the wages and conditions of its maintenance workforce. Grey, whose union fought the CUB plan, pledged a $10,000 donation from the ETU to the NTEU fighting fund.
Ex-student Halima Mohamad said it was important that there is a local university option for western suburbs migrant communities. A current postgraduate student spoke about the distress at losing supervisors, with no clarity provided as to who might replace them. A staff member described how some students were told just days before classes started that their courses had been cut.
All speakers rejected what looks like an attempt to turn VU into a US-style community college with less choice and overworked staff who have no time to support students.
The attacks at VU are part of a push by vice-chancellors across the country to increase teaching workloads, reduce research time and cut wages. The line coming from their offices is that research is a privilege, not a right, and should be undertaken in one’s own time. Increasingly corporatised universities will demand still more of staff for less given the further cuts to funding recently announced.
Under the plan, VU staff will be less able to engage in community-driven research that can ensure their teaching approach is up to date and relevant to the people of the western suburbs. VU staff have a proud history of working with migrant and working class communities in the west and providing quality education to those who face extra challenges in their studies. These attacks on staff threaten that history and suggest that those living in the west deserve only a second-rate education.
All present vowed to fight the cuts and sackings. Two motions were passed unanimously, calling for further action and a community rally to pressure the VU Council to drop its plans.

Jo Williams

Campaign to save Vic Uni jobs kicks off at big meeting

Limited changes to the education system, which prime minister Michelle Bachelet has tried to package and market as great reforms, have not eased the political crisis the Chilean government is facing.
On the contrary, protests by students and teachers threaten to accelerate and deepen the crisis. Recent student marches, including those responding to increased police and right wing violence, have mobilised numbers as large as those at the peak of the movement in 2011.
Some 95 percent of national teachers’ union members have rejected the government’s plan for the teaching profession, which not only failed to address concerns about working conditions and educational quality but also established a performance pay framework that will open the road for a further erosion of teachers’ rights and wages.
On 1 June an indefinite national strike began. According to the union, on the third day of the strike, more than 150,000 teachers mobilised in marches across the country. University and secondary students joined the demonstrations, which now look like developing into a new wave of protest.
Since the 2013 election, Bachelet has tried to use the participation of the Communist Party in her coalition government to muffle and coopt opposition to an agenda that by and large aims to persist with and in some areas extend the neoliberal attacks of previous governments. In the context of a looming decline in the minerals-dependent economy, the hard right has been increasing its public agitation, putting pressure on the government and shifting the balance of forces in the coalition further to the right.
Bachelet’s Socialist Party is struggling to keep the initiative. The Christian Democrats are in the wings waiting for a chance to take a more central role.
Despite the Communist Party giving Bachelet some initial breathing room, the momentum of the long-running education movement in Chile appears to be breaking through that party’s bureaucratic grip on the trade union movement. The Communist Party won the presidency of the teachers union in 2013. But it has been under growing rank and file pressure to hold firm against the government’s plans.
Such pressure appears to be forcing the party to tack left. Its president of the national trade union confederation recently announced a national mobilisation for 11 June to push for progressive labour and constitutional reforms, which Bachelet promised to enact. But while the Communist Party is agitating for changes to the government’s plan, other sections of the teachers’ union leadership are campaigning for a complete rejection.
As soon as the teachers went on strike, secondary students joined the protests, organising numerous school occupations in Santiago, including at a number of the most emblematic schools – Liceo 7 in Providencia, Liceo 4 in Santiago, Darío Salas and the Instituto Nacional. According to Tomás Vergara, a spokesperson for CONES, one of the two secondary student organisations, students are in solidarity with the teachers and also are protesting the government’s refusal to follow through on education reforms it had promised.
An additional component of this new wave of protest is the increasing mobilisation of students from the private universities.
Nicolás Fernández, president of the student federation of the private University Diego Portales and spokesperson of the CONFECH (national confederation of student organisations), made the point: “Students at private universities understand that they need this social right [free public education] and you can now notice their enthusiasm to go conquer it”.
Fernández also pointed out that in the private universities, the most prominent demand is for democratisation; students increasingly are conscious of the rorts and mismanagement of funds by administrations.
University students are becoming more aware of the government’s strategy of packaging small changes in grand rhetoric about public education, while refusing to make the big changes being demanded.
At its 30 May meeting, the CONFECH decided to organise another major mobilisation for 10 June, at which students will put their demands on the table again.

Jorge Jorquera

Teachers, student movement shake things up in Chile

Chilean students are back on the streets. More than 180,000 marched on 16 April under the slogan “Ni corruptos ni empresarios, que Chile decida su educación” (Neither corrupt politicians nor business, Chileans must decide their education).
The first major education march of the year called on students, teachers, parents and other social organisations to mobilise for real change in, not just band aid reforms on, the country’s broken university system.
Organisers estimate that 150,000 people marched in the capital, Santiago, and 10,000 each in Concepcion and Valparaiso. Demonstrations also took place in seven other cities. Unlike earlier marches, this protest was jointly called by the umbrella university student union (CONFECH) and the national teachers’ union (Colegio de Profesores). It was also supported by secondary students, parents’ organisations, trade unions and other groups such as environmental, local resident and feminist organisations.
The march rejected the current education reform processes. Specific demands focused on genuine student and community participation in political decision making and the implementation of promised reforms, such as recently approved corporate tax reforms to fund promised free universal higher education from 2016.
Already, a range of conservatives are talking about loans, limited scholarships and the like, while Bachelet’s minister for education has mentioned the need for strong economic reform to assist with footing the bill.
Such plans would involve further attacks on working people, students and the poor as Chile’s mining boom comes to an end. Other politicians have signalled that “tough decisions” will be needed, and have pitted reforms against each other – such as increased teacher wages against more funding for early childhood education.
Amid a wave of scandals facing corrupt politicians, people were also mobilised against the Chilean political establishment. Demonstrators demanded transparency and direct involvement with the budget.
There is a crisis of legitimacy for the ruling political-business elite. Among others, president Bachelet’s son and daughter-in-law have been implicated and are currently being investigated for conflict of interest. Chilean newspaper El Mostrador reported that secondary school union leader Claudia Arévalo yelled from the protest platform: “All politicians must go!”
Student leaders said that the mass protest was the first of many this year, urging a return to 2011 when Chilean students “owned the streets”.
Valentina Saavedra, spokesperson for the CONFECH, told online newspaper diaroUchile: “We see that it is not only the educational sector who is feeling the discomfort, but also different actors of organised society. Today we saw fathers, mothers, whole families marching, workers, residents through to students, and we believe that it is essential for progress...
“We have no business backing to give us the power to make changes, we have only the expression and mass presence in the streets that can finally deliver once we are ready to mobilise together.” The movement, she said, is “not interested in a policy tailored for the bosses, nor agreements imposed from above; what we want is the real participation of society”.
The size and character of this remobilisation of the student movement in Chile, on the back of a decade of organisation and protest, may well signal the beginning of a crisis for the increasingly discredited centre left government.

Back on the streets in Chile

Higher education in Chile will be free from March 2016, funded by US$8.3billion in corporate tax increases. Recently adopted legislation also ends government subsidies to for-profit schools, stops selective entrance policies in the public system and establishes a 10-year plan to provide free education for all primary and secondary students.
The Chilean student movement has waged a 10-year battle to force these reforms. It has been the largest and most sustained political action in the country since the democratic movement of the 1980s, which eventually forced out Pinochet. But it is not over yet – the students have tasted their collective power and are demanding much more than what has been offered.
Education for who?
Chile has one of the most pro-market and class-segregated education models in the world. Since 1980, enrolment in under-resourced public schools has dropped from 80 percent to less than 40 percent. Eighty-four percent of university education and 100 percent of technical education are privatised. The system is wholly based on a voucher system.
The vast majority of students attending Chilean government schools are from the poorest sections of society. Until the current reforms, anyone could open a for-profit school with no requirements on quality whatsoever. In the tertiary sector, around 50 percent of the least wealthy students drop out of their degrees, which they have undertaken at for-profit, low-quality institutions where they are given little support and leave with huge debts.
The movement that made the difference
The most decisive period for the Chilean student movement was that of the mass struggles of 2011, sometimes called the “Chilean Winter”. Mass mobilisations, school and university occupations, an eight-month non-stop relay marathon around the national parliament building and the innovative use of social media to disseminate plans and ideas – all were used by the movement to increase participation and build popular support.
There was a strong focus on developing links with workers’ struggles and building solidarity with organisations such as the Workers’ United Centre of Chile (CUT, the largest union federation).
Largely as a result of the political pressure from the student movement, the centre-left Bachelet government won the 2013 elections and took office in March 2014. Several high profile leaders of the student movement were also elected to parliament, including some members of the Chilean Communist Party who participated in the Nueva Mayoria (New Majority) electoral alliance with Bachelet’s Socialist Party and others.
Student response
In May 2014, before the reforms had been announced, 100,000 students protested in Santiago and elsewhere around the country. Then in June, soon after the first reforms were announced, another march of around 100,000 students took place in Santiago to denounce them as inadequate and unrepresentative of the movement.
The protests had six key demands: strengthening public education; free and fully funded education for all; an end to the corporatisation of education and education for profit; democratisation of educational institutions; improvement of the working conditions of all those involved in education; and abolishing student debt.
Lorenza Soto, spokeswoman for the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students, said at a press conference: “No government or reform that does not meet all the demands of the student movement will stop us mobilising.” Soto also said that “students will determine when and why [they] mobilise … as long as ‘business’ remains in education, the fundamental problem is not being attacked”.
The student protest was quickly followed by a mass march of teachers on 25 June. They pointed out that there can be no reform of Chilean education without teachers, and demanded full participation in the reform process, job security, wage justice, decent teaching conditions and professional respect.
Secondary students resumed school occupations. At one point the mayor of Santiago was so pressured by the number of school closures that she approved two periods a week in the formal curriculum for students to discuss the reform process and the demands of the student movement. The students then agreed to end the occupations.
But when all major student unions and the teachers’ union voted against participating in the government-led consultation agenda, the secondary students resumed their occupations.
Another mass protest in August highlighted what the movement saw as attempts by the government to “negotiate” with the conservative side of parliament – the very actors who engineered the existing system and have always championed it.
Chilean online newspaper Cooperativa.cl reported comments at the time from Melissa Sepúlveda, president of the University of Chile Student Federation: “When the government talks of partial transformations, when they put forward three policies that don’t meet expectations, let alone offer solutions to the principal problems of segregation in our country … we are talking about irresponsibility …
“If education is a right, then there is no place for business in education. Any reform to the education system cannot leave happy those who have profited for years from education.”
The students’ six demands highlight deeper tensions between the government’s agenda, the neoliberal education system as it stands and the aspirations of the students and their supporters.
Lessons
Perhaps the most important achievement of the Chilean student movement to date is its success in redefining the “public” to exclude profit making and commercial or market interests. Rather, “public” is understood as the use of taxation for the creation of non-commercial institutions for collective benefit.
The students’ rejection of any reform that does not constitute a complete break with the market has pushed the whole debate to the left. In a global context of increased privatisation of education, this is a significant political development.
The Chilean students emphasise the need to return to a fully publicly funded education system. They have argued that this is a necessary precondition for social equity and quality education. But they also argue that this achievement alone would be insufficient.
The student movement, in working alongside and with other sectors in various alliances, has played a leading role in developing consciousness around the need for any reform to be based on democratisation. It realises that “public” cannot simply mean nationalisation. Instead, students and teachers have argued for community control rather than bureaucratic-government administration.
There is a conviction that any meaningful reform is impossible without a mobilised student and teacher movement. Students and significant sections of the population have realised in practice that the degree of social mobilisation, in direct conflict with the political establishment, determines the extent to which government policy can be changed.
The less mobilised the student movement and community, the more likely that governments will shape policy to re-weave education with the interest of business, while using the language of reform and progress. As one banner at the mass rally in August 2014 read: “The reform won’t change the education of the market – ourselves organised, we will change education.”
Where to now?
The Chilean student movement to date has been powerful and wields significant political influence. These young people reflect a broader unwillingness to accept the continuing claims that neoliberal Chile is working for everybody. They are not only worried for themselves and their futures but also are deeply affronted by Chile’s economic and social inequality, and they understand and can critique the system that perpetuates it.
However, the challenges facing the students also demonstrate the limitations of single-issue movements when they are restrained in their ability to link up with other forward-moving working class and popular movements. While the students have forged alliances with the labour movement and various other struggles, these have been limited by the lack of united leadership and organisation in the broader anti-neoliberal movement in Chile.
The next period will be important. To what extent can the movement remain united and focused around political demands that seek much more than what the government is currently offering?
President Bachelet, in a May 2014 article in the Economist, was at pains to allay right wing fears that her government was falling prey to populism. “We’re still committed to public-private partnerships and the free market, we’re still open to foreign investment and free-trade agreements”, she wrote. “None of that is going to change.”
Even with the most sustained mass struggle, every victory is tenuous and partial. The future remains unclear, but to date the strength of the Chilean student movement has been its focus on mass mobilisations. The current leaders have stated their commitment to continuing to organise and protest around the demand for a community-centred public system for the people, by the people, that puts education at the heart of a new, socially just Chile.

Campaign to save Vic Uni jobs kicks off at big meeting

Teachers, student movement shake things up in Chile

Back on the streets in Chile

Insurgent students in Chile

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us