In 2023, the NTEU branch at Melbourne University undertook the longest strike action at a university since the union was formed in 1993. Activists, inspired by the long-haul strikes in the US and some significant wins at the branch in the past few years, decided on an ambitious campaign based around ambitious claims.
And yet, our branch has been left with an enterprise agreement (EA) that sends our rights backwards in key areas, and is far from the ambitious claims we set out to achieve. Understanding the promise and the limitations of the campaign, and particularly the role of union officials in dampening members’ aspirations, is important for future organising efforts.
The positives
The Melbourne University branch has seen some welcome developments over the past few years, based mainly around an attitude of more seriously organising members to fight for our rights. The wage theft campaign was an activist campaign, which also used the EA and the legal avenues provided by a strong clause around casual pay, and won the most back-pay for casuals out of any campus in Australia—$40 million and counting.
The branch also won a thumping victory against the university’s attempt to do away with one of our annual pay rises in 2021, following huge faculty meetings organised by the union. The union’s “vote no” campaign won more than double the number of votes as there are union members on campus.
Going into this EA round, we decided to improve on the usual process in order to increase rank-and-file involvement. Member working groups (based around work type such as casuals, professional staff, gender equity) met to discuss the core concerns of their areas and develop claims based on those. Six priority areas resulted: 
- Secure work—our key demand was for 80 percent of staff to have ongoing jobs, compared to less than 50 percent currently - Workload relief—filling all vacant positions, and a guaranteed 40 percent research fraction for all academic staff - Limits on restructures—no more than one for the life of this EA or no forced redundancies - Enforceable work from home rights - A pay increase of more than inflation - Gender equity—especially, dramatically improved parental leave
The branch also set up a strike committee. In the past, such groups had been called campaign committees, the idea being that this time we were making industrial action the core focus of the campaign. We began 2023 with a zoom link-up with activists from the incredible University of California strikes.
Our first four-hour strike resulted in around 1,500 staff and students joining a march to Trades Hall on 5 May—an indication of the widespread disgust and mistrust of senior management among staff. In the past ten years, the university has posted record profits and hoarded billions in assets while habitually sacking hundreds of staff. Workloads have increased and casualisation became entrenched.
The mood among staff at the university has been bitter for a long time, so the argument that we needed serious, sustained industrial action to change things for the better won an easy audience. 
Solid organising in the arts faculty, mostly among the casualised sessional tutors and lecturers, built towards a marking ban at the end of first semester. But two weeks before that was to begin, we got the first warning that the NTEU leaders were unhappy with our ambition. They announced that the union was not prepared to support the ban, as they were too scared that the university might take us to the Fair Work Commission.
They were particularly scared of section 242 of the Fair Work Act, and an unfavourable decision by the Commission in 2013 around a marking ban. This is an extremely repressive legal tool, but the fact that the union was unwilling to support industrial action that had the potential to affect students says a lot about the industrial strategy of the NTEU leaders. 
We will never be in a position to properly improve working conditions in the higher education sector unless we challenge that law. If the union leaders refuse to back action, we must be prepared to defy them, too. Unfortunately, this was the first time that many branch activists had experienced such a betrayal from the leaders, and we weren’t in a position at that stage to defy them. But it should have been a lesson better learned.
Two weeks on strike
The leadership’s refusal to support the marking ban threw the campaign into a bit of a quandary. Months were spent arguing about what sort of industrial action could be supported by the union leaders and effective enough to win ambitious claims. During this time, activists in Fightback, a rank-and-file group, proposed a one-day strike around the University Council meeting on 20 June, arguing that we couldn’t let the campaign languish without any action, even if a one-day strike was short of what we knew would be needed to win.
A plucky band of 300 members gave the vice-chancellor an eyeful during the council meeting. The strike also saw the emergence of members in student services as a backbone of our campaign. Members who previously had done little activity with the union picketed their workplace in the morning. They convinced enough of their workmates to join the picket (if they were union members) or even to join the union in order to strike, that we shut down the in-person student information centre for the first time ever. 
Unfortunately, because some activists were dismissive of the strike, it was not well built in areas outside of student services and the library. But the student services response showed the branch a way forward—take any action seriously, involve members in building and organising that action, and more members will get a sense of their power. It was a model we could have used in other, less organised sections of the branch
It was in this situation that the bargaining team proposed the first step towards undercutting our ambitious claims, in a “heads of agreement”. It was the first major debate in the campaign. Our argument was that we should not water down our claims before we had even tried to fight for them. It was a signal to the bosses that we were heading down the usual NTEU path—asking less so that we don’t have to fight for more. It was something of a positive that we managed to force the debate into the open.
With semester two approaching, the campaign had to decide on action, but was still going around in circles. The arts activists cut through with a vote in a faculty members’ meeting for a week-long strike in week six. Fantastic! While many activists (including Fightback) had argued for sustained, indeed open-ended, strikes from May, there was still some uncertainty about how other union members would respond to a call for a week-long strike. 
Activists from Fightback argued that the week-long strike should be made branch-wide—that such an action in arts alone would not have the same impact and risked being isolated and possibly open to retaliation. We argued that the strike and branch committees should support an all-branch week-long strike at the members’ meeting called to decide the question.
Unfortunately, many of the arts activists and the branch leadership insisted that only local areas (faculties, schools or non-academic divisions) could vote to join the week-long strike. The vote was narrowly won by the branch leadership, with around ten votes’ difference in a meeting of hundreds of members. Having lost the vote, we were still determined to try to ensure that the arts strike was not isolated. 
Fightback members in the library and student services called meetings and organised around supporting week-long strikes in those areas. Members in those areas correctly saw that such a piecemeal strike was less effective; some who had voted for a week-long all-branch strike, voted against local area week-long strikes. But others agreed that arts should not be left to go it alone, and the votes in those areas won out, as did votes in the Law School and one of the schools at the Victorian College of the Arts.
Once the votes were up, we had a short amount of time to organise a week-long strike program for each area! We organised pickets each morning at our buildings to speak to students and other workmates about the importance of the strike. We joined other areas’ in teach-ins and organised rallies at the areas we could, in order to bring members on strike from different areas together as much as possible. 
The students’ strike support tent in the centre of campus became a welcome rest hub and also a space where we held meetings on the radical history of Melbourne University, on explaining our log of claims, and on fighting repressive industrial relations laws. The members who participated in that strike, although losing a whole weeks’ pay, felt galvanised and united—we had stood together for the kind of higher education system we believed in. 
Student services and the library held a joint organising meeting on the last day of the strike. That meeting was one of the most inspiring things I have participated in during fifteen years of union activism! Listening to the conclusions drawn from colleagues who had only recently got active and felt their own nascent power as workers was something of a glimpse of those moments in history when that happens on a mass scale.
Going back to work felt a bit odd. We held our breath for a few days with no word from senior management or our bargaining team. And then, the university finally responded. After a year of refusing to even discuss our secure work target, they relented by responding to our 80 percent secure work target with an offer of 75 percent. Although there were plenty of loopholes, it was the first time any such ratio had been offered in higher education. At the members’ meeting following, members drew the conclusion that our strike had worked.
But still the question of what sort of effective industrial action we could take in the limits imposed by the union persisted. Some of the arts activists proposed an indefinite strike, limited to the arts faculty, but that was narrowly defeated. Such an action would have been even more isolating than the week-long. But there was little acknowledgement that it was a moot point anyway—we had been told that the union leaders would not notify for an indefinite strike. And so a second week-long strike was born.
Just before a members’ meeting was to vote on the second week-long strike, the bargaining team convinced the branch committee to defer the vote for a week, arguing that it jeopardised movement at the bargaining table. We knew that was a prelude to calling the strike off altogether. At the members’ meeting, against the recommendation of the branch committee, we moved a procedural motion to put the strike vote, which was supported by a large majority of members. A motion that the strike only go ahead if more than 60 percent of the meeting endorsed it was then voted down—members were in a bolshie mood! More than 60 percent of members in the meeting then voted for an all-branch, week-long strike.
We set about organising the next strike. We argued for all-in pickets at the major entrances to the campus with local areas picketing their own buildings if they chose. These pickets became a focal point for the strike and galvanised members who participated—especially when the head of the university’s bargaining team appeared to attempt to drive through the picket line on his motorbike. 
Rallies at student services and the VCA were highlights of the week, too. The testimony from rank-and-file members, many of whom had never given public speeches before, was compelling and even eye-opening, as they detailed the personal cost of working in a system that is broken. The repeated renditions of “Solidarity forever” at the pub at the end of the week was a beautiful way to finish. There was again movement at the table, with some of the more blatant loopholes in the secure work target being closed.
But the campaign now faced a crossroad. The union’s state secretary moved in, and under the guise of “getting the decision-makers at the table” imposed a new order on bargaining. Throughout the campaign, we struggled with a lack of timely, regular and written bargaining reports, and no bargaining chart. This was bad enough, but the lack of accessible, easy-to-read guides on the importance of our claims and how they were worded also meant that when the union leaders insisted on watering down the claims (“renegotiating” them), members were not as informed as they ought to have been.
Momentum is key to any industrial campaign. And powerful forces within both management and the union hierarchy were now moving to suck momentum out of our dispute. In the wash-up of the second week-long strike, the bargaining team agreed (or proposed—we’re not quite sure) to a “ceasefire”—in which they engaged in negotiations while imposing a ban on both industrial action and even communications to members about what was happening. They also presented to members a “package”—another rewrite of our claims—with little notice and threatened that negotiations would be derailed (and our strike would be in vain) if we didn’t vote for it. Members of Fightback argued for a deferral of that vote to give members time to debate the proposal, but it was narrowly defeated, and the package was approved.
Having lost two weeks of pay within a couple of months, it’s not surprising that some members were open to the suggestion that further strikes were unnecessary. State office was happy to oblige. The official union communications, backed by management, that things were progressing nicely at the table, but without detail, fed into a sense that all would be well. It was well into December that the proposed agreement, supported by the union bargaining team and management, was sent to members. Initially, the branch leaders wanted to give us just a few days to read it before voting to agree. Thankfully, that plan was rejected, and we were given until early February before the vote.
The more that we analysed the proposed agreement, the more we realised what a sell-out it was. Our lesser-paid colleagues would go backwards in terms of real wages, two of our end-of-year shutdown days were swapped for forced annual leave, work from home rights were diminished and the “pay for all hours worked” clause, which had been the foundation for the wage theft campaign, had been deleted.
There were some improvements, of course. The university proposed a better parental leave clause, we got gender affirmation leave (including for casuals) and a minimum 20 percent research clause for academics, which had not been written into the Melbourne University EA before. The tragedy is that these partial victories were accepted when we could have won much more if we had been clearer on our industrial strategy and willing to take on the union’s refusal to back effective action.
We decided to run a campaign to vote “No”. The proposal was an insult to members—dramatically diminishing our rights in our supposed “priority” concerns. To agree to such a proposal after such lengthy industrial action, particularly when there was plenty of potential left in our campaign, would undermine the organising that we had done throughout the year and make it more difficult in the future. Why should members trust that we should engage in lengthy (especially open-ended) strikes for ambitious claims if we were so willing to jettison such claims this time around.
We faced serious opposition from the branch leaders in organising the campaign. The branch committee refused to allow the circulation of vote “No” material, so we had only our own networks to distribute critical information. Despite this, at the largest members’ meeting ever, with more than 600 members’ attending, we won a “No” vote of 27 percent, the highest “No” vote in the country. That showed a significant minority of the active branch membership agreed that we should have continued to demand more.
Lessons to learn
Besides the historic defeat of the union leaders’ Jobs Protection Framework, the NTEU has a lengthy track record of successfully curtailing members’ interest for a proper fight for our working conditions. This campaign was no exception.
Unfortunately, this is a lesson that seems to have been ignored by some branch activists. A <a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/australia-universities-open-ended-strikes">sum-up of the campaign</a> in<a href="https://jacobin.com/2024/03/australia-universities-open-ended-strikes"> </a>Jacobin
magazine doesn’t once criticise the union leaders. Calling for open-ended strikes and recognising that solid rank-and-file organising will be necessary to get there is a good starting point.
But our union leaders said explicitly that they will not support such strikes, and in fact were the only reason that the arts marking ban did not happen. If we don’t confront their power over our campaigns, we’re kidding ourselves. The authors of the Jacobin
article rightly praise the University of California Santa Cruz vote “No” campaign, seeing that it played an important role in solidifying a left on that campus. Yet there’s not a word in support of the vote “No” campaign at their own campus.
There were other weaknesses in the campaign. It lacked regular spaces for members at different levels (branch, local, faculty, etc.) to get together to debate campaign strategy and tactics. These spaces need to be seen as just as important in rank-and-file organising as spreadsheets showing the outcome of one-on-one conversations. There were also no timely, regular, detailed communications from the bargaining table, and no accessible explainers of the original claims. These limitations made it easier for the union leaders and bargaining team to water down solidly worded claims with little scrutiny.
Despite the limitations, the campaign at Melbourne University was one that all members who participated should be proud. Our weeks of strike built our branch to the largest in the country. Hundreds of members gained experience in union organising for the first time. We had large and engaged strike committees, and plenty of debates that will mean these union members have more experience to judge debates in the future.

Katie Wood

Lessons from the Melbourne Uni enterprise agreement campaign

Members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at the University of Melbourne are embarking this week on historic strike action. Ten months into our campaign for a new workplace agreement, management has refused to budge on our major demands. After a four-hour stoppage in May and a 24-hour stoppage in June, we are intensifying pressure in second semester with a weeklong strike. This will be the longest large-scale strike action at an Australian university campus for a decade or more. 
The escalation was sparked by members in the arts faculty, who voted to strike for seven days starting today. Their decision was only possible after years of dedicated work by activists that made arts the best-unionised area at the University. After the arts vote, a branch-wide meeting resolved to prepare for a half-day all-member strike. Members outside of arts jumped on the opportunity to build support for more extended action in their own workplaces. 
A flurry of organising across departments in recent weeks culminated in a series of successful votes to join the weeklong action. Union members in student services, libraries and scholarly services, the law faculty and the VCA’s schools of art and stagecraft will now join arts on strike for the full week. These votes showed that there is appetite across the branch for sustained strikes to win our demands. Deep seated resentment towards management after years of cuts mean that many members are prepared to vote for action above and beyond what’s been done in previous bargaining rounds. 
After the all-in action today, the weeklong strike will be limited to those areas that held votes for extended action. This will not be an all-member stoppage across the entire branch, despite the best efforts of militants to push for an all-out strike. But it will draw strength from the most organised and active work areas to seriously impact different levels of the university’s operations. And it can lay the basis for more recruitment and organisation, potentially opening the way for more all-out actions in future. When we participate in serious strikes, members get a chance to feel our own collective strength and develop strong arguments for our workmates to join the union. This week, strikers will be leafleting and running open union events to highlight the power of united action and to encourage engagement among all NTEU members.
This strike is a serious disruption to business as usual at Melbourne Uni—and also in the NTEU. It’s been quite some time since we’ve seen the union branch put forward an ambitious log of claims and embark on protracted strikes to push for them. The ambitious demands we put forward at the start of this bargaining round have inspired renewed levels of participation. In particular, the bold claim for a secure employment ratio—for 80 percent of all staff to be employed in ongoing roles—has inspired plenty of staff to get active in an institution in which most of us are on casual or fixed-term contracts. Claims for filling all vacant positions to address spiralling workloads, a wage rise that keeps up with inflation, and a strict limit on endless rounds of restructures have also inspired support.
The shorter work stoppages we’ve organised have been well-attended and lively, and have already forced some small concessions from management. With membership growing month-by-month, we are now the largest NTEU branch in Australia. What we win at Melbourne University—and how we win it—can have an impact across the country.
For decades, the NTEU has been stuck in a self-defeating cycle of lacklustre campaigns with modest demands that inspire little confidence in members. Our union leaders have shied away from serious industrial action, instead placing their faith in backroom negotiations to “win” small improvements around the edges. The inevitable outcome is that the union dilutes or withdraws its own demands, while members are left feeling disempowered and cynical about the bargaining process. So past NTEU campaigns have generally reinforced our weakness and lowered expectations about what our branches can achieve, instead of building union power.
The situation at Melbourne University today offers a glimpse of a different way forward. We’ve seen the potential for strong claims to inspire active participation from our workmates. It will be up to militant activists in the branch to resist a slide towards concessions in the coming weeks. This strike is the result of hard work from rank-and-file members. Let’s use it to expand our numbers, raise our own confidence and push beyond what’s been done before.

Ruby Healer

What’s at stake in the strike at Melbourne University

Construction is not the only industry in which there is a storm over COVID measures.
Universities are some of the country’s largest employers. When students are included, campuses bring together tens of thousands of people to work and study in close proximity. Staff who teach, or those in public-facing professional roles such as in libraries or information services, will come into close contact with hundreds if not thousands of students over the course of a week or semester. So tertiary education should be recognised as a high-risk industry.
Yet university bosses have been dragging their feet on implementing the full range of measures that reduce the spread of the virus. For the safety of our families, our colleagues and our students, we need to demand more and better of our employers. Our workplaces must be adequately ventilated and cleaned, and workers, unions and health and safety representatives need to be involved in decision-making about COVID safety.
Recent mass exposure incidents at universities that are supposedly locked down demonstrates the negligence of our bosses. Melbourne is in the midst of a surge in COVID cases. We are meant to be under strict a lockdown, which includes a rule that only essential work and study should be undertaken face to face. Yet at RMIT University, more than 400 people have been exposed at just one tier one site (in a single building) alone.
Between 8 and 28 September, there were five RMIT exposure sites. Staff, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and students initially were not told how many people had been exposed. 
Similar concerns have arisen at the University of Melbourne. It took the university more than a week to list the buildings that were part of a spate of exposures, rather than just mention that exposures had occurred at “several buildings”.
The lack of precise information is troubling because only those who remember to check-in are told about the exposure. Most university exposure sites are not even listed on the Department of Health and Human Services website. Yet RMIT management had to admit that the mass exposure on that campus involved many people breaching safety procedures.
This lack of information is an appalling act of negligence. How can staff and students make an informed decision about whether they can or should go onto campus if they don’t know the level of risk? Especially when there seems to be such a dismissive attitude to lockdown restrictions.
Every university has had a COVID safety plan for many months now. The current outbreak in Melbourne has not come as a surprise. Yet even when we have been promised ventilation audits of buildings, there have been no details about who will receive the findings and how any issues will be addressed. There is absolutely no excuse for this foot-dragging, which is putting the health and lives of staff, students and their families at risk.
Even with the number of exposures on supposedly locked-down campuses increasing, many universities are planning to send staff and students back onto campus as soon as the reckless state governments’ “roadmaps” allow—at this stage on 5 November in Victoria, while schools will reopen on 5 October in NSW and in stages during October in the ACT.
That is just weeks away. The NSW and Victorian “roadmaps” are based on the premise that cases (and, therefore, hospitalisations and deaths) will increase dramatically after those dates. Since the NSW and Victorian governments are now going to let the virus rip, the NTEU needs to be at the forefront of campaigning for each and every safety measure we can win.
Such measures include (but are not limited to):
<ul>
<li>An immediate audit of every campus building for ventilation and filtration. The results of those audits and plans for ongoing monitoring should be shared with all health and safety reps and the union branch, if not all staff. No building should be reopened to staff or students unless it can be shown that a ventilation rate of ten litres per second per person can be achieved in line with Victorian WorkSafe<a href="https://www.worksafe.vic.gov.au/managing-covid-19-risks-office-environment"> guidance</a>; </li>
<li>Transparency on cleaning contracts and plans for regular cleaning of all buildings, including those apparently “unoccupied” due to work-from-home arrangements;</li>
<li>Detailed information on exposure sites, including (where possible) the location and numbers of people exposed;</li>
<li>Providing health and safety reps with all COVID safety plans and policies relevant or specific to their direct working group;</li>
<li>Ongoing negotiations with both the union branch and health and safety reps about the implementation of COVID safety plans, which should include providing the union with all relevant information.</li>
</ul>
These words fill me with dread: without immediate and strong measures to protect staff and students it is only a matter of time before we see the first cases of transmission occurring on our campuses. We know <a href="https://universitybusiness.com/covid-19-protests-outbreaks-and-deaths-fuel-chaotic-restart-for-colleges/">what comes next</a>.
Another important health and safety measure will be a vaccine mandate. The national leadership of the NTEU has released <a href="https://www.nteu.org.au/article/NTEU-Statement-on-COVID-safe-workplaces-22992">a statement</a> that supports mandates for the industry, but with caveats that may be taken as opposition to mandates in many circumstances.
Obviously, vaccine mandates must be implemented alongside measures to make access to vaccinations as easy as possible and must be accompanied by information campaigns. But there is<a href="https://www.courant.com/coronavirus/hc-news-coronavirus-connecticut-colleges-covid-cases-20210926-nynddromb5azbdvrher7cet2ei-story.html"> mounting evidence</a> that, done the right way, mandates can drive up vaccination rates, which will decrease the spread and reduce the severity of the disease among those who still get infected.
Governments are pushing for a reckless return to face-to-face teaching. If we don’t have a vaccine mandate (to reiterate, alongside other measures) we deny university staff and students the right to undertake their work or studies in the safest possible environment. 
The right not to get sick and die from unsafe working conditions has been one of the prime motivators building the trade union movement from its inception. It’s time we as unionists recognised the looming threat of COVID and organised seriously to defend ourselves from the negligence of our employers and the government.

The struggle over COVID safety in universities

As a wave of austerity washes across the university sector, with jobs and courses being cut across the country, university managers have become masters of deflecting righteous anger by playing the victim.
At UTS, the former Dean of Science Diane Jolley is in court <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2021/jun/16/uts-professor-allegedly-sent-herself-threatening-letters-with-one-containing-her-underwear">facing charges</a> that she orchestrated a campaign of intimidation—against herself. While pushing to cut the traditional Chinese medicine course, Jolley claimed that she received death threats, an anonymous letter including her own underwear, and in-person abuse from “someone in the Asian community”. It seems that she was trying to make cutting a course seem like the only way to stand up to bullying. UTS spent more than $127,000 in security measures to protect her from the harassment. Now she's defending herself against 20 charges, including "sending an article to create a false belief of danger".
The University of Sydney’s Dean of Arts, Annamarie Jagose, takes a different tack, reflecting her academic training. Her office was recently targeted by student protesters opposing cuts to the university’s School of Literature, Art and Media. Jagose is an expert in feminist and queer theory; according to her staff profile, her most recent monograph, Orgasmology, “takes orgasm as its scholarly object in order to think queerly about questions of politics and pleasure; practice and subjectivity; agency and ethics”. Now Jagose is investigating the misogyny and racism inherent in protests against cuts to the faculty she manages. After students applied a classic campus chant—"Annamarie, get out, we know what you’re all about/Cuts, job losses, money for the bosses”—she sent out a <a href="https://fass-comms.sydney.edu.au/pub/pubType/EO/pubID/zzzz60c80364ee1b9374/?aid=4b28787ede036aab" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">faculty-wide newsletter</a> analysing the “interpellative moment”. The chant, she discovered, was both “insinuatingly gendered” and probably reflected that protesters were disturbed by the “relative exoticism” of her surname. “Know my name!” she concluded, providing a link to a National Gallery exhibition devoted to “challenging stereotypes and highlighting the stories and achievements of all women artists”.
Senior managers playing the victim now has the added backing of a <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/0305764X.2021.1897524?journalCode=ccje20" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">peer-reviewed article</a>. The Dean of Education at the University of British Columbia and a lecturer at La Trobe co-authored a paper in the Cambridge Journal of Education, later basis of a <a href="https://www.smh.com.au/business/workplace/smart-bullies-emerge-in-universities-in-new-workplace-trend-20210418-p57k57.html" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">report</a> in the Sydney Morning Herald, investigating the rising tide of “incivility” that university managers were experiencing from their employees. As the Herald journalist Anna Patty explained, universities were experiencing "rising trend in insubordination that involves staff bullying their superiors". The extensive and balanced research leading to this report involved interviewing 20 deans across eight Australian universities, who whinged about "disrespect and insubordination". A useful <a href="http://honisoit.com/2021/04/uncivil-discourse/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">response</a> detailing the article's weaknesses was written by Casualised, Unemployed, &amp; Precarious Uni Workers.
Disrespect and insubordination have an important role to play in opposing cruel and damaging cuts. We know that the people who are actually suffering in our sector at the moment are the tens of thousands of people who have already lost their livelihoods, or who will soon, and the hundreds of thousands more who are dealing with ruthless and incompetent managers. Don’t let their crocodile tears stop us from demanding better from them.

Course-cutting uni managers say they're experiencing 'interpellative' abuse

In the middle of unprecedented management and government attacks on university workers, National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) officials have declared war on rank and file unionists they disagree with.
There has been an outraged response across the union and beyond. At least 626 people, including 430 members of the NTEU, have signed the<a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfaFmLOmDYajnUrTAnVhfG6sWr2CZpD9PGdxnh3Mf3hRiGIbA/viewform?fbclid=IwAR3iqaVMLsj2LAJjd2MrweUe215aZSpkAJhS1kpJjOeyG7yYivoa-eFFSSk"> </a><a href="https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfaFmLOmDYajnUrTAnVhfG6sWr2CZpD9PGdxnh3Mf3hRiGIbA/viewform?fbclid=IwAR3iqaVMLsj2LAJjd2MrweUe215aZSpkAJhS1kpJjOeyG7yYivoa-eFFSSk">protest letter</a> drawn up by<a href="https://nteufightback.site/get-involved"> </a><a href="https://nteufightback.site/get-involved">NTEU Fightback</a> calling for the withdrawal of a precedent-setting motion that would gag unionists at Murdoch University. If you’re a unionist, please sign it. 
Thousands of university workers have lost their jobs during the COVID-19 crisis, both because the federal government has refused to provide the same employment subsidies to universities as they did to the private sector, and because vice chancellors have used the opportunity to restructure employment and cut pay and conditions. 
Early in the crisis, the national leadership of the NTEU, in a “Jobs Protection Framework”, shamefully offered wage and conditions reductions to the university bosses, in return for a role in implementing them. In the face of a massive revolt by union members and rejection by some vice chancellors, the framework was dropped.
The rank and file organising centre NTEU Fightback played a crucial role in building opposition to the framework, by providing and distributing detailed arguments against it and formulating an alternative approach to the current crisis. Fightback emphasises the importance of resisting all attacks on university workers now, rather than offering concessions, building membership self-confidence and combativity, so that sustained strike action can be a feature of the campaign over enterprise agreements which expire at key universities in the middle of next year.
But union officials have persisted with their concessionary approach at individual universities. And they hate the fact that there are members speaking out against it.
These are the circumstances in which Murdoch University branch and Western Australian NTEU division officials are attempting to gag activists who are critical of the union’s approach. Local and divisional officials put together a<a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/production-gator-v1-0-6/456/335456/9fFSO2bi/c161857c9be74a7c9c2b4b3b5279692e?fileName=Text%20of%20proposed%20Murdoch%20University%20NTEU%20branch%20%E2%80%9Cprotocols%E2%80%9D.pdf"> </a><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/production-gator-v1-0-6/456/335456/9fFSO2bi/c161857c9be74a7c9c2b4b3b5279692e?fileName=Text%20of%20proposed%20Murdoch%20University%20NTEU%20branch%20%E2%80%9Cprotocols%E2%80%9D.pdf">motion</a> for the Murdoch NTEU Branch Committee meeting on Monday 9 November, seeking to ban union members from being able to “advocate amongst the membership positions at variance with Union decisions”, or to participate in any public discussion of debates within the union. The motion would allow the Branch Committee to sack delegates who don’t adhere to this policy.
The Murdoch Branch leadership, which failed to organise serious resistance to a massive reduction in conditions in 2018, has taken aim at anyone who might voice criticism of union policy in general and two members of NTEU Fightback in particular. Both are very effective delegates. One is a member of the Branch Committee and a thorn in the side of its old guard. The other initiated and has led the network of casual workers at Murdoch. They have been demonstrating in practice how one of the union’s weakest and most demoralised branches can be rebuilt.
Earlier this year, Murdoch management balloted staff to vary their agreement and take a significant pay cut. The casual Fightback member was instrumental in carrying an argument among casuals to reject the bribe offered by the university to casual and low paid staff in an effort to secure support for the proposed pay cut. She did this while maintaining her criticisms of the union’s overall strategy. The campaign was successful with casual staff part of the 73 percent of total votes cast against the deal. 
The officials were afraid to take their motion to a general meeting of members. Still afraid of their own members, they are now taking the even more undemocratic step of putting it to an email vote of Branch Committee members, because the in-person Branch Committee meeting they put it to was inquorate.
Under this bureaucratic manoeuvre, members of the Branch Committee who have not participated in or even heard the debate, and some who have long been inactive, will be deciding whether or not to gag members they disagree with.
The motion restricting democracy would have stopped Jack Mundey in his tracks. Earlier this year, unionists around Australia celebrated the life of Jack Mundey, one of the leaders of the New South Wales Builders Labourers’ Federation in the early 1970s. The BLF in this period was famous for its<a href="https://facebook.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=696ff0032fed15a96d2a3516f&amp;id=6769a396c3&amp;e=546dff7a6b"> </a><a href="https://facebook.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=696ff0032fed15a96d2a3516f&amp;id=6769a396c3&amp;e=546dff7a6b">Green Bans</a>: after thorough debate at every level of the union, labourers imposed work bans to preserve green space and working class housing, to defend gay rights and women’s rights, and to support anti-racist and anti-war struggles.
Of course, Mundey’s<a href="https://facebook.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=696ff0032fed15a96d2a3516f&amp;id=fcc08e312e&amp;e=546dff7a6b"> </a><a href="https://facebook.us19.list-manage.com/track/click?u=696ff0032fed15a96d2a3516f&amp;id=fcc08e312e&amp;e=546dff7a6b">rise to the leadership</a> of the BLF was not smooth. For years, Mundey and his rank and file team put out a newsletter called The Hoist, which promoted a serious industrial strategy as well as democracy and progressive policies in the union. Mundey’s team used the left press, including the Communist Party newspaper Tribune, to discuss their project and to recruit members to their rank and file group.
None of this would have been possible if they had abided by a ban on “advocating amongst the membership positions at variance with Union decisions”, or a ban on participating in debates in public forums, such as Tribune, about the direction of the union. The fact is that rank and file groups, reform groups, caucuses, and debates in public forums—including rank and file newsletters and left-wing media—have an important place in the history of virtually all unions.
NTEU officials, not only at Murdoch and in Western Australia but also nationally, are adopting the<a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/sda-leadership-lashes-out"> </a><a href="https://redflag.org.au/article/sda-leadership-lashes-out">approach</a> of the Shop, Distributive and Allied union (SDA), among the least democratic and most right wing in the country. The recent National Council of the NTEU adopted motions designed to intimidate critics by condemning “division” (their code for criticism of the leadership’s policies) and condemning “bullying” (their code for criticism of the leadership’s policies) within the union. These motions were supported by arguments that NTEU Fightback was undermining solidarity and potentially bringing the union into disrepute.
The Council also rejected a motion reinstating the practice of allowing delegates to know who the members in their workplaces are. This information, which even the SDA gives its delegates, was denied to NTEU delegates in the course of the debate about the Jobs Protection Framework. For the NTEU’s leadership, avoiding potential criticism came before building an effective union.
NTEU Fightback members of the Council had a different approach. They moved the motion about membership lists for delegates. Watered down by the officials, their motion committing the union to demanding effective paths to continuing jobs for casuals was carried. Their proposal that the union replace its strategy of pre-emptive surrender on job cuts, by offering concessions to university managements, with a<a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/production-gator-v1-0-6/456/335456/9fFSO2bi/a7e85803fa694e5a9e32ecf544e8babb?fileName=fighting%20back.pdf"> </a><a href="https://storage.googleapis.com/production-gator-v1-0-6/456/335456/9fFSO2bi/a7e85803fa694e5a9e32ecf544e8babb?fileName=fighting%20back.pdf">fighting approach</a> was defeated. They supported a motion to devote more resources to organising casuals, which was also voted down.
Union activists committed to building the NTEU and fighting their employers’ offensive know that their success depends on resisting their own officials’ attacks on union democracy too.

Rick Kuhn

Resisting the assault on union democracy in the NTEU

Black communism in the Great Depression

Bosses at Melbourne University, one of the wealthiest institutions in Australia, have tried to steal a week’s wages from its employees and worsen redundancy conditions, only to be defeated by an incredible burst of worker organising. In results released late Thursday morning, management announced that of 8,069 staff who voted, an extraordinary 5,190 – 64% – voted No.
This is an extremely significant result. It sends a message to higher education workers at La Trobe, Monash, ANU, Wollongong, UWA and elsewhere that it is possible to defeat employer-sponsored attacks on wages and conditions. Management at the University of Melbourne wanted to reverse a recent 2.2% pay rise, and to introduce new, less generous provisions for “voluntary” redundancies.
The way the victory was won is at least as significant as the result itself. In the past ten days, more than 1,700 workers across Melbourne University attended 20 meetings in their local work areas to discuss management’s attack and the union’s response. Management at one of the most wealthy and powerful institutions in the country was defeated by systematic worker organisation.
This kind of organising drive has no parallel in recent years either at Melbourne University or in higher education more broadly. It’s a welcome shift from the dominant approach of unions in Australia, and the national leadership of the NTEU in particular, who have expressed a deep pessimism about the ability to organise workers in the workplace in order to resist – and used that pessimistic outlook as a justification for signing terrible, wage-cutting deals with management at many campuses.
The fantastic burst of organising at the University of Melbourne is exactly the antidote required. One example among many: in Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, 45 people attended the first union meeting in living memory in the faculty, with 76 Zooming in last week for a second meeting. 
The meeting showed very clearly why it’s so important that union organising provides a platform for workers to engage in such discussions, not least in a time of social isolation. The meeting was open to both union members and non-members, because all staff can vote in the variation ballot. 
One staff member raised that they thought that a small wage cut, or a similar concession such as a compulsory cut in work-time fractions, would be acceptable. This is a widespread opinion – unsurprisingly, given that both the University and the national leadership of the NTEU have been arguing that this is the best way to save the jobs of colleagues. But it was roundly rebutted by numerous other staff members and a healthy discussion ensued. 
Workers discussing common issues with their trusted fellow workers should be the foundation of trade unionism. But many unions have generally avoided such basic organising work. In fact, for many years, <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7224">from the “Accord” of the 1980s onwards</a>, the deliberate and rigorously enforced policy of the top leadership of the union movement was explicitly to not engage in this sort of on-the-job organising. 
The wage-cutting, concessionary approach of the NTEU’s national leadership follows this model. Their “National Jobs Protection Framework” opened the door to wage cuts of 15% , as well as serious attacks on provisions like the clauses governing consultation and major change, which are often used to campaign against job-cutting restructures. Attempts to impose the “Framework” at a national scale <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7199">imploded</a> a country-wide <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7149">rank and file rebellion</a> within the union, but the same concessionary approach, and the same “model” clauses, are being <a href="https://redflag.org.au/node/7223">pushed hard by the NTEU</a> at several campuses.
Indeed, in her response to the ballot result, the National President of the NTEU, Alison Barnes, sought to foist the Framework back on the Melbourne University branch, pleading with management: “We have negotiated a framework which allows for temporary pay reductions to save jobs, provided vice chancellors are transparent about their finances and open to co-operative negotiation.” 
But the non-union ballot at Melbourne University showed clearly the dangers of such an approach. The Framework sowed confusion amongst union members who questioned what difference there was between the union or the university proposing wage cuts. Melbourne University management used the space opened up by the NTEU leadership to rush to a non-union ballot.
The NTEU should abandon its zombie Framework and use the results at Melbourne to wage a national campaign to defend the wages, conditions and jobs of all university workers across the country.
The unprecedented organising in the branch against the non-union ballot was kicked off largely without the support of the state or national offices of the union, aside from the work of the existing branch organisers. It speaks volumes about the priorities of the union office that it seemed last week that more organiser resources were being put into selling an awful, union-negotiated variation at La Trobe, than into resisting an employer-sponsored attack at Melbourne. 
The only serious intervention of the national leadership into the early part of the campaign was an email by the National Secretary to all members, which chose to re-prosecute the arguments for the National Framework. This only served to confuse members and muddy the waters. Additional resources were eventually allocated. They were important in the past few days of phone banking. But this victory belongs to the branch delegates and activists who organised long and hard over the past few weeks, not to the architects of the Framework.
We can’t expect the success at Melbourne to be easily reproduced across other campuses. The corporatisation of Universities and bloating of their layers of management has created a natural constituency for a Yes vote. And the context of the union’s National Framework has made it harder to give staff confidence in the reasons for voting No. 
As we’ve already seen, the union machine is working hard to push concessions at many places, rather than oppose them. And also crucially, not every campus has a layer of activists dedicated to systematic, methodical, workplace organising, which has been a focus at Melbourne for some time, and has had a massive boost in the past couple of months with Vote No campaigning.
But win lose or draw, systematic organising and a firm stance against concessions is the way forward. The branch has a campaign committee and delegates that have shown this week they are capable of impressive feats. We know that the next few years are going to be a hard fight. But at least by signalling at the start that we are willing and able to engage in that fight we have given ourselves something to build upon. And that is where the future of the union lies, at Melbourne and far beyond.

Worker organising defeats management at Melbourne Uni

There is a rising rank-and-file rebellion in one of Australia’s major unions, the National Tertiary Education Union. It’s the most significant revolt in decades. The upheaval comes in response to the union leadership’s proposal to adopt a “framework” agreement with universities that would cut wages and conditions in exchange for a seat at the table for union officials. This makes it important to all workers whose union officials have tried to cut similar deals with the bosses, from the Australian Council of Trade Unions down. 
Scenes of spontaneous revolt against union officials’ attempts to stifle debate are galvanising new activists across the country. At RMIT University, the branch experienced its own Spartacus moment. A meeting on 15 May maxed out its Zoom capacity of 400, the largest branch meeting in memory. After a lengthy defence of the union’s strategy from an official and a much shorter criticism from NTEU Fightback activist Liam Ward, union officials tried to stop a vote with bureaucratic arguments. With the poll function unavailable and members sick of being talked at for so long, and sick of their voices being ignored by the union, they <a href="https://www.facebook.com/107770750893909/videos/2766930840216578/">suddenly began to unmute themselves to vote, declaring “I support Liam”</a> one after the other. Eight minutes of hundreds of individual members voting in this way decided the matter and sent a clear message to the union leaders present.
More than 1,300 university workers have signed a “No Cuts – No Concessions” statement and vote No pledge. The so-called National Jobs Protection Framework give universities that sign up the ability to cut wages by up to 15 percent as a trade-off for vague promises to use the cost savings to save some jobs. This will be done through variations to local enterprise agreements, which will weaken the ability of activists to fight, not least because they will be fighting against cuts that their union is helping to implement.
After a month of negotiations, union members were finally informed of the deal’s substance in mid-April. Starting with a few dozen activists, the NTEU Fightback group has now connected networks on campuses across Australia, including many where existing activists had no contact before. The local area and campus “vote No” meetings have attracted people who rarely come to union meetings and activated many who attended only passively in the past. 
Hundreds of members have been drawn to branch meetings, which have been scenes of furious discussion and debate – when it’s been allowed by the officials. Dozens of local area meetings have taken place across campuses to discuss the implications of the framework and its political implications for the sector. With the whole union apparatus against the No campaign, rank-and-file members have had to sit down with a list of names, map their campus and figure out how to win the No vote, how to shore up the waverers and how to refute the officials’ lie that cuts in wages or conditions will save jobs.
For activists in the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NTEUfightback/">NTEU Fightback group</a>, many of whom have been unionists for 10 or more years, this is a tremendous opportunity to play a role in every area of organising. A look at mass members’ meetings at three of the union’s largest branches gives a glimpse of this revolt. 
Sydney University, long considered the most activist and independent of the branches of the NTEU, kicked off the revolt against the framework with a members’ meeting on 9 April that voted 117 to two to reject the plan, which was at that stage in its infancy. The motion included a censure of the NTEU national executive. 
A second, larger, members’ meeting on 22 April carried a “no concessions/vote No” motion 145 to 45, even after the division secretary spoke to defend the framework. The scale of the opposition at the Sydney University meetings surprised everyone. It became a signal for NTEU activists across the country that there could be significant opposition to build on. 
A similar groundswell was evident at a Melbourne University members’ meeting on 1 May. Despite indications from workmates and fellow delegates that there was anger at the proposed deal, NTEU Fightback activists were unsure how widespread that feeling was. The first indication came when an amendment to the leadership motion was put to remove references to specific concessions. That amendment was carried, 69 percent voting in favour. Then a motion to allow national president Alison Barnes to address the meeting to defend the national executive’s proposal was overwhelmingly rejected. The strength of opposition was shown again when, despite being made more appealing by the amendment, the leadership motion supporting a deal was still voted down. 
The counterposed motion called for a serious campaign to protect all jobs and conditions and to vote against EA variations that diminished those. It was carried 79 percent for, 12 percent against, a crushing majority. 
Large members’ meetings at the University of New England, University of Technology Sydney, Western Sydney University and the University of New South Wales, as well as casuals’ networks at universities across the country, have now also voted against the framework. The list may grow if members at other universities succeed in their attempts to force local union branch leaders to hold genuinely democratic meetings.
<div class="column_width_image article_inline_image"><img alt="A meeting of the Victoria University branch of the NTEU votes against the proposed deal. PHOTO: Supplied" src="https://cms.redflag.org.au/sites/default/files/inline-images/GalleryView_UnitedUnion_Captionsv3.PNG" /></div>
<div class="article_inline_caption">A meeting of the Victoria University branch of the NTEU votes against the proposed deal. PHOTO: Supplied</div>
The solid majorities in these members’ meetings have come about because of the detailed groundwork undertaken by NTEU Fightback activists and others. Local area meetings, many in faculties and divisions that have not held union meetings in decades, have allowed members to analyse the framework and see the gaps and the flaws in the strategy it represents. 
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Some union leaders are parroting the Institute of Public Affairs talking point that university workers are privileged and should be ashamed to protect their wages and conditions. But the sector looks a lot like many others. Decades of federal government underfunding and corporatisation of management have resulted in unsustainable increases in workloads and stress, massive casualisation (it is estimated that more than half of university workers are on casual contracts), and constant restructures and redundancies that make the ideal of job security a joke even for those on continuing contracts. And this was all in the supposedly good times.
Thousands of members across the country can see the historic implications of the campaign. It is not just about what happens in the university sector; it is about how unions should respond in a crisis. Should unions be part of committees that oversee cuts, or should they be rebuilding union power by organising members in political and industrial campaigns to fight the cuts? What counts in a union – the posturing of the officials or the organisation of the rank and file?
Many university workers no longer believe that university managers have the same interests as them. Indeed, they believe that administrations will use any opportunity they can to screw us harder. 
Apparently, the union leadership doesn’t understand that university staff don’t trust the bosses to have their best interests at heart. They don’t understand that their members can’t afford wage cuts of hundreds of dollars a fortnight. That is why the NTEU officials are having such a hard time selling their deal.
But it is also because NTEU Fightback has tried to build on every flicker of resistance across the country. This is not just some exercise in “getting the vote out”. To convince members to vote No requires an activist orientation in word and deed. The “vote No” campaign builds strength on the ground. Members are talking through important issues such as the role of unions in society, becoming familiar with their legal rights, figuring out how to organise meetings and talk to workmates about union issues. This is the kind of invaluable training that is a necessary step if we are ever to revive union strength. Unfortunately, the potential of this kind of momentum is being ignored by the official structures of the union in favour of their pay cut deal.
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Facing unprecedented opposition from members, the NTEU leadership has resorted to undemocratic measures that would make a Stalinist blush. At meetings around the country, members have been prevented from putting motions or amendments, calling for debates or even speaking. The chat function in Zoom has been disabled and all sorts of spurious bureaucratic arguments used to stop members from doing what should be a basic right for a union member – talking about and voting on industrial strategy in their branch. 
The national leadership has instructed its paid staff to block the distribution of vote No material and told branch presidents to clamp down on dissent. The national executive uses the argument that because they and two meetings of national councillors have voted for the framework it is now official union policy and therefore must be abided by. There have even been claims that organising against this “official union policy” is akin to scabbing!
But it is bizarre and undemocratic nonsense to insist that members do not have a right to discuss and distribute vote No material when they are all meant to be voting on it shortly! How can the leadership possibly claim that it is a democratic vote when they are using their hold on the machinery of the union to suppress discussion in the lead-up to it? Genuinely democratic votes involve informed discussion and debate beforehand. These facetious arguments are simply cover for a leadership unable to win the argument in an open contest.
It is vitally important that all activists who oppose the framework should campaign to get the highest No vote possible. Despite widespread scepticism about the framework, it may well be voted up. There are plenty of branches that the union has left to become disengaged, where members feel more the weight of university and union admonitions. 
It is also important to campaign on campuses that might not be a part of the framework. While few vice-chancellors have signed up, the negotiations have given a green light to many of them to implement immediate attacks, in particular against those employed on casual or fixed-term contracts. The NTEU officials going cap in hand to the employers to offer cuts to wages and conditions has only encouraged many VCs to dispense with the framework and go after even more severe attacks. A strong No vote is a signal to both VCs and the union that members are strongly opposed to cuts to their existing wages and conditions, and that they do not think university staff should be made to pay for the crisis.
The leadership tried to use the recent National Day of Action for proper federal government funding of the sector to divert attention from their reprehensible strategy and conduct. On social media, the union account harassed members who asked questions about the framework, telling them to go to the NDA instead. On the same day as the NDA, a furore erupted in the La Trobe branch when the president refused to allow any discussion or debate at a members’ meeting. The large and vibrant campaign against the framework on that campus has now organised its own alternative branch meeting in despair at the despotism of the local branch leadership.
The vote matters. It is a debate over the soul and strategy of the union. Are these officials going to be allowed to sell the wages and conditions of members for a seat at the table? Are they going to be allowed to trample over basic democratic rights that members believe they have? While it is necessary that pressure be brought to bear on federal governments to properly fund the sector, there is a very bitter, very real, contest now taking place about the nature of the union. 
The leadership is trying to shut its eyes and pretend that there is no rank-and-file revolt going on. Whether that revolt wins the vote or not, it has the potential to be the basis for a network of members who have learned valuable lessons about how to be an activist. And they won’t forget the role of the current union leadership.
The fight back does not end with a No vote in the national ballot. But it is a crucial first step in establishing resistance to the idea that workers should pay for the crisis. And through the process of organising to reject the deal, members can feel empowered to organise locally. We need to galvanise the largest possible “No” vote precisely because it will make the union stronger for the fights to come.

Alma Torlakovic

The rank and file uprising in Australia's higher education union

Facing an unprecedented groundswell of opposition from rank-and-file members across the country, the leadership of the National Tertiary Education Union is pushing through with its plan to collaborate with university bosses to undermine decades of hard-won conditions in enterprise agreements.
In response to the spectre of collaboration, hundreds of members across the country have become more engaged in the union than they have been for years. Overwhelming majorities at mass branch meetings at Sydney, RMIT and La Trobe universities have passed motions against concessions. This was despite union leaders attempting to squash them. At Sydney, the first vote was 117 to two in favour of “no concessions”. A second meeting was called and a strong majority of the 250 members who attended reaffirmed their opposition. Unlike Sydney, La Trobe does not have a reputation as a highly engaged, independent branch. Yet after an attempt by the leadership to hold off a vote, the members held a second meeting the following day in which the “no concessions” motion was passed 71 to five. 
Significant opposition to the union leaders’ proposals was registered at members’ meetings at Monash, Flinders and UNSW, including a tied vote at Monash. More meetings are planned in the coming week. Casuals’ networks and branch committees across the country have also passed motions of opposition. The scale of the rebellion is unprecedented. 
This week, a hastily called national council “briefing” was rebadged as a “meeting of national councillors” to ram through a vote backing the national executive’s strategy of collaborating with management. The meeting approved the national executive's motion by a vote of 89 to 13. That's been touted as a vote of confidence in the strategy, but it has no standing in the union’s official rules – there was no procedure to propose motions beforehand, amendments were explicitly ruled out and procedural motions were repeatedly ignored. Before the vote, about which we had only just been informed, we were shown a professionally produced video that announced, “national councillors have voted”. The mover of the leadership’s motion proclaimed this the most important decision in the history of the union – yet the meeting of 100-odd was given 20 minutes to debate it. 
Unfortunately, the top union officials provided scant detail about the deal they are negotiating with vice-chancellors, and even less in writing. This makes it extremely difficult for national councillors and those on branch committees to understand what is going on, let alone report back to members. 
What we do know is that, during talks with managers at about half of the universities in Australia, the officials have agreed to set up national and local implementation committees. These will look at cost-saving measures, to be made through changes to existing enterprise agreements. The extent of the cost-saving measures at each university will be based on the financial impact of the health and economic crisis. 
The cost-savings are still under negotiation, but one example given in the verbal report was to allow employers to cut our hours by 10 percent and slash hourly rates by up to 10 percent, with the first $40,000 per year exempted. This would amount to a pay cut of around $180 per week for those on the median full-time wage of around $1,250 per week before tax. 
Apart from such details (or rather the lack of them), there are more fundamental issues. To the extent that sackings are due to a lack of demand – especially the sharp and surely increasing fall in international students – no amount of wage cutting will fix the problem. 
More fundamentally, there is the issue of the role a union should play. A briefing provided to national councillors boasted that there would be “a strong union role in managing the introduction of any cost-saving measures”. The idea that union representatives will be equal representatives on “implementation committees” with management to work out what cuts to make to members’ conditions and wages is collaborationist madness that will neuter members’ ability to fight. How do unionists fight against cuts when their own representatives are busy negotiating their imposition?
A union should stand first and foremost on the principle of support for decent wages and good conditions for its members. It should back and encourage its members to fight for these.
We are told that we must sacrifice to avoid alienating workers who don’t have the conditions we enjoy. But what of the tens of thousands of families and dependants who rely on the incomes of university workers, many of them on already low wages?
Despite protests from the leadership, negotiating concessions is not “fighting” and members are smart enough to see that. Thousands have recently joined the union in the hope it will fight to defend them. But, as one new member noted in a union Zoom meeting, “Having just joined the union, I was surprised to see it talking about making concessions”.
A leadership that genuinely wanted to fight would be trying to harness the energy apparent in the mobilisations against concessions, at the very least as a bargaining chip. Instead, it has signalled its willingness to surrender members’ wages conditions and employed all sorts of bureaucratic obfuscation, filibustering and undemocratic manoeuvres to shut it down. The farce of the “vote of national councillors” is just the latest example. 
We’ve had social media campaigns – selfies, hashtags, petitions. That should be just one component of a serious campaign: we’re a union, not GetUp. My workmates have many questions about what the changes to the agreement variation notification period mean, what the university is legally allowed to get away with, and what we can do. The union’s full-time officials have not provided this information or a genuine lead.
We need genuine organising meetings in every faculty, department and workplace on the stronger campuses and university-wide campaign committees on all of them. We need to provide members with the arguments and confidence to stand up for their rights, not pump out fear-mongering propaganda that could have come from the Australian Higher Education Industrial Association (the bosses club).
Far from alienating other workers, a serious campaign to defend our existing wages and conditions will show others how to fight for their own. Unfortunately, it looks like we’re going to have to wage this fight against not just the bosses and the government, but our own union leaders too.
University workers – join the “NO” campaign on your campus. <a href="https://tinyurl.com/y7wmza22">Sign up here</a>. 
For more news about the campaign see the <a href="https://www.facebook.com/NTEUfightback">Facebook page</a>.
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Katie Wood is a member of the National Tertiary Education Union national council.

University workers revolt against union concession plan

Melbourne University’s sandstone façade provides a genteel mask for a ruthless agenda to squeeze more and more out of those working there. The administration’s years-long productivity push currently appears as a number of proposed attacks on staff conditions. In the context of ongoing enterprise bargaining, we’re responding by striking on 9 May, at the same time as the Melbourne Change the Rules Rally, organised by the Victorian Trades Hall Council. 
The National Tertiary Education Union has been negotiating with management over a new enterprise agreement for a year. The conditions at stake are important. 
The university is seeking to remove academic freedom provisions from the agreement, leaving staff with no legally enforceable protections if they publish or express views that are unpalatable to the university’s corporate administrators.
Management also wants to introduce performance pay by making pay progression for certain professional staff depend on an assessment that they “exceeded” their performance requirements. 
But perhaps the most concerning proposal from management is to have two separate agreements: one that will cover academic staff and another for professional staff. Separate agreements will make joint actions such as the 9 May strike more difficult to organise, making it harder for staff to defend their conditions in the future. For a university that makes no secret of the fact that it views the main purpose of non-academic divisions as being to generate revenue, this is a disastrous proposal. 
Many important union claims also remain outstanding, including Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment guarantees, casual job security improvements and a commitment to student-staff ratios. The university has also not made a pay offer and has, so far, not given staff an annual pay rise, something that has occurred previously when negotiations have dragged on for more than 12 months. 
Melbourne University union members have seen how hardline university administrations across the country are using the rigged bargaining system to mount sweeping attacks on conditions. The response has been strong. Around 1,000 union members participated in a protected action ballot authorising strike action. Hopefully, the strike on 9 May will be the start of a serious industrial campaign to beat back the university’s attacks.

Lessons from the Melbourne Uni enterprise agreement campaign

What’s at stake in the strike at Melbourne University

The struggle over COVID safety in universities

Course-cutting uni managers say they're experiencing 'interpellative' abuse

Resisting the assault on union democracy in the NTEU

Black communism in the Great Depression

Worker organising defeats management at Melbourne Uni

The rank and file uprising in Australia's higher education union

University workers revolt against union concession plan

Melbourne Uni staff strike back against administration attack

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