Staff at the University of New South Wales walked off the job for 24 hours over workload concerns on 30 May. The strike was part of the NTEU’s campaign for a new workplace agreement. 
More than 100 workers picketed the main gates of the university’s Kensington campus. Around 100 students joined in solidarity, as well several workers and students from other universities across Sydney. 
At one point deputy vice-chancellor Merlin Crossley’s car was spotted and surrounded by workers and students chanting “Merlin Crossley get out, we know what you’re all about!” He was eventually rescued by police. 
A lunchtime march to the Chancellery building was joined by a group of construction workers who walked off the job with CFMEU flags held high. Maddie Powell, a National Union of Students campus representative, shared a message of support.
“They don’t care about the quality of education, because if they did, they wouldn’t force staff to slave away doing unpaid marking and lesson planning, they wouldn’t force you into casualised positions, and they wouldn’t attack you the way they do while we’re sinking further and further into HECS debt”, she said.
This strike was called in response to management’s refusal to meet the NTEU’s claims, including demands aimed at resisting management’s recent push to increase workloads.
Management is opposed to casual positions being converted to permanent jobs. More than half of all teaching at UNSW is done by casuals. They are paid for as few as one or two hours to prepare for lessons and are allotted 45 minutes per student per semester to mark all assignments. 
They can teach for years without accruing any sick leave or annual leave and perform hours of unpaid work each week. 
While UNSW staff are squeezed, the vice-chancellor, Ian Jacobs, is on a comfortable $1.22 million annual salary (a bit less than $25,000 a week). 
It’s clear that the administration views staff and students as mere gears and cogs in the university’s profit making machine. UNSW staff and students must build a campaign to turn the tide against the attacks.

NTEU member

UNSW staff strike against workload pressure

The new environment that has emerged since Donald Trump’s inauguration has played out in my university call centre in its own way. It has resulted in three new union members and newly identified left wing allies. 
Trump’s attacks, especially his Muslim ban executive order, shocked many and had everyone at work talking. But it was the immediate response of protesters that had the biggest impact. During breaks at work, I watched footage of the airport demonstrations in the tea room. This sparked conversations about racism, resistance and more. It brought more political people out of the woodwork, including a new workmate who goes to refugee solidarity protests and another whose parents were resistance activists in Chile.
I started more openly talking to co-workers about the union, where previously I tended to raised it with individuals privately.
Then, during the week, we discovered that we had been underpaid for an overtime shift. A few people starting saying things like, “I’m not letting this slide” and “I know my rights”. Given the generally intimidating atmosphere at my workplace, it was the most defiant I had seen people.
As a group we checked our enterprise agreement, and I jumped at the chance to talk about the importance of joining the union, particularly as our agreement is due to be renegotiated later in the year. I told everyone I was the union delegate, and a few other union members openly identified themselves for the first time. This prompted some people to talk about their experiences of unions standing up for workers.
It all came together when our union endorsed Melbourne’s anti-Trump protest rally. At the end of our shift, we made signs that said “Trump NO, refugees YES”. I talked about why it mattered that unions take a stand on political issues. I followed it up by asking everyone if they had joined yet or had any questions. Three people signed up straightaway, and a few others said they want to talk more.
Right now, as images of thousands of people standing up to the president of the United States stream across the globe daily, union activists should be talking to workmates about taking a stand in our own lives and why joining and being active in your union is a great start.

Impact of Trump election ripples through to the workplace

The higher education sector has a long-running and increasingly dire problem with casualisation. More than half of teaching across Australian universities in done by casual academics employed for a few hours a week. A majority of all academic staff are employed on casual terms.
In late February, the Victorian division of the National Tertiary and Education Union (NTEU) launched its “supercasuals”campaign at La Trobe University. Named to reflect the superpowers expected of casual workers – from living without pay for weeks on end to fitting 10 hours of marking into two hours – the campaign is also running at Monash, Swinburne and Victoria universities. It aims to improve the standing of casual workers and strengthen the union’s presence amongst this section of the workforce.
Close to 50 casual workers from a range of departments attended the meeting at La Trobe, including many who weren’t union members. Angry stories were shared. One woman explained that working at five campuses meant she needed signatures from up to seven different supervisors to submit her time sheet. Another said that the marking word allowance in her department had unilaterally been doubled, halving the time available to mark each assignment. Numerous stories emerged about casuals not being paid on time – sometimes not until the end of semester.
The union estimates that there are between 50,000 and 60,000 casual staff working at Australian universities. They can be fired with an hour’s notice. They receive no sick pay, no annual leave, no maternity leave and only half the superannuation contributions of permanent staff. But hanging over all of this is the unquantifiable lack of respect that casuals report.
The initial meeting at La Trobe was a promising start to the union’s campaign. A committee was established and quickly homed in on one grievance to tackle first – the frustrating and time-consuming time sheet process imposed by the university. Completing hard-copy time sheets can take hours of work, for which casual staff are not paid. Being made to come to work just to collect pay slips is unheard of in the tertiary sector, except at La Trobe.
The campaign is proposing that casuals claim two hours’ pay per fortnight for administrative work until management agrees to automate the system. Already, the union has recruited new members, and it is hoped an initial campaign victory can help union activists win the argument that the best place for casual workers to be is in the union and fighting, with others, for their rights.

University casuals campaign off to solid start

“If you don’t want to work on a weekend, fair enough, don’t work on a weekend. But if you do want to work on a weekend, and lots of people, particularly students, particularly young people, want to work on a weekend, you want the places to be open to provide jobs.”
– Tony Abbott, January 2015
Penalty rates are under sustained attack. The Business Council of Australia, representing some of the country’s biggest companies, has been issuing increasingly shrill demands for the rates to be cut or abolished.
Last year Fair Work Australia knocked 25 percent off the Sunday penalty rates of hundreds of thousands of hospitality workers. Right now, at the federal government’s instruction, the Productivity Commission is considering their removal from industrial awards, allowing bosses to set their own rates if they pay them at all. 
The government and much of the media have presented the payment of penalty rates as a marginal issue, relevant mostly to students and young people working the odd weekend shift. This is an ambitious mischaracterisation of reality. The deregulation of penalty rates would directly impact the income of millions of workers and have far-reaching effects on the wage structure and working hours of the entire working class.
Stripping penalty rates from awards would immediately affect 1.5 million workers whose wages and conditions are set by these minimum standards. Workers on awards are concentrated in industries in which weekend and shift work are common – retail, hospitality, health care, social support and manufacturing. The Australian Council of Trade Unions estimates that workers in service industries like shop assistants, cleaners and hairdressers would be $50 to $90 a week worse off without penalty rates.
In a 2014 survey about unsociable hours and penalty rates, researchers at the University of South Australia’s Centre for Work and Life found that 67 percent of surveyed machine operators received penalty rates. More than half of this number described a reliance on these rates to meet household expenses.
The provision for penalty rates is also a feature of more than three quarters of workplace collective agreements. The changes to the award system currently under consideration would not directly alter the rates paid to the 3 million workers covered by these agreements; however, any drop in the standard set by the award system lowers the bar for workplace bargaining. Unions and workers would be under considerable pressure to “trade off” penalty rates in future rounds of enterprise bargaining.
The Australian Nursing and Midwifery Federation has calculated that its members would lose up to 25 percent of their wages were they to give up penalty rates. Discussing the issue in an online forum, one nurse explains how workers will be forced to work more for less if penalty rates are cut:
“I really needed a job to help support the family so took any shift, but now as I look back over 28 years, I lost friends, relationships, because I worked unsocial hours. Was it worth it? No.” As for the suggestion that night shift nurses simply refuse to work unsociable hours if the rates are cut: “That will not happen; you need the job”, she said.
Since they were first federally legislated in 1919 – following a massive strike wave – penalty rates have provided the legal underpinning to the expectation that workers can enjoy a common time off work, a time in which to participate in joint social, cultural and political activities.
The weakening of trade unions and workplace activism over recent decades has significantly eroded this culture. Deregulation of penalty rates will further legitimise the expansion of “normal” business hours, allowing employers to rob workers of more wages and time.

Penalty rates and the right to rest and play

“They’ve seen what we’re capable of, I think. It’s not a threat, it’s just a reality – if we’re not happy, if our members are not happy, we will walk out. We’ve done it once, we’ll do it again!”
Until a few months ago few people would have expected to hear a statement like this from a National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) delegate at Melbourne’s Centre for Adult Education (CAE). Never before in the centre’s 66-year history had workers gone on strike.
In November and December last year they took action that was unprecedented in the sector - a strike and picket that lasted for 3 weeks. CAE ground to a halt. Classes and events were cancelled. The CEO resigned.
Lay-ping Powell and Carlos Marquez-Perez, administrative staff and union delegates at CAE, spoke to Red Flag about how events unfolded.
At first, Lay-ping explains, workers were scared by the prospect of a strike, as were the four delegates. It was the severity of management’s attacks on the union and the contempt shown at the bargaining table (management twice reneged on an in-principle agreement) that whipped the normally placid workers into a storm, says Lay-ping. Countless one-on-one conversations between delegates and members meant that everyone knew of each dishonest management manoeuvre at the bargaining table.
Lay-ping also attributes some of the discontent to the behavior of arrogant “toxic bosses” since CAE’s merger with Box Hill TAFE four years ago. Workers were sick and tired of management’s "wanton wastage of money for infrastructure… which means that the number of staff is reduced drastically", she said.
In bargaining, management wanted to restrict union access to dispute resolution at Fair Work, and remove union delegates from a key workplace committee. Such an agreement would have been “unworkable” says Carlos. “I wouldn’t work in a place like that.” In response, union meetings voted unanimously for an indefinite strike.
Encouraged by 1,000 students’ signatures on a petition in support of the strike – and despite a brief management attempt to tear down material advertising the strike – workers walked off the job. “It was unifying”, says Carlos. “It connected us.”
Immediately, Carlos noticed a boost in everyone’s confidence. He describes one worker who he had “never seen being vocally that active – at first [Ann] wouldn’t jump up and take the megaphone because she was just so scared about it. But after speaking to one person she was just so strong she just kept on jumping on there.” After seeing the change, “her husband said to the delegates ‘who are you and what have you done to Ann!?’”
The strike went on for longer than anyone had expected but Carlos says they quickly realised that it didn’t matter how long it took – “we need to be here.”
In the end, their resolve paid off. On 19 December they signed off on an enterprise agreement that, according to Carlos, is “not only what we wanted but that we dreamed of”. Workers beat back management’s anti-union attacks and won a 25 percent pay increase for sessional teachers.
Though Lay-ping says it "is really not quite the 9 percent that we should be getting", the rest of the workers won a 5 percent pay rise with 2.5 percent backdated to 2012.
Carlos hopes for a more offensive strategy in the next round of enterprise bargaining, starting in a few months. He says they need a strategy that says “let’s add things as opposed to always subtracting things”.
The workers at CAE have come away from the dispute with more than improved pay and conditions. Not least is a union membership that has grown by about 30 percent. Carlos added: “The way it stands, if we told our members we’re going on industrial action again, they’d just say ‘let’s go’. They’re ready.”

UNSW staff strike against workload pressure

Impact of Trump election ripples through to the workplace

University casuals campaign off to solid start

Penalty rates and the right to rest and play

CAE - behind the strike

Other Media

Shop

Manage Your Subscription

Contact Us