The spread of pro-Palestine encampments at universities across the US, and now across nearly a dozen Australian universities, is an electrifying example of peaceful civil disobedience. It is the only decent response to the videos of Palestinian children sitting in blood-soaked clothes, confused, and trembling in shock that confront us every time we turn on the news. 
As a long-time activist with the university staff union, the National Tertiary Education Union, it has been so heartening to see students challenging the universities’ links with Israel in this way, in particular the extensive weapons research that takes place on our campuses and directly contributes to the deaths of Palestinians. 
But there is another very compelling reason why those of us working and studying on campuses have an obligation to show solidarity with Palestine and oppose Israel’s genocide: because Israel is systematically destroying the education system in Gaza. 
Israel’s targeting of hospitals has been well documented, and rightly so. The destruction of electricity works, water treatment facilities and food production has also received some attention—again rightly, because it poses an immediate risk to survival. 
But the destruction of libraries, museums, schools and universities is also an important element of genocide. Israel’s bombing of education facilities, along with the murder or more than 5,400 students and 260 teachers, and the assassination of academics and scientists, is a deliberate effort to systematically destroy the entire Gazan education system.
This action has been described as <a href="https://scholarsagainstwar.org/toolkit/">scholasticide</a>, a term coined following the 2009 war on Gaza. Within the first few days of the 2009 assault, Israel had bombed the Islamic University. 
During the current war, twelve of the sixteen university and higher education campuses in Gaza have been severely or moderately damaged. At least four have been completely destroyed. None of Gaza’s 88,000 university students have been able to attend classes since the war began, and more than 500 international scholarship recipients have been unable to leave Gaza to pursue their studies according to the Euro-Med Monitor. In March, the International Monetary Fund estimated that 70 percent of Gaza’s colleges and universities had been destroyed.
In a brazen act of destruction, on 17 January Israel annihilated Al-Israa University. Israeli defence forces had already taken over and occupied the campus for 70 days, using it as an operational base and a detention facility. But then the IDF laid out over 300 mines and demolished the entire university, like a controlled detonation of a condemned building.
According to the Euro-Med Monitor, Al-Aqsa University in Gaza City was targeted on 6 February, resulting in two buildings being completely destroyed and others severely damaged. The main headquarters of Al-Azhar University and most of the Islamic University, also in Gaza City, were similarly destroyed by airstrikes last October and November. 
It has not just been universities under fire. Nearly 90 percent of Gaza’s approximately 737 primary and secondary schools have sustained significant damage or been destroyed. 
This is an obscene picture, particularly considering the disproportionately young population of Gaza. More than half of the 2.1 million people living in Gaza are under 20, while nearly 40 percent are of school age. 
Chillingly, Israeli soldiers have found joy in the wanton destruction. Videos have surfaced showing Israeli forces cheering after bombing various schools, including an <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PXNCGuOCIrM">UNRWA school in northern Gaza</a>.
Targeted bombing of schools and universities is of course part of the collective punishment that Israel has pursued in Gaza during this war and has been meting out to Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank for more than seven decades. Targeting intellectuals and writers has also been a long-term Israeli strategy. 
Palestinians have a particularly strong affinity for education and learning. They have extraordinarily high rates of literacy, despite the terrible conditions Israel imposes on them, and education and culture have long been a vital part of Palestinian resistance. Which is why it’s so disastrous that all Gaza’s schools have been closed since the Israeli offensive began last October. While survival is clearly the first concern, children are less likely to return to school the longer they have been kept away. Instability and lack of routine, not to mention the trauma of witnessing a war, will present significant challenges in the future for the Gazan children who survive. 
Wiping out schools and universities is part of the project of destroying the Palestinian people. In this sense, it’s an abomination that most universities around the world have failed to condemn the destruction of Gaza’s education system, or the genocide that campaign is a part of. Instead, university administrations accuse the student protests of being disruptive or “violent”, and continue to do business with the companies and Israeli institutions that make this war possible. 
For this reason, the now-global uprising of students occupying their campuses and sending solidarity to Gaza is a vital and inspiring development that all of us should support.

Robin Laycock

The destruction of Gaza’s universities

The idea that university lecturers should be paid to research in their areas of expertise and stay on top of their field, as well as teaching, is under serious assault. The Morrison government’s “Job Ready Graduates” legislation cut Commonwealth funding for universities down to what's needed for teaching purposes only, with no allocation for research. This gives a powerful incentive for university management to attack academics' research time in the enterprise bargaining round which is now getting underway in universities across the country.
That’s why it’s significant that academics in RMIT’s School of Health and Biomedical Sciences (SHBS) have won a union dispute centred on workloads. The seven-month dispute focussed largely on the allocation of time for research activities. 
The dispute affected around 100 teaching and research academics across ten disciplines, including nursing, psychology, osteopathy and laboratory medicine.
Academics are formally allocated a certain about of time for research activities. In the case of SHBS, many academics had their research time stripped from the previous norm of 20 per cent of working hours down to 5 or 10 per cent. Some were given no research time at all.
This harsh attack was carried out by the use of a rigid set of performance metrics. A senior lecturer was to publish nine journal articles, attract $90,000 in grants and have two PhD student completions over the preceding three years. If you didn’t meet the metrics, your research time was cut.
The attack limited the possibility of conducting any research, while forcing academics to increase their teaching load. But the academics are officially allowed only a fraction of the time that is really required to perform many teaching duties anyway, so workloads were already high. The effects of these new changes were catastrophic. Academics routinely work more than 60 hours per week during the peak of semester. These changes made that level of overwork continuous.
Before we’d even begun working under the new model, an SHBS NTEU members’ meeting voted to lodge a dispute with management. Our key demand was the removal of the rigid research performance metric system. We also wanted 30 percent to be the new baseline research allocation, which was consistent both with other schools in our college and with the university’s own promotion guidelines.
Our school didn’t have a very strong union presence, but in the first months of this year, we carried out detailed organising and mapping of all academics, organised a number of local and school-level organising meetings and made many phone calls and teams calls. (Much of this transpired in lockdown, so we couldn’t do much face-to-face organising.) We created a wide understanding of the key arguments of the dispute. We launched an open letter addressed to the school’s dean; that became an important organising tool, a way to talk with union and non-union members alike.
We built good momentum, but the dispute dragged on. Management would occasionally concede on minor points, but never budge on the substantive issues. Meanwhile, academics were stuck with zero research time and spending as much as 90 percent of their time teaching.
By chance, a new dean was appointed to the school. She was welcomed with the open letter, which by now had attracted signatures from over half of teaching and research academics. Shortly afterwards, we managed the most significant concessions on the terms of our dispute to date—but no change to the rigid all-or-nothing application of the metrics. 
By this stage, the harsh reality of working under the new workload regime was taking its toll on academics and the campaign. More than a few academics resigned. Many took sick leave, some for extended periods. The regular members’ meetings to discuss the dispute had continued, and now voted to bring the dispute to Fair Work. At this point, the deputy vice-chancellor of our college, with whom we had already tried unsuccessfully to escalate negotiations, suddenly appeared with an offer that represented significant progress.
In the final stages of the dispute, a members’ meeting put a final set of demands to management. After some last-minute wrangling with management, we finally won back the notion that all academics get 20 percent research time for the rest of the year, while those with no research outputs can access a mentor scheme and still get 15 percent research time. We didn’t win the full 30 percent we aspired to, though the increase in time for research won across the school will significantly reduce teaching workloads in semester two. It will also require a substantial increase in the casual budget provided by management.
This dispute exposed an important limitation in our enterprise agreement relating to workloads. A clause referring to what an academic would “normally” expect in terms of non-teaching workload proved to be a management loophole. It also proved to many academics that our upcoming enterprise bargaining will be crucial in order to fight for stronger protection against future attacks.
But if also proved that workers can have victories. Officially, this came from utilising our EA dispute clause and holding negotiations. But this was backed up by the open letter of protest, by active union meetings, by conversations about work stress, and by the gradual building of a more active rank and file. We showed that collective organising works, and that we can fight and win over workloads. More fights on this front can be expected in 2022.

How to win a dispute over workloads

People in the outer suburbs of Melbourne spend hours commuting every week. The average daily return trip is around 80 minutes. Nearly one user in three spends more than two hours each day on a train, bus or tram. 
Those using public transport have a commute time roughly double that of someone driving a car. 
This is no surprise: the system is chronically underfunded. Also unsurprising has been the steady flow of profits to private companies since public transport was privatised nearly two decades ago.
We were told that the large subsidies the new operators were given would be reduced as patronage grew, boosting operator profits.
But patronage increased only slightly, at a slower rate than in the period prior to privatisation, and the government was forced to hand over more subsidies. In 2003, with Labor in government, $1 billion was allocated in the budget to boost private operator subsidies.
Another promise was that fares would not rise above inflation. This promise didn’t last long. Prices have risen at double the inflation rate since privatisation.
A 2005 auditor-general’s report showed that the private train and tram operators were receiving nearly twice the amount in real terms the government body – the Public Transport Corporation – had received in 1999. Yet seven years after privatisation, public transport’s share of all motorised trips had marginally decreased.
Privatisation also resulted in 16,000 workers being sacked.
So it was money for less than nothing.
Private operators have an incentive to seek the largest possible subsidy and to run the system with the minimum level of service. Perversely, the worse the standard of service, the more profits can be made: way better, in the eyes of the private company, to have each service packed to the rafters than have fewer people getting a more comfortable ride.
Metro Trains, a global consortium that receives $800 million a year from the state government, has made more than $230 million in profit in the last five years as its trains have become ever more crowded.
Last year the Andrews government renewed Metro’s contract, giving it a $1.25 million bonus every month it meets performance targets. It gets extra millions just for not screwing up each month.
The Myki system is another example of a disaster in outsourcing. In 2007, a private corporation, NTT Data, was given almost $1 billion to set up and run the ticketing system for 10 years. The project ran three years over time and blew out to a cost of $1.5 billion. NTT Data was recently rewarded with a new seven-year contract worth $700 million.
Public transport is a racket for multinational corporations. We should not be paying private companies to run an essential public service for profit. It should be put back in public hands and given a major boost in investment to increase services and turn it into a usable system.

Public transport should be in public hands

Victoria has a privatisation problem. To be fair, selling public assets for profit has been a world trend over the last 40 years. But Victoria led the way in Australia.
In the Andrews Labor government’s 2017 budget, a large increase in privatisations was planned, with between 40 and 50 percent of funding for infrastructure projects over the next few years coming from Public Private Partnerships (PPPs).
PPPs vary – but they always allow private profit from public projects. They are also a good example of word play, whereby governments studiously avoid using the word “privatisation” and instead use terms such as “asset recycling”, “asset leasing”, “outsourcing” or “marketisation”.
This isn’t surprising. Privatisations are hugely unpopular. A 2015 Essential Report survey, for example, found that 53 percent of respondents didn’t think that selling off public utilities would help the economy. More than 70 percent agreed that utilities such as water and power are too important to be sold off, that privatisations mainly benefit the corporate sector and that prices always increase after privatisation.
It’s surprising that Victoria has any public assets left to sell after Liberal premier Jeff Kennett’s notorious binge in the 1990s. The Kennett Coalition government privatised public transport, electricity, gas, water distribution and more. Essential human services were sold to the highest bidder and are now run in the interests of shareholders, rather than the public.
Today many sectors such as aged and child care, hospitals, child protection, disability services, prisons and vocational training are partially or in the process of being privatised.
Daniel Andrews has found even more public assets to sell.
In 2016, the government sold a 50-year lease for the Port of Melbourne for $9.7 billion. The container port is the largest in Australia; tens of millions of tonnes of cargo pass through every year. Undoubtedly, the profits accruing to the new consortium owner will be well worth the price.
Last year, the government announced that 500 state-run homes for people with cognitive disabilities would be put to tender to be run by non-government organisations.
Then there is the disaster of the largest single sell-off of public housing in Victoria’s history. For now, nine inner city estates covering approximately 1000 public housing dwellings will be demolished and the land sold to private developers.
Some social housing will be built, but will not equal the number of bedrooms currently available. The number of three-bedroom homes will be cut from 182 to 25.
Andrews also plans to privatise Land Use Victoria. This government agency keeps records of who owns land across the state, and information about mortgages, titles, leases etc.
Just before NSW sold its land titles agency last year for $2.6 billion, leaked Treasury documents revealed that it was making the state government $130 million annually.
The registry is a natural monopoly. Home buyers, sellers, real estate agents and researchers must use it – and hence pay whatever fees are charged. Similar privatisations in Canada led to 300 percent price increases.
In January, the premier said, “If you asked ordinary Victorians, would you prefer the electricity system to be in private, for profit, ownership, or owned by every single Victorian, I think the majority of Victorians would say they would be much happier if it was owned by them”.
Pity he’s doing nothing about it and continues the sell-off elsewhere.
Privatisation of public assets has been disastrous. For example, research by the Australia Institute showed that the cost of electricity increased nearly three times the overall increase in prices in Australia in the 10 years to 2016.
This increase was partly a result of a loophole in the regulatory system allowing electricity companies to over-invest in infrastructure – “gold-plating” – and pass the cost on to consumers.
On top of this, there has been a grotesque ballooning in the number of managers within electricity providers – a more than 200 percent increase in the same 10-year period.
Then there’s the 400 percent increase in the number of advertising and marketing employees, which rams home the gross inefficiency of selling public assets to the private sector. How ridiculous that we are paying for the advertising budget of an essential service.
Bringing privatised assets into public ownership would cut out all the profit-taking corporations and reduce prices. The case for placing such utilities into public hands could not be clearer.

Victoria’s privatisation problem

The multinational stock exchange-listed education provider Navitas is again in the firing line after implementing cutbacks that have angered staff and students.
Navitas, which trades as La Trobe Melbourne and provides alternative pathway courses into bachelor degrees at La Trobe University, made substantial changes to its intensive English language courses for overseas students in 2015.
The changes, which came after management refused to consult with teachers about its plans, result in a one-week loss of classes in a 10-week English course, along with larger class sizes – breaching student to teacher ratio requirements.
Branch president of the NTEU Ramesh Presser told Red Flag that the decision was all about cost cutting – “a 10 per cent reduction in teaching costs”.
Presser explained that the cuts “have led to more students failing and decreased student experience”.
Teachers have lost out through reduced hours for casuals and being forced to achieve the same learning outcomes in less class time.
Although staff are angry, they are not surprised; standards have been steadily eroded since La Trobe University privatised the college in 2010, and Navitas took over.
In 2014, staff held a full-day strike, several half-day strikes and stop-work meetings, and implemented work bans as part of a campaign to defend long service leave and redundancy payments and stop increased casualisation.
The latest cuts were implemented before the new collective agreement was signed in May 2015. Now, the NTEU has lodged a complaint with the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency, citing Navitas’ failure to comply with a number of minimum standards for English language courses of this type. 
Staff have been independently monitoring the impact of the cuts with a survey that 300 students have completed so far. Presser says that 70 percent of students want more time in the classroom with their teacher.
But the NTEU is not holding its breath on the prospects of the government regulator resolving this dispute. Staff have just sent an open letter to management outlining their concerns.
It will take more action from staff and students to defend their work and study conditions. Presser believes the real problem is the privatisation of education where private providers “can ride roughshod” over national standards while the regulator is unable or unwilling to act.

Private education provider ‘rides roughshod’ over standards

Robbie lives in regional Victoria. He lost his job and can’t live off his savings. He is forced to go begging at the welfare office. The 20-year-old behind the counter told him he wasn’t trying hard enough. “You need to get out there and really pound the pavement”, she said to the 61-year-old who has worked all his life.
The situation for unemployed people is about to get worse. As of 1 July, privately run employment service providers have gained new powers to suspend payments and fine job seekers for missing appointments. People like Robbie better brace themselves.
As part of the new $5.1 billion Jobactive employment service contract, compulsory work for the dole will also be extended, kicking-in earlier and requiring more hours for young job seekers.
Tropes about the unemployed are well worn. They’re “bludgers” and “rorters”, we’re told. Social services minister Scott Morrison has labelled social security a “career choice”. 
But as Owen Bennett from the Australian Unemployment Union (AUU) told Red Flag, life for the unemployed –
 surviving on a payment that is $280 a fortnight less than the poverty line – is tough.
“Given the skyrocketing price of housing, utilities and food, many unemployed people have to sacrifice many comforts of life. Not only does their health deteriorate as a result, but also this lack of money means unemployed people can’t afford to maintain an active social life. This leads to social isolation and in some cases serious mental issues”, Bennett said.
The research backs this up. The latest General Social Survey by the Australian Bureau of Statistics found that while life satisfaction ratings among the overall population averaged 7.6 out of 10, 25 percent of unemployed people had ratings of 5 or less.
As if trying to juggle bill payments on a subsistence allowance while filling in job applications isn’t hard enough, the unemployed have to jump through hoops for their employment service provider: irrelevant training, pointless appointments, work for the dole commitments of up to 25 hours per week.
For the one in four people on Newstart allowances that have a significant disability, meeting these requirements can be impossible. Bennet argues that this is the point: “The aim of the welfare system is to make the experience of unemployment so humiliating that unemployed people become so desperate, so impoverished that they would be willing to accept any work no matter how bad the conditions”.
With 767,500 unemployed people in Australia competing for around 150,000 jobs, even finding an undesirable job can be difficult. Add in the more than one million underemployed, and there are on average around 11 people competing for every job. These are not appealing odds.
While the poverty and indignity accompanying unemployment are getting worse, there are winners in this story. Job service providers have received $18 billion in government funding since the sector was privatised in 1998. The tap stays on, despite recurring revelations of fraud and widespread rorting.
Bennett believes that the structural over-supply of available workers places a downward pressure on wages and conditions more generally. “Real wages are at their lowest growth rate in 17 years,” he said, “paving the way for larger profits for business – the real goal of this cruel policy toward the unemployed”.

More punishment for the unemployed

“Speak English.” If these words had been directed at an Indian by an unruly youth on a suburban bus – and A Current Affair got wind of it – all hell would’ve broken loose. Racism has no place in Australia, they would’ve howled.
After Australian cricketer David Warner yelled these words at Indian batsman Rohit Sharma at the MCG, Cricket Australia unleashed … not much more than a pat on the wrist.
That’s not surprising. The Australian cricket team is regarded as the most important and prestigious sporting team in the country. Countless pages of drivel have been written about Australia’s national identity being shaped by the love of the game and, presumably, by 11 drunk men singing True Blue in the change rooms.
The privilege of representing Australia also appears to include a license to be a racist brute.
Officially, the International Cricket Council (ICC) takes these matters very seriously. Racism is one of the most serious offences that can be committed. How this squares with Warner’s pathetic half a match-fee penalty is not clear. The more serious one-match ban dished out to Australia’s One Day International captain George Bailey for the heinous crime of a slow over rate in a game puts this into some perspective.
It is true that Australia is no lone wolf when it comes to racism in cricket. Last year the England and Wales Cricket Board charged Yorkshire’s captain with racism after a confrontation with a Black South African opponent during a county game.
But there is something special about the culture around the Australian cricket team. In a sport notorious for its sledging culture, Australia is infamous.
Coach Darren Lehman conceded that Warner’s outburst was “not a good look”, while helpfully pointing out that the batsman “is an aggressive character and we support that”. Reassuring words from a man who, when playing for Australia in 2003, left the field in a huff after being run out and stormed past the Sri Lankan dressing rooms yelling, “Black c***s!”
The Australian cricket establishment seems to believe that although there might be a line players shouldn’t cross, they nevertheless should push the boundaries.
Australian cricketers play hard but always fair. In all this there is an air of the Aussie digger at war; the mythology of brave, heroic and moral soldiers, which contrasts with the seedy reality of a brutal and racist army certainly no more moral than the enemy – and in many instances renowned for being particularly ruthless.
Speaking in his own defence Warner claimed he was simply being polite, not racist. Merely demonstrating a cultural curiosity. What rubbish.
Warner was not asking for Sharma to speak English – he was demanding, in a heated and angry exchange. Indeed, Warner has spent much more time playing in the Twenty20 Indian Premier League than Sharma has spent in Australia. Time to learn some Hindi perhaps, unless you expect the whole world to speak your language?
The Age Sports writer Greg Baum had the best line: “Here’s something in English for David Warner – shut up.”

Racism in cricket not just a ‘bad look’

Last year was a big year for science. Many more people will now be killed in brilliant new high-tech ways. In a breakthrough by the US Department of Defense, the first self-guiding sniper bullets have been developed.
Currently, snipers can hit targets from 600 metres with 90 percent accuracy. It surely goes without saying that we need to improve on this. Teledyne Scientific and Imaging has delivered.
The company developed what it claims is the first handheld sniper rifle that can re-direct bullets mid-flight, at high accuracy within two kilometres. The new technology provides a grotesque illustration of how talented scientists aid US imperialism. Complex technologies, theoretical innovations and human ingenuity, which deserve to be marvelled at, are instead combined to raise the level of barbarity in the world.
The project, called EXACTO (Extreme Accuracy Tasked Ordnance) was funded in 2010 by a $US25 million grant from the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). In fact, this money is for “phase two” only. “Phase one” cost a further $US9.5 million, while a subsidiary of Lockheed Martin called Sandia National Laboratories received $US12.5 million to develop its own version. Competition is great for humanity.
Companies like Sandia National Laboratories are running a large number of projects. They include developing kinetic energy warheads that can deploy thousands of penetrating fragments to destroy a target. Sandia alone had a budget of $US168 million in 2013. Its self-declared mission is to maintain the reliability of nuclear weapon systems, and ensure the US “maintains science and engineering superiority in a world replete with threats to our national security”.
In a rational society, science would be for improving society and making life better for the majority of people. Under capitalism we can see this possibility. For example, researchers currently are exploring ways of using direct current stimulation of the human brain to increase learning efficiency.
Unfortunately, Sandia is conducting some of this research in aid of training soldiers and intelligence operatives more quickly.
Imagine if the nearly $US50 million instead was used to hire more than a thousand teachers. Or if Sandia went without its 2013 budget – 47,000 poor people could be fed for a year.
The combined Army, Navy and Marine Corps and the Air Force R&amp;D budget amounted to $US49.7 billion last year. Most of this went toward developing new technologies for weapons. Instead it could have built 100 new hospitals.
And the skills and research power of scientists could have been put to increasing people’s quality of life, rather than figuring out more efficient ways of killing them.

Science in aid of evil

After a drawn-out Fair Work Commission hearing found in their favour, NTEU members at La Trobe University have again rallied in opposition to massive job cuts. The university’s Funding Future Ready strategy is its rationale for cutting $65 million in spending, largely by sacking up to 350 staff.
In its 9 September ruling, the commission found that the university did not consult properly with the union and that the imposition of forced redundancies is inconsistent with its job security obligations.
The decision prevents the university from implementing proposed changes “until the employees and the NTEU have an opportunity to respond” to the strategy. Shamelessly, the vice-chancellor, John Dewar, emailed all staff after the decision claiming that the union had been “ordered” to provide feedback. 
On 23 September, close to 100 staff marched to Dewar’s office. A “feedback” banner, painted by the union campaign committee, was delivered. The banner was covered in the signatures of staff and students opposed to the cuts. Unsurprisingly, Dewar was “unavailable” to meet staff, but a union delegation was allowed into the administration building, which had been under lockdown during the rally. 
University of Melbourne
More than 100 staff and students gathered outside the University of Melbourne administration building on 24 September to protest major job losses. Under the university’s Business Improvement Program, 500 – one in five – general staff will be sacked.
The mood at the protest reflected the deep bitterness felt across campus. After an NTEU delegation went in to meet the vice-chancellor, the crowd marched around the building chanting “Glyn Davis: unsatisfactory!” and “Sack Glyn Davis, not librarians.”
Resentment turned to outrage in the week preceding the protest. After months of assurances that there would be no “spill and fill”, management announced on 17 September that more than 2,000 staff would need to reapply for jobs. Hundreds who were initially told that their jobs were safe found out days later that this was a mistake.
Staff anger has also found expression at management’s massive town hall-style staff meetings. These previously polite affairs are increasingly being disrupted from the floor by hostile questioning and cat calls.
The preparedness of staff to stand up to senior managers reveals that there is some potential for this long passive workforce to be organised. If staff are to look to the NTEU, however, the union will need to provide a far more decisive lead and more resources in the fight than it has to date.

Alex McAulay

Small steps forward in NTEU jobs campaign

La Trobe University’s pathway institute La Trobe Melbourne was hit by a 24-hour strike on 28 May over stalled enterprise agreement negotiations with Navitas, the multinational corporation contracted to run the facility since it was privatised in 2010.
La Trobe Melbourne is pitched as providing an alternative pathway into a bachelor degree course at La Trobe University. Domestic students pay around $20,000 a year to attend the school. Navitas turns huge profits but is trying to gut conditions provided in the now expired staff enterprise agreement – conditions that are standard just across the road at La Trobe University.
Specifically, it wants to reduce long service leave, cut redundancy payments, continue to casualise and deny casuals (about 60 percent of staff) any prospect of permanency.
A spokesperson for La Trobe Melbourne Navitas told a local newspaper that the benefits staff are fighting for are “a legacy from their former employment [at La Trobe University]”.
Tensions had also recently been piqued by the institute’s April relocation to a new, state-of-the-art building that has already exceeded its staff desk capacity. Casual workers have been forced into “hot desking” arrangements, with no place to store personal belongings.
NTEU branch president Ramesh Presser told Red Flag that the work space arrangements in the new building have been the driving force behind a successful union recruitment campaign over recent weeks. According to Presser, casual workers “feel unappreciated and disrespected by the situation” and have been joining the union at a rate of more than 10 a week. 
The union installed temporary lockers in the new building for staff to use during the day. In response, management complained that the “unidentified metal objects” – UMOs – were a safety risk and had to be removed. In a win for staff, management subsequently agreed to provide access to shared lockers and pigeonholes.
The Fair Work Commission has ordered the parties to continue enterprise agreement negotiations. In the meantime, staff plan to continue with existing work bans and will meet again to discuss further actions.

The destruction of Gaza’s universities

How to win a dispute over workloads

Public transport should be in public hands

Victoria’s privatisation problem

Private education provider ‘rides roughshod’ over standards

More punishment for the unemployed

Racism in cricket not just a ‘bad look’

Science in aid of evil

Small steps forward in NTEU jobs campaign

Tertiary staff fight for ‘legacy’ conditions

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