Hi, I’m Dani. I’ve been an active NTEU member since I started working here two years ago as a casual tutor in the arts faculty, including serving for the last year as the branch committee casual representative. In that role I’ve done my best to support and encourage local organising, build public protest action, and to stand staunchly together as a union on casual issues.
We urgently need to save tertiary education from managerialism, which sees a billion dollar surplus prioritised at the expense of wage theft, increasing staff-student ratios, and unsustainable workloads. This is producing a reduced standard of education and staff burnout.
We’ve already had wins these last few years, on wage theft in mathematics, stopping job cuts in the arts faculty, and the wins on leave and workload committees we’ve achieved from strike action.
Now is our opportunity to step up, recruit, and win. For our campaign to be successful, we must expand our base of union members and union activists. We need to talk to every person who ran an online class or worked from home during the strikes, to explain the importance of our campaign, and why they should support our strike action. We need a concerted effort to go out, talk, and listen to our colleagues about the issues we know are there and what we can do about it.
Let’s prepare for the strike action that will be necessary to provide wins not only on workloads, the 40:40:20, and working from home, but on First Nations and trans issues, on job security for ongoing, fixed-term, and casual staff, and on ending exploitative casualisation.
I’m committed to a strike round that delivers this change. I’m committed to true union democracy, which requires rank-and-file organising, open strategic and tactical discussions, and efforts to hold our leadership to account to the reality on the ground. I’m committed to continue to mobilise together with other branches and sectors to demand better funding, as well as to stand together as a union on social issues such as climate, First Nations justice, and trans rights.
Vote for Rank-and-File Action (RAFA), and help us build the united, militant union we need. The vision we’re trying to outline requires renewed effort from us all to strengthen our union, deepen the strikes, and transform the university.
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I’m running as a member of RAFA. We’re a group of union members seeking to extend our industrial campaign in Semester Two. We believe our union could be even stronger with more concerted organising, recruitment, and engagement. We’re made up of academic and professional staff, ongoing and casual, and we want to see the university reflect the voices of its workers.
We’ve come out of three days of strike action with a boost in membership and lots of good press coverage. We have a real chance to make change happen at the University – but that needs our vibrant grassroots campaign to continue and grow across Semester Two. We’ll need to bring new members on board, build towards even stronger strike action, and conclude negotiations not only with a fairer contract but a stronger union.
Vote [1] David Brophy for Academic VP
Vote [1] Dylan Griffiths for General VP
Vote [1] Finola Laughren for Casual BC
Vote [1] to [8] for Ordinary Committee Member: [1] Markela Panegyres, [2] Dylan Griffiths, [3] Dani Cotton, [4] Cian Galea, [5] Ben Miller, [6] Luke Alexander, [7] Matte Rochford, and [8] Ben Graham
For a full how-to-vote and to find out how you can get more involved, go to https://rafausyd.wordpress.com
Rank-And-File Action USYD 