History Department

As a union member who is deeply troubled by the attacks on our university community by management, RAFA colleagues have brought hope. I am proud to endorse their ticket which offers a new way forward . I have been inspired by their clear activist vision, their inclusive political debates, their intellectual generosity, their thoughtful vision for a better, more just world and the diverse range of perspectives and life experience on the RAFA ticket; here is a group that brings the best of dynamic activist politics to the challenges that define our lives. We have a chance this election to build a new consensus amongst union members, one that strengthens our solidarity. I’m excited by the smart, committed leadership of RAFA candidates.

Shawna Tang

Lecturer in Gender and Cultural Studies

RAFA colleagues and supporters have helped this Singaporean, a cultural stranger to union organising, imagine and see what it means to build a good political life. I admire their collegiality, tactics, sense of fairness, leadership and their keen awareness and commitment to a broad vision of social justice beyond the university. RAFA members clearly understand that the university has a role in socialising society: what we fight for at the uni is always in solidarity with workers everywhere else. RAFA’s dynamic and diverse team is committed to and collectively aligned with the interests of a broad constituency. Shout out to Finola Laughren, Gender and Cultural Studies scholar, putting into practice queer and feminist knowledge and methodologies to shape RAFA’s radical politics!

Professor in Gender and Cultural Studies

I’m very happy indeed to endorse the RAFA ticket in the upcoming elections–happy, because this combination of a humane, practical vision for the University with active commitment to job security, fair pay, social justice and real democracy within the NTEU has come along just as the deterioration of our work conditions seems endless and morale is at the lowest ebb I can remember. This team has shown it can be effective and offers us goals worth fighting for.

Health Sciences, NTEU member since 2002

I am voting for RAFA in the upcoming NTEU election because:

• they have stood with me on the picket line in our fight for better working conditions;
  
• they are clearly committed to increasing our membership in order to create a formidable rank and file movement;
  
• they have given me and other rank and file members a greater say in how the NTEU represents us, so are already in the process of expanding member engagement;
  
• like me, RAFA want a unified NTEU focused on fighting the Manageriate, not each other;
  
• they are determined not back down or make compromises in enterprise bargaining;
  
• they share my vision of a more collegial university run by the workers, not the Manageriate;
  
• I like that their team is broadly representative of USyd’s workforce, with a mix of students, professionals and academics employed as casuals, continuing and fixed term staff;
  
• like me, they are passionate, progressive unionists with a strong social justice agenda.

Senior Lecturer, Studies of Religion

When the FASS departments of Studies in Religion and Performance Studies were threatened with closure last year my colleagues, Nick Riemer, Sophie Cotton, Matte Rochford, leading a hell of a lot of other NTEU members, stood up with me in defiance of these insane closures. They did all they could to fight the false economic arguments that were trying to put me and my colleagues out of our departments and our jobs. This is why I am thrilled and delighted to support them and my other dedicated colleagues running for the Rank and File Action Ticket (RAFA) in the coming Sydney Branch elections.

Unlike a majority of NTEU members at Sydney, I have had the privilege of serving on Branch Committee on and off over the last five years. Through that experience I have seen close-at-hand who has been dedicated to our membership’s genuine needs, who was a little too eager to give into management bastardry, and who has a serious attitude to grassroots organising. Those years of service confirm in my mind that the hard work, considered strategies, and dedication of those on the RAFA ticket are worth supporting. Colleagues, take seriously the opportunity you have to vote in the coming Branch elections and please consider joining me in supporting the RAFA ticket. Our jobs and our workplace conditions will depend on it.

The headline takeaway from bargaining meeting #8 this week was that management seeks to have as much of our conditions to be in ‘policy’ as possible rather than the Enterprise Agreement. This distinction is significant.

Policy is made without the need for consultation and agreement by staff. Our Enterprise Agreement is on the other hand a legally binding document and gives us rights. We have built our agreement over many years and we must ensure that our rights and conditions remain in a binding Agreement instead of ethereal policies.

The other major concern is that we put to management the need for a proper fact-finding approach to the big issues: workloads and overwork. We say let’s pull a working group together and initiate a genuine inquiry into the state of work at Sydney. We heard in response that there is only interpretation and that facts could not be agreed upon.

This is dire, folks! Our biggest concerns are being evaded. Why? Are management scared of the funding out the truth? We need to force management to confront these issues with real evidence-driven data. Fill out our workloads survey and encourage your colleagues to as well, so we can make real headway on the workload crisis.

Much of Bargaining focused on professional staff issues around flexible work and hours and job security measures. Management seem concerned that there was no approval process in place. We explained that roster systems and simple trust can deal with requests for flexibility and flexible working hours. Our flexibility clauses are a small measure to help protect staff from having to always negotiate the power imbalance attending the employment relationship.

We also presented our claim that professional staff be given the opportunity to apply and be interviewed for jobs before they are advertised externally. Disappointingly, this was not something management seemed keen on. We explained some of the benefits. Importantly, we have argued that our workforce is a community and people build their lives around their places of work. An internal recruitment process is a small measure but with big consequences to our working lives.

After 8 meetings we can see a few areas where agreement might be possible. But the crisis issue of workloads looms in our next bargaining session (Nov 23rd)!

On Tuesday, a fortnight later than we had wanted, the NTEU bargaining team resumed negotiations with management in a hybrid meeting on the top floor of the F23 ‘Michael Spence’ building. Since August, we’ve largely met with frustrating resistance to our vision of a better and fairer university. So it’s pleasing to report that on one area at least – different aspects of leave – the Bargaining Team are now making some encouraging progress, which we’ll be in touch about soon.

However, on our major priorities for this bargaining round, management have still not indicated any willingness to accept our proposals. In particular, they still haven’t withdrawn their plan to remove protections against overwork, and they’re still propsing to strip academics’ right to a 40% research component in their workload. Our priorities in this round address the very real problems we all face in our work. NTEU members have proposed solutions that offer real protections against overwork, make forced redundancy a thing of the past, put an end to exploitative casualisation, make performance and change management non-punitive and consensual, establish the right to flexible work and work-from-home arrangements for professional staff, and embody a real commitment to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment targets. I’m sorry to report that on all these crucial issues, our position and management’s are still miles apart.

It’s essential to the integrity of the bargaining process that staff be frankly informed about the union’s and management’s positions. So it was unfortunate that the Vice-Chancellor told everyone in an email last week that under management’s proposal for the new agreement, ‘the majority of our continuing academic staff will continue to be employed in teaching and research positions with a traditional 40/40/20 workload allocation’. Some members have understandably interpreted this as management backing down from their original intention to take the right to 40/40/20 out of the Enterprise Agreement. It’s important that everyone understands that despite the VC’s message, no such backdown is happening, that management’s bargaining position is unchanged, and that they are still proposing to remove the right to 40/40/20 from the EA.

From the start, management have claimed that their intention is to retain 40/40/20 as the reference point for academics on teaching and research contracts. Intentions are all very well – but what matters is the legally enforceable protections staff are given in the EA. Regardless of what Mark Scott claims about what he wants or plans to do, management are still proposing to remove a right to 40/40/20, and still want to force academics to negotiate their teaching-research balance one-on-one with their head of school every year. Our position is very clear: you don’t signal commitment to 40/40/20 by striking it out of the agreement.

The NTEU maintains its belief that this is the most serious attack on staff rights at the university for many, many years. We think that it will only contribute to the intensification of already-out-of-control teaching workloads and degrade the quality of education at the institution. In contrast, our proposal for the future of academic work, which was overwhelmingly endorsed by members at our meeting last week, represents a serious and realistic plan both to regulate academic workload and to end exploitative casualisation.

Bargaining update – bargaining meeting 12, March 29

The bargaining meeting yesterday discussed the following subjects:

Professional staff development fund: We are nearing in-principle agreement on our modest claims for the maintenance of the PSDF, which was established in 2013 in lieu of a better pay-rise. There still is no final agreement that funds can only be used for individual staff career development, not management-imposed training requirements.

Professional staff career and recruitment: There was significant disagreement about the role of internal advertising in professional staff vacancies. The NTEU is determined that institutional knowledge needs to be valued and that professional staff vacancies must therefore be advertised internally first. Management want to be able to advertise externally at the same time. We see this as a significant diminution to staff rights at the university.

Dispute settlement: Management is seeking to make it easier for them to implement changes when we are in dispute. The NTEU is clear that we will not accept this.

Redundancy pay: Management wants severance payments to be based upon the staff member’s average fraction over the whole period of their employment. This would see both winners and losers. The NTEU insists on the most favourable severance conditions for staff possible.

One-hour minimum engagement for casuals: University management want to reduce the current minimum engagement period from three to one hours. The NTEU is very concerned that this will open the door to our most precarious staff being forced to work for less than the existing minimum period. Both parties agreed to think further about ways which will protect casual staff and give the employer more flexibility.

Casualisation: management restated their periodic employment ‘solution’. We reject it because it locks staff in terrible jobs without career prospects; generates workload problems since it doesn’t give staff enough time to keep up with new research in their fields; and breaks the teaching-research nexus, thereby robbing the university, supposedly a research-intensive institution, of its distinctiveness (in contrast, for instance, to schools and TAFEs).

Future of academic work: We have asked management to come back with more information on their position on three areas on our proposals for the future of academic work: what percentage of the academic workforce should be on a balanced teaching-research role; what division of teaching and research constitutes a balanced teaching-research role; and what benefit to the university derives from teaching-only roles.

40/40/20 and individual workload negotiation: Management have not withdrawn their claim to remove the right to 40/40/20 and force academics to negotiate their research-teaching balance annually.

At last week’s Enterprise Bargaining meeting, management continued to refuse our key proposals for badly needed reforms to working conditions at the university. On our vital claims for job security and collegial change management, they refused outright to even engage with our ideas. They have also still not withdrawn their proposal to force academics to negotiate their research-teaching balance annually with their supervisor – the most serious threat to staff rights at the university for many years.

This leaves us with little choice other than to initiate a campaign of industrial action, as authorised by the protected ballot which closes tomorrow. Given our commitment to member-led decision-making, we will be asking you to vote to endorse a strike on Wednesday 11 May of 24 hours’ duration, and to consider the option of extending it into a 48 hour strike on Thursday May 12. We will also be asking you to vote on a possible further strike in week 13 if sufficient progress at bargaining is not made.

Rank-And-File-Action (RAFA) are excited that at today’s USyd NTEU meeting, members endorsed a series of steps to continue building our Enterprise Agreement campaign. 

Over 200 people attended today’s members meeting, with 70% supporting a motion to start escalating our industrial campaign, by calling a mass strike meeting on August 2nd to vote on strikes in week three, followed by strike action on Open Day. A further 24% supported a counterposed motion to call a 48-hour strike immediately. While we’re disappointed that what we regard as a small tactical disagreement was raised to the level of strategy and principle, we’re happy that we can now move together as a branch towards serious organising and equally serious strike action.

We know that to win working conditions commensurate with providing the high-quality education that students deserve, we will need to take further industrial action, including more strikes and pickets in semester two. 

We also know that to make strikes and pickets as effective as possible, we will need to recruit new members to the union, and increase member engagement by organising local area meetings, forums and information sessions. We need to recruit, organise, and mobilise. 

The next step in the campaign is to make sure there is a strong turn out to the mass strike meeting on August 2nd. A resounding ‘YES’ to a strike in week three from hundreds of members will send a clear signal to management that we are serious about conversion rights for casuals and pay for all hours worked; an end to the attacks on the 40-40-20 and the research-teaching nexus; enforceable First Nations employment targets; and, secure and permanent jobs for professional staff. 

Please get involved to help us build awareness and participation in the EA campaign. The first of these will be a phone banking session, which you can sign up for here. Watch this space for more!