By Mike Head
22 August 2018
After presiding over a series
of betrayals of university workers, the two top officials of the National
Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) are standing aside and backing the installation
of a more openly pro-management leadership.
Both the national secretary,
Grahame McCulloch, who has held the post at either the NTEU or its predecessor
union for 35 years, and national president Jeannie Rea, there for eight years,
have resigned. According to McCulloch, their aim was to “encourage leadership
renewal of the union at all levels.”
The simultaneous departure
points to a significant crisis within the university trade union. Disaffection
among university staff is growing as the union assists managements to impose
government funding cuts via real wage reductions, greater casualisation and
heavier workloads.
Since the NTEU was formed in
1993 to enforce the regressive “enterprise bargaining” system, introduced by
the Keating Labor government, the union has participated in transforming the
country’s public universities into corporatised institutions, serving the
narrow profit interests of employers and the corporate elite.
Like all the other trade
unions in Australia, the NTEU has used enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs)
to split university employees according to their individual workplaces,
suppress industrial action and subordinate them to the profit demands of
university administrations.
Over the past decade this
process has only accelerated, since the NTEU backed the last Greens-backed Labor
government’s “education revolution.” This so-called “revolution” has forced
under-funded universities to compete with each other to enrol high-fee paying
students, attract corporate sponsorships and drive down costs, at the expense
of the educational interests of both staff and students.
Between 2009 and 2015, only
6.4 out of every 100 new positions created at Australian universities were
tenured teaching or research jobs. At the same time, the universities and
related companies have generated more than $22 billion a year in revenue for
the wealthy elites, mainly by charging exorbitant fees to international
students.
Around the world, parallel
processes have already triggered strikes this year by university workers and
school teachers, including in Britain, Canada, the US, New Zealand and Sri
Lanka, often in defiance of their own unions. Similar rebellions are already
brewing in Australia.
Over the past year, opposition
among university workers has grown to the NTEU’s sellout deals in the seventh
round of enterprise bargaining since 1993. These have included a betrayal at
the University
of Sydney so blatant that the union’s own branch committee recommended
a “no” vote; a similar sellout at Western Sydney
University, and an agreement at Western Australia’s Murdoch
University that cut wages, increased workloads, facilitated
retrenchments and overturned hard-won conditions.
To replace McCulloch and Rea,
the leadership’s “NTEU Future Team” backed the unopposed nominations of Alison
Barnes, from Sydney’s Macquarie University, as president and Matthew McGowan,
McCulloch’s long-serving assistant, as secretary.
The election of these two
marks a further pro-corporate shift. At Macquarie University, Barnes has
pioneered “interest-based bargaining” (IBB), which consists of months of
backroom talks, based on defining “common interests” between the union and
management.
In reality, IBB means devising
schemes to overcome rank-and-file opposition to management demands for further
cost-cutting and pro-business restructuring. Over the past six years, prominent
trade unions have used IBB to inflict mass retrenchments, wage reductions and
the overturning of hard-won conditions on their members.
At Macquarie, a centrepiece of
the IBB drive has been a misleadingly titled “jobs families” proposal, endorsed
by Barnes. It will permit management to coerce up to a quarter of academics to
allocate 70 or 80 percent of their workload to teaching, with no time for
research, overturning the traditional academic workload of 40 percent research,
40 percent teaching and 20 percent administration.
In April, a joint email circulated
by Barnes and the university’s human resources director announced “significant
progress on the major strategic topic of academic job families” and declared
“in principle” agreement on a 2 percent annual pay rise—well below the increase
in average household expenses.
At a Macquarie University NTEU
branch meeting on June 19, opposition to these joint proposals led to a
majority vote for resolutions moved by Socialist Equality Party supporters,
calling for a unified national struggle by university workers to overturn
budget cuts and for vastly increased education funding, at all levels, to
guarantee the basic social right to free, first-class education for all
students.
These resolutions were passed
in the presence of Barnes and NTEU officials. They advanced a perspective
completely opposed to that of the NTEU, which is why Barnes and the union have
suppressed them. Unlike other union resolutions, those advanced by the SEP and
passed by the union membership have not been circulated to all Macquarie staff
or to their colleagues elsewhere. This underscores the anti-democratic
character of the union itself, notwithstanding McCulloch’s claim that he led a
“highly democratic structure.”
In reality, the NTEU
specialises in cajoling university workers into accepting the erosion of their
conditions and basic rights, invariably keeping them in the dark about the real
content of the agreements that the union signs behind their backs.
The Barnes-McGowan “NTEU
Future Team” has nominated Western Australian state secretary Gabe Gooding as
assistant national secretary. She was at the centre of this year’s sellout at
Murdoch University. According to the Future Team’s election brochure, she “led
the campaign against the aggressive management tactic at Murdoch University.”
In fact, the NTEU cynically
exploited an application by Murdoch management last year to terminate an
existing EBA, initially threatening to unilaterally slash salaries and
conditions. The union ultimately pushed through a deal, despite immense
hostility among its members, that gave the management practically everything it
wanted.
Nationally, the NTEU insisted
that its members could support their Murdoch colleagues by rushing to sign EBAs
everywhere else. The NTEU’s sole concern was to preserve its role as the
enforcer of management demands.
Because of growing hostility to
these betrayals, a rival leadership faction is supporting a pseudo-left
candidate against Gooding. University of Technology Sydney branch president
Vince Caughley, once a public member of the International Socialist
Organisation (ISO), is canvassing votes in the name of “grassroots leadership
renewal” to “make union strength a priority.”
The perspective of the
pseudo-left organisations is to divert outrage on the part of union members to
ever-deepening cuts behind the election of yet another pro-business Labor
government.
Whatever the tactical
differences between the two factions, Caughley’s position echoes that of the
“Future Team” in calling for support for the Australian Council of Trade
Unions’ “Change the Rules” campaign.
Also revealing is the fact that
Caughley is backed by another ex-ISO leader, Michael Thomson, the union’s New
South Wales state secretary, who was instrumental in pushing through last
year’s NTEU sellout at the University of Sydney.
To fight for their basic
rights, students and university employees must decisively break from the NTEU,
and begin to form workplace rank and file committees that are completely
independent from the union and from Labor and the Greens. Such committees must
turn out to other university workers across the country and to workers
everywhere in a unified struggle against wage cuts, the deepening social
crisis, and the escalating drive towards authoritarianism and war. This
requires a socialist perspective, aimed at the complete reorganisation of
society in the interests of the vast majority, not the profits of the wealthy
few. We urge all those who want to take forward this fight to contact the
Committee For Public Education (CFPE), established by the Socialist Equality
Party.
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