By Ben Reid and Jo Williams
Andy Blunden's attempt to justify his selling of the enterprise bargain agreement to NTEU members at Melbourne University (above) evades the real issues. The opposition to the agreement from wide sectors of the union and the MU Students Union is well founded.
The key point Blunden does not address is that the campaign to defend tertiary education is not an abstract principle divorced from "purely" industrial issues. The common interest of staff and students, of defending publicly funded tertiary education, is the basis for the staff-student alliance.
The type of agreement adopted at MU is an obstacle to building such an alliance, not only because it undermines the students' campaign against up-front fees, but because it also prevents the staff from campaigning against the adverse effects on their wages, conditions and job security of this latest stage of the corporatisation process.
The agreement stipulates that bi-monthly "consultative" meetings are to be held between union and management to monitor the achievement of targets. It is true that the union is not obliged to cooperate. In other words, the union is obliged to do nothing, while management restructures the university to achieve those targets.
If these targets are not met, the union is only able to argue that the third stage of the pay rise be linked to different targets. But the precedent remains that this is linked to accepting revenue targets connected to the restructuring and corporatisation of the university!
While the introduction of up-front undergraduate fees is only a small portion of the revenue targets, the deal clearly signals that the union will actively assist university management in extending the user-pays principle and accelerating the process of corporatisation in return for an extra 6.5%. Instead of pretending that the university may not enrol any full-fee-paying students, Blunden should ask the question: if agreeing to these targets is really so harmless, why was management willing to pay an extra 6.5% for the NTEU's agreement?
Yes, departments aren't mentioned in the agreement. But this is the danger. The branch has agreed to make potential unspecified trade-offs. Management can now designate all sorts of restructuring processes "necessary" to achieve the "productivity goals" (which is how the management has defined the revenue targets).
Whole departments can be abolished and the funding for staff shifted to those areas capable of generating the revenue necessary to meet the targets in the agreement as long as there is "no overall reduction in staff numbers." So staff in "unproductive courses or departments" can and will be pressured not to resist jobs being transferred because this could jeopardise the pay increase. This will deepen divisions between staff members.
Most importantly, Blunden has not responded to a major issue raised by our article. Members were not presented with the option of fighting for the pay rise and conditions. Given that at the union mass meeting just under 50% voted against the agreement, there was a strong enough sentiment for a well-argued alternative strategy to have won majority support. This would have strengthened our branch of the NTEU.
Blunden has previously argued that if the union did not accept the deal the administration would sideline it by putting its proposal to a ballot of all staff. But the ballot happened anyway, with a large majority voting for it, given the absence of union opposition to the deal. By not taking a position of opposition the union gave legitimacy to a ballot of non-union staff members.