BY SHUA GARFIELD
HOBART — Teaching staff at the University of Tasmania have voted to hold a 24-hour strike on July 18 after negotiations between the National Tertiary Education Union and university administration on a new enterprise agreement broke down.
Of Australia's 39 tertiary education institutions, 37 have settled this latest round of enterprise bargaining with an agreement to increase salaries by 12% or more. The University of Tasmania, however, initially offered staff only a 6% pay increase and increased it to 8% only after the first offer was refused.
When staff unions refused the second offer, the university administration attempted to avoid negotiating with the unions altogether by holding a secret ballot for general staff. An overwhelming 2:1 majority of staff voted to reject the university's new offer, anyway.
Teaching staff have also rejected an offer from the university of a 12% salary increase, with 2% of it contingent on getting extra funds for carrying out federal education minister David Kemp's workplace reforms, and 2% contingent on otherwise increasing university funding.
The NTEU has demanded that the 12% pay increase be guaranteed, with no contingencies attached.
As hotly debated as pay issues have been, however, according to Jo Fox, the union's Tasmanian branch president, issues of working conditions have begun to overshadow salary increases in the minds of teaching staff.
To halt the decade-long decline in staff numbers, the NTEU has demanded a moratorium on forced redundancies or a guarantee of no net loss in jobs. The union also wants staff to be guaranteed their long service leave, after the university expressed an interest in paying out that entitlement.
The university is able to afford these concessions. In December, an NTEU analysis of the university's budget revealed that it had an annual average surplus of $11 million in the years 1995-2000.
The administration claimed at the time that it needed to save money to upgrade buildings and infrastructure — a claim disproved by a recent university review which found that current infrastructure is more than adequate for the university's needs.
The university then changed its excuse, claiming that the surplus was in fact intended for scholarship funds for disadvantaged students.
The union claims, however, that the surplus has been used to build up the university's stock portfolio, now worth over $60 million, containing shares in such companies as Rio Tinto, North Ltd, and Westpac.
The university has defended its large investments, which now provide 3-4% of the university's income, saying that federal cutbacks to education spending have forced the university to look to other sources of funding to remain viable.
Fox told Green Left Weekly that when the NTEU argued that staff were also an important "investment", university administrators flatly replied, "no, they're not".
Teaching staff will hold pickets on both the Hobart and Launceston campuses of the University of Tasmania.
Both the Tasmanian branch of the National Union of Students and the Tasmania University Union have called for students to strike on the day, in solidarity with staff.
On Hobart campus, the picket will culminate with an afternoon unity rally of staff and students.
TUU president Mark Evinhuis told Green Left Weekly that the student union will campaign for students to encourage their lecturers to take part in the strike.