Karen Fletcher
Bespectacled anthropology professors may not fit the militant unionist stereotype, but they and their comrade faculty administrators, research scientists, sessional tutors and IT help-desk jockeys are becoming an increasingly familiar sight on industrial picket lines surrounding Australian campuses.
Dr Jeremy Smith, coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Ballarat, sociology lecturer and researcher, president of the university's branch of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and Socialist Alliance activist, has been in the thick of the recent upsurge of industrial conflict on Australian campuses. Green Left Weekly spoke to him in the lead-up to the NTEU's June 1 national day of action against PM John Howard and federal education minister Brendan Nelson's Higher Education Workplace Reform Requirements (HEWRRs).
The federal Coalition government's latest industrial "reform" package, designed to dismantle the last of the hard-won gains of the labour movement, is the centrepiece of a project the government has been undertaking throughout its three terms, a project that has included concerted, targeted attacks on the strongest and most effective unions in the country, including the Maritime Union of Australia, the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union and the Victorian branch of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. The NTEU, which represents academic and general staff in the higher-education sector, has become the government's latest target.
Smith says his union has been singled out because of its relative success in maintaining decent, secure jobs for higher education workers despite the deregulation of the labour market that began with the ALP's introduction of enterprise-level bargaining in the early 1980s.
"Like the building and manufacturing unions, we have used 'pattern bargaining' strategies very effectively", he said. "We have refused to allow the higher education work force to be splintered between academic and general staff, between campuses or between states. We have struggled, as a national union, for decent wages and conditions across the whole sector. The Howard government really hates that. Its goal is to break that collective power. It wants us all negotiating with management as individuals."
Smith says he, like many younger academics, has personally benefited from the success of the NTEU's industrial strategies. Early in his academic career he, like so many young workers, was unable to secure a permanent full-time job, lurching instead from contract to contract. "I got a couple of 12-month teaching contracts, but mostly they were six-months or less, he says. In 1999 he was rescued from the "McJob" nightmare by the HECE (Higher Education Contract of Employment) Award, a hard-won achievement of the NTEU that prevented higher education employers from using contracts, except where the work was genuinely "fixed-term". Smith was finally employed on a permanent basis in his early 30s.
Smith says the HEWRRs and the changes to industrial laws announced by Howard last week mean the end of the HECE Award. Smith is possibly part of the last generation of academic workers that will have any hope of a permanent job. "If all these changes get through, most people from now on will be on contract. The lucky ones might get up to five years, but most will be on 12 months or less", he says.
"The government wants everyone on AWAs (Australian Workplace Agreements), which are individual contracts that pit the organisational might of universities and the government against individual workers, who are forbidden from organising in their own defence. Guess who comes out best in that negotiation!"
The Ballarat University branch of the NTEU has been holding weekly mass meetings of members and several strikes, and has imposed bans on student graduations, research data collection and even rubbish collection and toilet paper re-supplies, in an attempt to bring management to the negotiating table. Their last agreement expired in June 2003 and, like many other universities, management has been stalling negotiations in anticipation of the Howard government's assault on the union.
"We've got around 200 members on the Ballarat campus", Smith said, "and we get more than half of them to many of our meetings. We are ready and willing to fight."
The branch will hold a two-hour stop work on June 1 and demonstrate in the streets of Ballarat, where they are big news. "We make the front page and the evening TV news bulletin in the regional media", says Smith. "The uni is one of the biggest employers in town and uni business is community business. We are determined to make a splash."
Smith says the federal government has been "very smart" in its HEWRR strategy. "They've tried to break the NTEU before", he said, "and they have learned from their mistakes. This time they are offering the universities an irresistible bribe to break us — recurrent, public university funding. That's the kind of funding universities — especially small, regional universities like Ballarat — really need because they have been reduced, by a series of cuts to public education funding, to scrabbling for student and corporate money just to keep afloat.
"This fight is our toughest ever, but we are resolute. June 1 is just the beginning. We need to hold our union together and combine its strength with that of the other unions who are willing to fight. We're going to need collars of every colour struggling together if we're going to win this blue."
From Green Left Weekly, June 1, 2005.
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