The industrial dispute at the University of Sydney, where I work, is continuing. On the first day on the picket line, I wrote a letter to our Vice-Chancellor (for overseas readers, that's roughly equivalent to University President) explaining the reasons for the strike. The letter has been quite widely circulated. Here's the text.
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| Source: USYD NTEU |
7 March 2013
The Vice-Chancellor
University of Sydney
Dear Michael
Why I went on strike
today
Thank you for your emails of 12 and 20 February, and Stephen
Garton’s of 1 March, and Boyd Williams’ of 5 March, giving me the management’s
views about the enterprise bargaining and our industrial action. In return, I
will try to help you understand why a significant part of your staff are on the
picket line today. I’m one of the
oldest inhabitants of the village – my first job at the University of Sydney started
in 1971 - I care a lot for this place, and for the people I work with.
University staff don’t take industrial action lightly. As you may know, a strike rarely has a
single cause. It generally grows
from a build-up of frustrations, setbacks and conflicts that result in a loss
of trust in management. That is
the case at the University of Sydney.
It is the same in much of the Australian university system, which has
become more troubled, and more tense and distrustful, than in previous
generations.
Universities as employers have not made it their priority to
have a secure, committed workforce.
Over time, university managers have responded to funding pressures by
making job insecurity grow – through outsourcing of general staff work, erosion
of tenure, and above all, casualization.
Our glossy brochures don’t admit this, but around half the undergraduate
teaching in Australia is now done by temporary staff.
To management, this looks like flexibility. To many of my younger colleagues, it
looks like a life of precarious labour, scrabbling for short-term, part-time
and totally insecure appointments.
These are poor conditions for building an intellectual workforce. From an educational point of view, it
means a mass of teaching done by staff who can’t build up the experience, depth
of knowledge, or confident relationship with students that are needed for the
very best teaching.
The full-time staff too have been under growing stress. You will be very familiar with the
worsening student/staff ratios in the last generation. No pretence that we can work smarter
can reduce this pressure, on both academic and general staff. The industrial relations colleagues
call this “labour intensification”, and it’s a reality at the chalk face in
this university.
At the same time there has been more micro-management and
surveillance of how we do our jobs.
The staff of this university are increasingly enmeshed in a thicket of
anonymous online control systems - to document our courses, get permission to
travel or to do our research, get our “performance” managed, and many other
things - taking increasing slices of our time and energy. In other ways too, we have been losing
autonomy in our day-to-day work.
Have we agreed to these changes?
In most cases we were never asked; they have simply been imposed on us.
That’s part of a broader decline of organizational democracy
and self-management in the university.
We don’t have any forum, or set of forums, where the problems of this
university can be debated in a participatory way, with some prospect of
influencing outcomes. The nearest
we have is the Academic Board, where good discussions do occur, but most
academic staff aren’t invited and of course non-academic staff aren’t
represented. What we do have in
abundance are media releases, “staff news” (comprising PR and commercial
“offers”), all-staff emails from you and Stephen, threatening messages from the
HR Director, even videos that you send us - in short, announcements from the
management. It’s not a good
substitute.
With performance management, online surveillance systems,
and closed decision-making, it appears that the university authorities these
days don’t really trust the staff - to know our trades, to act responsibly, or
to share in running the place.
That’s an important reason for the depth of anger about the
redundancies issue in 2011-12. We
are grown-up people, we know universities have financial problems, we too want
to work out solutions – and we know there are many ways for institutions to
handle financial pressure. Instead
of an invitation to work on the problems together, we saw colleagues
threatened, tenure weakened, arbitrary rules imposed, and mysterious exemptions
granted. And then a further round
of redundancies was mishandled too.
I don’t know what your original intention was; but as these events
unfolded, staff saw the management behaving unpredictably, wrecking the
livelihoods of valued colleagues, and undermining security for all the staff.
It’s not encouraging to see university managers across the
country increasingly resembling the executives of big corporations – in pay and
conditions, in language, in techniques of running an organization, and in
hard-handed approaches to the workforce.
Corporate managers are an increasingly powerful, rich and selfish group
in Australian society. The more
that university managers integrate with them, the bigger the gulf that will
open with the staff of the universities.
When it came to the enterprise bargaining, then, there was a
big question: would you and your colleagues recognize these growing concerns
and use the enterprise bargaining to build a positive relationship with the
staff, or treat it as an occasion to beat the staff and the union back? Unfortunately it was the second, and
that’s basically why this strike has happened.
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| Source: USYD NTEU |
I’m not on the bargaining team; I follow what is happening from union report-backs, management announcements (including Ann Brewer’s welcome visit to my Faculty), and the documents. Some things have been obvious. Management wasn’t trying for a prompt agreement. When management did put proposals on the table, they weren’t proposals for improved staff conditions – they offered weakened rights and less security. I know that management contest the NTEU’s statements about this, but I’ve looked at the documents, compared management proposals with the previous enterprise agreement, and the union is right. On some points management proposed startling increases in managerial prerogative, and weakened accountability by management to staff. On a number of points the proposal erodes existing protections for staff. What management did in writing this offer was moving in exactly the wrong direction.
On the pay issue, I’m not a specialist but I do have common sense. To suggest that one of the richest universities in Australia, which you tell us in other ways is prospering, which can afford major new building works and salaries for senior staff (including me) on the current scale, will be driven broke by more than a 2% wage deal for the staff – well, like Alice, I may be urged to believe six impossible things before breakfast but I can’t believe that.
I’m glad you have recognized that to drop the guarantee of
intellectual freedom from the enforceable industrial agreement was a wrong
move. Thank you for changing
approach on that. Please look at
the other issues in the same spirit.
Since the Dawkins ‘reforms’ twenty-five years ago,
Australian governments have tried to get an expanded university system on the
cheap. The decline of public
sector funding, and the bizarre doctrine that intensifying competitive
pressures will make under-resourced education systems work better, are
background problems we all have to cope with. But there is room for manoeuvre.
I think the most difficult thing, for your generation of
university administrators, is remembering that you are running a billion-dollar
institution that is not a
corporation. Our staff, both
academic and general, are proud to work here precisely because it’s a
university. It’s concerned with
the making of highly sophisticated knowledge and with the most advanced and
demanding forms of education.
These are the public interests for which Australian society puts
resources into the university system.
The staff are trying to make this happen, and a good personnel policy
for a university will respect and support them. The very last thing a university needs is an intimidated and
conformist workforce.
Most of us would welcome a more cooperative and respectful
relationship with the university management. There are benefits for you – including benefits from a
better relationship with our unions.
The unions will tell you the tough stuff, the hard truths about working
life in the university; and it’s in union forums that the best thinking about
higher education in Australia is currently happening. It’s a funny thing, which you won’t hear from corporate
advisors: for navigating the next stages of university life in this country,
the unions are your best friends.
In the next few years, especially if we have an Abbott
government, university managements might try to weaken the unions and casualize
the workforce more. It seems
some Vice-Chancellors and their advisors would like to try this - but not
all. I hope that Sydney’s
managerial group will follow a more intelligent path, because there is
something at stake here beyond staff morale and a particular log of
claims. The future character of
our university system is involved.
The staff on the picket line here are the people involved in
building universities for the twenty-first century, in practice as well as in
imagination. We’d rather do this
with your cooperation.
With best wishes,
Raewyn Connell
