The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at Deakin University took strike action on Friday after seven months of unsuccessful enterprise bargaining. Members of the NTEU’s Deakin Branch voted to strike on Monday 17 April after Deakin management’s decision to put forward a non-union ballot just three days earlier.
The NTEU at Deakin is campaigning on many of the same issues as The University of Sydney: academic workloads, casualisation and pay. They want management to maintain the 40:40:20 model of academic workloads and create 150 extra permanent positions for current casual staff by 2024.
The Union is demanding a right to flexible and work from home agreements for professional staff. In light of the current cost of living crisis, workers are bargaining for a fair pay rise. Management has offered a 2.85% yearly pay rise, significantly lower than the offers of other universities in Australia. The NTEU is demanding a 15% salary increase over the life of the next enterprise agreement or the Consumer Price Index (CPI) +1.5%, whichever is higher.
NTEU representatives claim that the proposed offer, put to a non-union ballot, does not meet any of the Union’s key demands.
NTEU Deakin Branch President Piper Rodd told Honi, “We are taking protected industrial action to raise awareness across the University that what management is doing should be of concern to all workers and students because it undermines the right to have meaningful input into what kind of university we want to be. We ask Deakin workers to vote no to management’s disrespectful and inadequate offer so that we can get back to the bargaining table to negotiate a better deal for all workers.”
During the stop work action, speeches were held which were live streamed on the Deakin NTEU twitter.
Kim from the Faculty of Arts and Education began after an Acknowledgement of Country, stating, “Our concerns about what’s happening to us as academics are long standing and they’re deeply serious. I think each of us know people who have suffered, and I mean in the sense of suffering.
“What we’re experiencing is incessant, and it’s incessant creeping intensification of work, and what’s worse about that is that it’s personalised. We are individuated, we’re neoliberalised, and when it doesn’t feel good — when we don’t feel good because we can’t do the work — we feel like a failure.”
Andrew Stapleton, a branch committee member of Deakin NTEU and a professional staff member, spoke to the importance of voting no.
“The work intensification pressures aren’t just for academic staff. They are felt really deeply in professional areas (…) This agreement does nothing, absolutely nothing to meaningfully address the rampant and sometimes frankly idiotic restructures that universities have been going through – not just since the pandemic but over the past few years.”
Tom, who has been a casual sessional staff member for the past ten years, spoke about the risk casuals face in accepting the non-union ballot. “[Their deal] will not be enough. This will be a system designed to extract more from us, without actually following through on what we need to have a successful career as researchers.
“They do our communities a disservice when they refuse to give us research within our teaching roles. To split academic research and teaching is a terrible crime. We are qualified as educators because we are researchers.”
Honi has approached Deakin University for comment.‘Incessant creeping intensification of work’: Deakin University goes on strike
