financial crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic to accelerate the transformation of universities into largely vocational institutions servicing the narrow profit requirements of big business, both in teaching and research. This is provoking student anger and concern.
At the University of Adelaide, where up to 130 full-time equivalent staff face retrenchment, the Labor Party-led National Union of Students (NUS), which has been virtually silent throughout the pandemic, felt compelled to organize a protest outside the vice-chancellor’s office under the banner, “No mergers, and no staff cuts at Adelaide Uni! Don’t trash our education!”
The refusal of the student unions and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), which covers staff members, to mount any struggle whatsoever against the government-management offensive across the country has encouraged the employers to go further. More job cuts have been unveiled, some involving brutal “spill-and-fill” operations that force staff members to compete against each for smaller numbers of positions.
Despite the student-led petition at Macquarie University, which forced the reinstatement of maths lecturer Frank Valckenborgh, the management is still proceeding with the “Hunger Games”-style process to terminate the jobs of 34 other academics. The University of Tasmania has proposed to shed five senior academics from its Australian Maritime College.
Last year, the NTEU dragooned staff at the University of Adelaide into accepting a 3.5 percent pay cut, loss of annual leave loading, postponement of a pay increase of 1.5 percent and a “purchased leave” scheme. The NTEU falsely claimed this would save 200 jobs. This is was very similar to the La Trobe University in Melbourne is conducting a restructure that would reduce overall staffing levels by the equivalent of 200 full-time positions, after exploiting the NTEU’s bogus “Job Protection Framework” (JPF) to announce around 400 redundancies under the framework last July and August.
The NTEU proposed the JPF in May 2020 to allow university managements nationally to cut wages by up to 15 percent while still eliminating “at least 12,000 jobs.” After an eruption of rank-and-file opposition to the JPF, most universities abandoned the deal to pursue similar pacts with individual NTEU branches. Since then, up to 90,000 jobs—permanent, contract and casual—have been eliminated.
The NTEU is continuing to block any unified struggle by staff and students, and is instead trying to tie educators into another round of enterprise bargaining. This regime splits workers into individual workplaces and subjects them to the associated Fair Work Act anti-strike laws imposed by the last federal Labor government.
