Campaigning on A&TSI employment targets

Frank Gafa, Branch Organiser, Monash University

Frank Gafa, Branch Organiser, Monash UniversityNTEU members are passionate about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) employment targets.

Development of targets

NTEU has long advocated for and won clauses in Enterprise Agreements around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander (A&TSI) employment targets.

Traditionally, the first iterations of employment targets Enterprise Agreements referred to a percentage of the overall staff cohort, while a useful figure, this proved to be easy for management to manipulate as the percentage of A&TSI staff would increase when a redundancy round occurred without a single A&TSI person being employed.

To address this in recent bargaining rounds, the National A&TSI Policy Committee has pushed for these to be hard numeric targets, which have the benefit of providing a consistent picture of the level of A&TSI employment, weathering fluctuations in overall employment numbers due to redundancies and restructuring of universities.

While the NTEU started the conversation, over the years other external players have joined to ensure that universities must take the increased employment of A&TSI people seriously.

Not only are there clear stipulations in government funding arrangements around the need for universities to be striving towards a 3% target, but the representative body Universities Australia has also set the same target for universities in its Indigenous Strategy 2017-2020.

Conversations with management

With targets now being an obligation for universities in order to receive funding from the Government, it has created a scenario where management may be increasingly open to constructive conversations around meeting targets in Enterprise Agreements, but it is up to the NTEU to lead these conversations.

The conversation with management may sound like an industrial task but in fact all Branches should see this as an organising opportunity. This was made no more apparent to me than during the last round of bargaining at Monash University, when we informed members that management had pushed back against the current A&TSI targets in the Agreement.

We were met with shock and intense frustration at what some members and potential members assumed was a core value of Monash, not realising that targets were in fact an NTEU initiative only adopted by universities through our campaigning and organising on the ground.

What this told me is that A&TSI employment targets were seen by Monash members as a key part of their unionism and it was a reminder that union values of fairness and equity in the workplace is of huge importance to our members.

Organising opportunities

Organising around Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander employment targets should be a priority for Branches throughout the life of Agreements, but it is never more important than in the year leading into bargaining.

First and foremost to organise in this area Branches need to ensure that the narrative is correct and being controlled by us, for too many years management has taken the lead in telling the university community that targets are a core value of the institution rather than something that has to be fiercely defended and improved on by the NTEU in every bargaining round.

Union education is a key part of ensuring members will advocate for A&TSI targets, but also a key tool in attracting potential members to join the NTEU and protect the current clauses. This union education must also be done in partnership with A&TSI members at the Branch, there is no stronger narrative to members, potential members and management than affected members clearly articulating that the enforcement and strengthening of current clauses is core NTEU business.

The power of being vocal about enforcement is in the understanding that the spotlight will force management to make real movements towards action on improving A&TSI employment.

Actively communicating about NTEU expectations on enforcement and showing potential inaction by management is a powerful organising tool when it may mean raising serious questions about whether management are complying with the terms of Government funding agreements and expectations of Universities Australia.

Management should no longer be able to rely on glossy employment strategy documents without having to show real structured programs and the progress attached to those programs.

Put simply in order to organise effectively in this space we need to ask ourselves four questions:

• Are we actively engaging with our A&TSI members?

• Do we have control of the narrative?

• Is our membership educated on the history of A&TSI employment targets at our Branches?

• Are we actively communicating managements action, or inaction to members?

All of this can build power as our membership is passionate about A&TSI employment targets.

To organise in this space is important for the NTEU, for members and potential members, and for the respect and safety of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community within higher education and is something we should be actively pursuing in the lead up to the next round of bargaining. ◆