Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism before it undermines us As part of Friday Sessions, the NTEU’s online national training program, we recently ran a seminar entitled ‘Neoliberalism: how it infiltrates universities, how it affects us, and how can we resist it?’ We hope to open and maintain a conversation about how the neoliberalism of the university sector affects us as workers and unionists. We want to reframe the narrative and bring about the university sector we deserve. The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis. That real crisis adds to the manufactured crisis of decades of neoliberal ideology and managerialism that has decimated the university sector. To quote one t whom we largely owe this widespread decimation to: ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’ and that the actions taken ‘depend on the ideas that are lying around’.1 Thanks to Milton Friedman and also the Mont Pelerin Society, the fringe idea lying around of neoliberalism took root immediately following the 1970s crises of stagflation and oil embargo.2 Whether ‘real’ or ‘perceived’, neoliberal ideology blamed these crises on the failure of the socially-democratic Keynesian state, framing state intervention as ‘unnatural’ and claiming it causes societal breakdown. This near-mythic ethos enforces extreme individual responsibility where collectivism and social welfare are an affront to the ‘natural’ order.1,2,3
Victoria Fielding University of South Australia
Kent Getsinger University of Adelaide
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Neoliberalism-proper entered in the 1980s with the Reagan and Thatcher Governments. We have them to thank for some of the cruellest austerity ever enacted, second only to the ‘shock treatment’ imposed on the Global South. In particular, Chile first suffered neoliberalism’s dictatorship implementation for what would be revealed to be anything but freeing individuals from the ‘tyranny’ of the state.2 Contrary to claims of enabling the ‘free market’, neoliberalism was (is) in fact a radical state reconfiguration of accumulation of wealth and power to the very top. What resulted is many institutions enforcing cruel
Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020
‘trade liberalisation, deregulation, wage rollbacks, union attacks, privatisation and fiscal retrenchment’.2 This reconfiguration that erodes our collectivism and conditions is also happening in the university sector. Since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s, universities have seen fee deregulation, mass precarious work, withering of academic collegiately, erosion of the public institution and a shift in power to managers. The neoliberal ideological rhetoric of the ‘free market’ is then used to justify high manager salaries, aggressive and cruel restructures, job insecurity and abhorrent workplace practices.4 When we speak to our colleagues about the insidious neoliberalism of the university sector, they see this culture as the cause of anxiety, shame and resentment in their working lives. They want change, but they don’t know what change looks like. We argue that to reframe our work in a neoliberal age, we need to show our colleagues how neoliberalism positions both our university work and our union activity as illegitimate. Only then can we collectively see that this is just one story, and that there are other stories which fight back against the shame of living in a neoliberal frame. Through a neoliberal frame, university work is perceived to be the same as the public sector: as a cost taxpayers have to bear, rather than an investment in the health of the economy and society. Universities are a microcosm of our larger society that has resulted in power and wealth concentration to the top. This contradictory
