Delegate profile:
Bailey Sharp My name is Bailey, I’m a casual tutor in the college of Design and Social Context at RMIT University. I started at RMIT the same week COVID reached Australia. In the first part of 2020, though I was a Union member, I wasn’t active. A few months in, after the frenzy of adapting to the pandemic gave way to the long depression of living COVID-normal, I found I was not given any work in the second semester. I decided I’d use a bit of my new (undesirable) free time to look into what my Casuals Network was doing. The first meeting I attended was relatively small, made up of maybe 10 stalwart members who turned to each other to ask how we should proceed. So much debate had just happened about the best way forward for the Union and there was so much carnage in the sector. I think the feeling across a lot of campuses was what was worth doing and what could we possibly do from a position of such weakness? At this point individual members at RMIT had recognised they were not being paid properly for their marking work. There are three bands of payment for marking at our university, the highest of which is the ‘academic judgement rate’ (AJR), to be paid for marking work that requires academic knowledge and skills. Several members had discovered that they were being paid at the base rate, which had erroneously become described as the ‘standard’, a difference of nearly $20 per hour. Not only is this theft, the conflation of the base rate as ‘standard’ is insulting. It’s easy to see that the vast majority of marking work done at a tertiary level requires ‘academic judgement’. So the matter of being paid at the AJR really sat at the intersection of two pain-points for casual members: wage theft and disrespect. Plus the wording in our Enterprise Agreement is clear on the matter, so ahead of Agreement negotiations an enforcement campaign felt timely. Some of these members bravely took their underpayments to the Union and together they forced repayments from the University (not without a lot of work and risk on the individual workers part). These members’ wins proved that management didn’t have a counter-argument, only a tactic: stick to meting out individual payments and keep them quiet, so only the bolshiest members, or those with little to lose, will pursue the money they’re owed.
At the time of writing this, about a year on from the commencement of the campaign, the Casuals Network, the RMIT NTEU Branch and the Victorian Division are working closely to win a collective outcome for former and current casual staff. After an initial meeting with HR (which was, quite frankly, embarrassing on the part of the University) we’re organising for a second, mass member meeting to force RMIT into forming a joint working party. Following the model of last year’s win for the Arts Casuals at Melbourne University, we want to see that casuals who have been underpaid are identified, contacted and re-paid. We believe for many people this will mean thousands of dollars. From the first meeting I attended, where members grappled with the overwhelming attack on casuals that came with COVID, it has taken real focus on the part of the Network to persist in moving this campaign along, step by step.
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We will now head into bargaining negotiations and future campaigns as a stronger, more united cohort than we were a year ago.
The AJR campaign doesn’t address the needs of all casual workers but as a starting point it has helped grow the Network and the NTEU’s casual membership. We will now head into bargaining negotiations and future campaigns as a stronger, more united cohort than we were a year ago. If we want to see change in the sector and, in the immediate future, positive changes to our conditions, we need the involvement of everyone, at whatever level they can participate. This is the only way to exercise our full union power. Get more information about becoming an NTEU Delegate at delegates.nteu.org.au
Connect ® Volume 14, no. 2 ® Semester 2, August 2021
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