Campaigning for jobs & a better sector

Michael Evans National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

Throughout the pandemic, your union has been steadfast in our campaigns against the Morrison Government's heartless and destructive policies for our sector; from denying JobSeeker, raising fees and starting cultural wars to the ongoing issue of wage theft.

WAGE THEFT RAMPANT

The Union continues to confront widespread wage theft in higher education, with at least 10 universities either repaying millions of dollars to staff who have had their wages stolen, or are under investigation for wage theft breaches.

We have consistently said that the sector’s chronic reliance on casual and fixed-term employment creates the ideal environment for exploitation. The power imbalance in the relationship between employer and employee lends itself to casual and fixed-term staff being squeezed by management to reduce costs and maximise profits.

The campaigning and organising by NTEU members against wage theft has involved pushing universities to undertake audits, lodging collective disputes, and included surveying our casual members in August. The survey demonstrates that exploitation remains rife amongst casual staff, and widespread across the sector.

But wage theft is common not only in our universities. Our investigations into private higher education providers, where almost every employee is employed insecurely, demonstrate that for many employers, wage theft is the business model of choice.

SECTOR IN CRISIS

With the Government still refusing to recognise how serious the sector’s jobs crisis is, more job losses have been announced.

La Trobe University has started a second round of voluntary redundancies following the 239 who left earlier, Victoria University has announced up to 190 jobs will be lost, while the University of Melbourne has signalled up to 450 jobs to go. At the University of Sydney staff were asked to prepare options for coping with up to 30% of staff.

NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes told Guardian Australia that students’ education would suffer as class sizes balloon and staff are either moved to insecure work or let go.

She said fewer permanent staff would have a negative effect on course quality, student support and course delivery.

Universities will be forced to increase numbers of domestic students in order to avoid a decrease in the level of government funding, Dr Barnes said. The higher education changes see a fall in the level of funding per student, so institutions are essentially being told to teach more, with less funding.

BLOCK THE BILL

The short term fate of Education Minister Dan Tehan’s Jobs-Ready Graduates package should be known this week (beginning 31 August), with the legislation likely to pass the House of Representatives early in the week, to be then considered by the Senate.

The bill’s immediate fate will be determined by the crossbench Senators, with the ALP and Greens already signalling they will vote against it.

NTEU has been campaigning under the banner of #FundUniFairly to have the Senate defeat the Bill, or at the very least refer the legislation to a Senate inquiry, where the package (which decreases overall funding for the sector and makes many courses, particularly humanities, more expensive for students) can be examined in more detail.

The legislation has come under strong criticism ever since Tehan announced it on 19 June. Nationals MP Andrew Gee, the Regional Education Minister, was critical of the legislation before reaching a compromise with Tehan, which now sees social work and mental healthcare courses spared from the proposed fee increases.

Over 1500 members have signed the NTEU's petition, 'Education for all – Stop fee hikes', with over 15,000 signatories, which will be presented to South Australian Senators Rex Patrick and Stirling Griff and Tasmanian Senator Jacqui Lambie, by the Union calling on them to block the bill.

The Government’s own Education Department officials told a Senate hearing that they had not conducted any modelling on the effect the fee hikes will actually have on student course choices, which is the Government’s stated aim for the fee changes.

However, modelling done by the independent Parliamentary Library for the Greens shows that some students will take up to 20 years to pay off university debts under the Government’s proposed fee changes, twice as long as the current system.

The modelling found that the new fee regime would have a disproportionate effect on women, who would be likely to take years longer to pay off the debt than men studying the same courses.