UQ workers set to strike during first week of classes

Luke Cass

Members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at the University of Queensland (UQ) will strike on Wednesday next week as part of ongoing enterprise bargaining negotiations.

The strike coincides with the first week of semester at the University. It is thus far unclear how many classes will be cancelled. The Union is planning a “high-vis” action at the gates of the University’s St Lucia campus as part of the action.

universities, “who are failing to detect or respond to any breaches” of Australian Research Council rules surrounding national security and foreign interference.

The government rejected the recommendation that ASIO’s annual report include information on threats to higher education and research, saying that it was inappropriate “to highlight a single sector in [ASIO’s] Annual Report when multiple sectors are being targeted by our adversaries.

It could be misleading and, in some circumstances, give Australia's adversaries actionable information about ASIO investigations.”

The report was commissioned by former Liberal Education Minister Dan Tehan in 2019.

The report recommended that Confucius Institutes’ sources of funding be disclosed; that universities publish annual reports of harassment, intimidation and censorship by foreign powers; and that the Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Authority create a national research integrity office to audit and publicly report on security issues. However, the government only noted these recommendations.

The Group of Eight, of which the University of Sydney is a member, welcomed the government’s response saying “protecting our research from foreign interference is a shared responsibility and never a case of ‘job done’ and we support various compliance, reporting and transparency measures to ensure we protect that which must be protected.”

The NTEU announced its decision to strike having been involved in enterprise bargaining with the University for almost 600 days, after the previous agreement expired on 30 June 2021. It will be the third day of industrial action taken by the NTEU during the negotiations.

The Union is striking over the substantial delay in reaching a new agreement, with NTEU UQ Branch President Andrew Bonnell saying “staff at UQ have been waiting 600 days for an agreement. We still don’t have an agreement around workload and job security.”

“We were hoping that management would clear the decks and that we would have an agreement by the end of February and unfortunately that hasn’t been possible.”

Bonnell told Honi that the Union is seeking substantially improved conversion pathways to secure work, labelling “the exploitation of casual staff” as a “national scandal”. While UQ is currently offering conversions to fixed-term teaching intensive positions for casual staff, Bonnell told Honi that the NTEU is seeking casual conversion pathways in-line with those offered by Western Sydney University in its recently agreed Enterprise Agreement.

The Union is also seeking a final agreement on the University’s offering of gender affirmation leave.