UTS staff strike for better working conditions

By CHRISTINE LAI

Staff at UTS held a two hour stop-work strike between 9-11am on Wednesday morning in their latest bid to escalate demands. The strike follows 12 months of negotiations where no change has been made by university management in response to the National Tertiary Eduction Union’s (NTEU) log of claims.

NTEU UTS Branch President Sarah Attfield chaired the stop-work action. The strike was attended by a multitude of union figures and politicians.

NSW Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi condemned the “decades of neoliberal policies” that have led to a system built on the exploitation of staff at universities across the nation.

She called for a demand of the “end to crushing workloads, end to insecure work” and a fight for better and “more supportive working conditions” for striking staff. Faruqi declared a need for a reinvestment in public funding and the reversal of fee increases under the Job-Ready Graduates package that was introduced in 2020 which has seen university fees for humanities degrees including arts and social sciences more than doubled.

“Universities must be democratic places that are run by staff and students, not by those up in their ivory towers”, Faruqi said. She declared the importance to “wipe all student debt and make TAFE and university free”, stating that it was possible to build a “better university”, but it was one that had to be fought for.

NTEU Secretary calls out “wage theft” at UTS

NTEU Secretary of NSW Damien Cahill criticised UTS for making “insecure employment their business model” despite being a public institution.

“Universities cannot deliver quality education when staff live in constant anxiety. When staff must choose between delivering quality education for students and the hours, they get paid, that’s called wage theft.”

UTS Education Action Group activist Lucia Thornton called out the rampant “class divide” on campus between the workers and university management who were “squeezing staff and students dry”.

“People who run the university have been on an absolute rampage over the last few years. They’ve handed out pay cuts to staff in the context of a cost-of-living crisis which is only worsening, as inflation is skyrocketing, and wages across the board are lagging,” Thornton said.

Thornton criticised the countless staff sackings, cuts to courses, hiked fees and push to online lectures which had “ripped into the quality of learning conditions that students are receiving.”

In 2020, UTS cut more than 350 staff jobs through a university-wide voluntary separation program and last year the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at UTS were required to cut salaries by $3.2 million  which was condemned by the UTS Education Action Group to be an “outrageous attempt to make students and staff pay for a crisis is the corporate university model.”

USyd NTEU Branch President Nick  Reimer declared the importance of taking back “worker agency” from  university management whose attempts to keep the corporate profit prerogative alive came at the cost of “undermining collective power”.

Reimer praised the simultaneous strikes occurring across Newcastle and the University of Queensland today, declaring that it was an “enormous step forward for our sector” and more industrial action would be necessary to win their claims against management.

He declared that shutting down university campuses by striking was the only way to “provide democratic, properly run, properly supported universities where dependence between staff working conditions and student learning conditions is acknowledged.”

“When we recognise our collective par, we are strong. Staff can wrest control back from the corrupt, overpaid, and misguided managerial caste who have taken over education and perverted it for far too many decades,” Riemer said.

Staff want First Nations hiring targets to be in EBA

UTS School of Public Health lecturer Demelza Marlin spoke on the claim for Aboriginal and Islander employment asserting that members were seeking an enforceable 3.4% hiring target to be included in the enterprise bargaining agreement.

“We need something in the enterprise agreement because it gives us a tool to organise around and a mechanism for accountability,” Marlin said.

UTS Senior Researcher Paddy Gibson praised the “collective power” of workers on strike and declared a “workload crises” which developed after the staff cuts over the last few years.

“Far too many people haven’t come back [from staff cuts] and everyone has to pick up the slack. The work hasn’t gone away, the work’s still there. There’s hundreds less staff than there was before,” Gibson said.

The fight against insecure work and the casualisation crisis has been evident across the tertiary education sector with recent strikes occurring at campuses including The University of Sydney, WSU, the University of Newcastle and the University of Queensland.