Note: The full interview is available here.
If you’ve been following Lot’s Wife this year, you’d be aware of our coverage and support for Monash NTEU members. From publishing articles, to covering their stop work action on March 20th and more recently their rally on October 7th. Whilst we’re proud supporters of the NTEU, why should other students care? To answer these questions Sam and I had the pleasure of interviewing Monash Branch Committee members Blair Williams, Carol Que, and Tony Williams.
Sam: First of all, what is the NTEU?
Tony: The NTEU is the National Tertiary Education Union. Basically, anybody who works at a University in an academic or professional capacity is covered by us, we’re their union; basically, anybody who doesn’t work in the gardens, in security or work in Monash’s retail spaces are able to have us represent them. The two biggest things that the union does on an ongoing basis are member advocacy, so if members are pulled into disciplinary hearings or if there’s any sort of trouble in the workplace that they need representation for, then we are there to send representatives to help them and to help them understand their rights and what is happening to make sure that they’re not getting screwed over by management. The other thing that we do, which we just finished up about six months ago now is enterprise bargaining; we bargain with the university for all of the pay and conditions that we’re all covered by, regardless of whether you’re a member or not.
Blair: We’re grassroots organised, and the rank and file, basically. Because we’re all on the branch committee of the Monash NTEU branch, and we’re trying to move towards a more activist union rather than an insurance scheme kind of union. So obviously, we do the things that Tony mentioned, but as workers, we want to see more activism and pushback, like the rally you saw today.
Sam: I wanted to ask specifically about the ‘Closing the Loopholes’ clause, and the University’s ‘bad faith interpretation’, how will this clause actually affect staff if it’s enacted in the way the University is interpreting it?
Tony: Yeah, and so on August 26th, there was a legislative change that redefined what a casual employee is. The idea behind that was to better align the technical definition of casual with the lived experience of the work that the people were doing. So there’s a bunch of people, including many many people who are casuals in higher education, whose reality of their job is that it is an ongoing job. I’m in my 11th year of teaching at Monash, I’ve worked consistently every semester over those 11 years, but on paper I’m casual, so I don’t automatically accrue long service leave, or sick leave, that kind of thing. So the idea in the legislation was to make it clear that for people like that there was a conversion into an ongoing job because the work that was being done was ongoing. When that happened, Monash’s response was kind of a combination of chaos and abdication, so there’s been nothing in terms of a centralised response from the university about the changes and about the impact that those changes will have. They’ve said to different people in all different work areas of the university to come up with your own solution and feed it back to us for approval.
Blair: They’ve had two years. The Australian Government made this change two years ago, and they gave all the universities two years warning that this was going to apply to us. They’ve had two years to do something and consult staff, consult students, and they’ve done nothing. It’s literally late August and they’re like “oh shit, we can’t rehire research assistants and it looks like they’re not going to hire casuals next year, goodbye”, and there’s been no consultancy, as Tony was saying.
Tony: But the way that they have decided to go about it, is to sort of… is this kind of slash and burn approach, where most of the people. So the university has somewhere around 3,700 casual employees. It’s a bit hard to get a set number because twice a year the university has to report the number of casual employees it has as part of some kind of government legislation. One of those counts happens in December, which doesn’t capture the academic casual staff because they’re not in contract anymore. So the numbers are not as precise as they should be but yeah somewhere around 3,700 casual staff and somewhere around a little bit over 2000 of those are academic staff. So those are people that could have been put onto ongoing jobs if that was ongoing work and that was what they wanted. But the university has decided to take a different approach which is to essentially render most of those 3,700 people jobless…
Carol: Yeah, we shouldn’t have to suck it up and that’s why we organise as a union. And I know this is like an annoying tangent but when we talk about the role of the university and I don’t know I’m open to like a third discussion and sort of debate and criticism on this. But for me, the sandstone unis – Melbourne Uni, Monash – are very much like a colonial product whereby these universities are established to perpetuate colonial frameworks like doing and organising a society and part of the colonial aspect is also the capitalist aspect where they want to push students into some sort of job or industry and you come back as an alumni and can be like “oh my god, you’re so special, we did this. We had a part in this.” And for me the role of the university in the most ideal sense, is like Blair said, to help students learn to navigate the world critically and not just having an analysis of all the bad shit that’s happening in the world but actually like how you organise. And that’s one of the huge things that I found constantly missing in like university, like education.
Sam: And they’re not even entitled to proper redundancy because they’re casuals?
Blair: No redundancies, no good-byes. Usually when someone leaves they get a redundancy payout, a nice little goodbye party, and its a thing because they’re colleagues. But casuals aren’t treated like colleagues. Casuals aren’t allowed to go to staff meetings because they aren’t paid to go to staff meetings, so they weren’t allowed at this meeting with the dean. And they don’t get entitled to any redundancy pay any sick pay, nothing like that. So they’ve not been consulted at all in this process.
Sam: This new round of cuts will disproportionately affect the arts faculty, following on from cuts to live lectures, and the Jobs Ready Graduates Programme doubling the cost of degrees, why is it important to continue funding the arts?
Blair: But students really lose out here, right? Like students are paying $50,000 for their degrees next year onwards they’re predicting and what are they getting for it. At Monash, in the school of social sciences, they’ll be getting first year 30 person classes, which I think is disgusting in the first place. I think we should be trying to fight that. When I was at Adelaide Uni, back in the early 2010s, the rule was first year courses should be 12 persons tutes and a second and third year should be no more than 15. But then changed to 20 in my third year, but anyway. Thirty is too many for first year and then you go on to second and third year and you’re paying 50,000 dollars for 75 person classes. Where the lecturer won’t know their name. THere won’t be any kind of personal contract or you know getting to know each other. We can’t do oral presentations in that way, which is an important skill to learn even if they’re not exactly the funnest for students I’m sure. So they’re paying a lot of money, for essentially not much at all. And we’ve even been told by management that they hope the students don’t come. They try to persuade us into continuing by saying, “don’t worry there won’t be 75 students for long because we know that students don’t come to class after the first few weeks.” So they’re kind of hoping that students who are paying a lot of money for online lectures don’t come to class and therefore probably don’t do the readings either. And so what are they paying for?
Carol: Although this was like, maybe like backtracking a bit, but when we say that arts is the ground zero, I mean what about the chemistry and like the FIT team, because like they have untenable classes too. Does anyone want to talk about that?
Tony: And somewhere like FIT (Faculty of Information Technology) has for many years been I guess like a university leader in fucking over the people that work for them And so like they have situations where like second year students are teaching in a first year unit…
Mandy & Sam: What?!
Blair: They should take an interest because this massive affects them, like it dramatically affects them. It just means massive weakening and worsening of their education, and that is completely unjust and it’s not fair. They deserve better, students deserve better, they deserve the best education that they can have, and we can provide that if the University lets us but they’re not letting us. They actively want to stop that, like, I shouldn’t have to fight the university to do my job properly. I just want to do my job, just let me do my job. I’ve spent the last three weeks organising to do my job, fighting my bosses to do my job. And that is why students should care. Because it will hurt them now, it’ll hurt them in the future and especially hurt them when they look at tax time each year and their HECS debt is exceedingly big. And they go what did they get for that? My tutor didn’t even know my name because I was one of 75. I didn’t go to any of my classes because I was one of 75 students.
Sam: My last question was about just how students can show solidarity and what they can do practically to help you guys?
Blair: Email your displeasure to the dean. Email the dean and be like I’m actually really angry about this as a student. And this is going to affect me. Email the Vice-Chancellor. Email these people because you can and they need to hear that students are really affected by this and it’s deterring them from whatever. Like I know students who were going to Monash but now aren’t going to go at all because of these changes. So why would I, I’ll go to RMIT or something.
Carol: Or another thing, if you’re a student worker and you have a contract with the University or something. Joining the union would mean that you can become more part of it I guess. The active people amongst us and I mean part of what we’re trying to push is like more support on you. People who want to organise having training, like the three of us went through conversation training. And this is like you know. It’s very essential that when people get active, I’ll speak for myself. When I started for myself, when I was younger, I had to figure shit out myself. I was quite confused about whatever groups and I didn’t know that stuff. There would be key skills that we would try to pass on to anyone who wants to organise with us. We would absolutely welcome student workers even if your contract is casual or a bit shit, I don’t know.
Blair: It’s only 8 bucks a month for casuals.
Tony: Even sort of on a practical level. The reason we can do something like this casuals rally is because there’s casuals in the union and we know about these issues. So being a student worker joining the union gives you an avenue to make your concerns heard. You can tell someone about the shit that is happening. If those voices aren’t in the union then it’s a lot harder for us to come across those issues and do something about it. And for sort of just general students who want to be involved or want to know what’s going on we will always do everything we can to publicise out to everybody when we’re doing something and ways for which students can be involved.
Blair: Follow our Instagram account and our Twitter account. But tell students that here’s our Instagram and Twitter account, link a QR code. Cause that’s where we put out a lot of stuff. Actually you know, student organisations if they’re reading this, feel free to get in touch with us, and we can do collabs on Instagram. And yeah I guess I would also like students to support their teachers, if you know your tutor is casual tell them you support them in their fight for this because it’s pretty rare that we get nice remarks from students.
Tony: And even telling their tutors about these issues. Introduce it to the tutors and say that there are people doing things about these issues. To come back to that atomisation point that I made earlier. Some people just sort of live in their own bubble and it’s hard to penetrate into that bubble. But if a student comes up to them and say something like “I heard about what’s going on and we support you” and that tutor is like “what’s going on”. That can be the avenue for that situation being more enlightening for both people.
Sam: Thank you guys so much for your time today. It’s been a very good conversation. Don’t worry we have your back in this and all the best in your campaigning and hopefully all goes well.
