Note: This is the full version of the shortened interview that came out in Lot’s Wife Edition 6 2024. It’s very long.
If you’ve been keeping up with Lot’s Wife on any of our social media pages (plug at end of article alongside NTEU socials), you might have noticed something that pops up every so often: our coverage and support for the Monash NTEU members. Earlier this year, we received and published an article titled Teaching Conditions are our Learning Conditions in Edition one that goes back to the basics of what Monash NTEU members have been fighting for and why students should care; since then, we’ve expanded on our support by covering the stop work action that happened on the 20th of March, and recently, we covered their rally in early October. These things are all great, and while we over at Lot’s Wife are proud supporters of the NTEU and have had the pleasure of being taught by some of these great unionists, why should other students care?
After the October rally, Sam and I had the pleasure of interviewing NTEU Monash Branch Committee Members Blair Williams, Carol Que, and Tony Williams, who all hail from the Faculty of Arts. Over video conference, we got to ask them a couple of questions to help understand and clarify the role of the NTEU.
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. The rally today was in response to the lack of consultation the university has engaged in about the changes that are going to happen to teaching next year.
Blair: Or for their bad faith interpretation of the closing loophole clause as well.
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 with (?) 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, who’s lived 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 was in the legislation was to make it clear that for people like that 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: So one of the first things that happened was, so Monash– I was going to say that Monash has but I guess now it’s Monash had it’s own sort of internal labour hire company for professional jobs that was manned completely by casuals. They were all summoned into a meeting– Carol, do you remember when that meeting was?
Carol: Probably a couple months back?
Tony: Maybe like the first week of September?
Carol: Yeah, early September.
Blair: It was the same time I found out about SoSS.
Tony: And they were told in that meaning that once their current contracts were up in the part of the university where they were currently working, that they wouldn’t have a job anymore. So there were a bunch of people that worked for FAST (casualised admin and IT professional staff) that didn’t have a current placement somewhere here in the university, and essentially they’d lost their jobs before they’d even come into that meeting. So that’s somewhere around 100 casuals that were impacted by that.
So there’s been this sort of dispersed response from the rest of the university, where a lot of people– a lot of casuals still don’t even know that these changes are there, and one of the things that we found– that Carol and Blair can speak to, is that when we were calling people about the rally today, a lot of them were sort of being introduced to some of this information for the first time, which really speaks to the sort of disrespect from the university about informing people and keeping them in the loop and the shambles that has been the response from that.
Blair: So the head of Politics and IR– don’t quote me on this, so he calls me and he’s like “do you know what’s happening? I don’t know what’s happening. Does anyone know what’s happening?” and he’s saying that the head of schools (?) doesn’t know what’s happening and that there’s no real clarity and transparency, and he said that I should know more because I’m in the union and I was like… we also don’t know what’s happening.
Sam: (sarcastic) Why would they want to tell you?
Blair: But I think it just goes to show how little transparency there is and how little consultancy with– not only the staff, but also heads of sections in schools.
Carol: Just to add a bit of context with the union, and what the point of the NTEU is– so, I think this is something that is really important for students to understand that, unions these days, there’s two aspects; the first is the union bureaucracy and the people who are employed, and paid, through membership fees and things like that–
Blair: Like jobs.
Carol: –And they have a job with the union. So there’s that layer of things, and there’s also the membership. It’s important to make clear that– me, Tony and Blair, we don’t get paid for the organising that we do. However, it’s vital to have this layer of membership, who are active, to push the union bureaucracy to take better positions on things and give us resources for the things that matter and– they have different material interests to us, being paid and having a career. So there’s a bit of context– the kind of, negotiators, and the EBA negotiation stuff, that’s definitely a part of what the union officials are definitely supposed to help us with, and members also take part in that, but what is really crucial in this point of time is we need to be rebuilding, bottom up, delegate networks, where each work area has meaningful representation, and are organised enough to, as workers and as members of the union, that don’t have a job at the union, we can actually build power in that way.
It’s an interesting thing, to have to work with union officials but also try to build that bottom-up power, because sometimes, people have different political ideas, and getting involved takes a lot of organising to push back against more conservative ideas of how unionism should be. So ultimately, me, Blair, and Tony, we’ve got a shared commitment to building a worker’s movement that is properly grassroots rather than anything “official”, if that makes sense.
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 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. This is not a part of EBA negotiation, it’s not technical industrial action, cause we’re not allowed to do that in Australia, thanks Paul Keating, but we want to actually push management, and as workers we should be doing that and it should be worker led.
Carol: Encouraging other workers to take this on as well. The three of us– it’s a lot of work, to be doing this on top of our jobs, and other commitments, and things like that but speaking for myself, I know that I don’t want to be an exceptional activist, that people look to. I would rather very much empower people like my co-workers to take initiative.
Sam: Would you say there’s reluctance among workers in the university to join in on actions and to join the unions because they aren’t sure of what the rank and file can actually do?
Blair: I think so, I think it’s much of the continuing staff? So today we saw a bunch of the casuals come out, a lot of PhD candidates come out– it was pretty light, from our continuing colleagues. So, that’s where we need to improve (laugh), but, yes, we need to, and academics especially, continuing academics need to understand that we are workers and we need to have class solidarity with each other. We need to fight for the collective rather than think about our individual research. Having these rallies will hopefully help, too.
Tony: Part of what we have to overcome as well, is that so much of the way that the university is structured atomises the workers that are here, and doing the work. For example, the only time, even though the three of us have been working for the last month to build this campaign, I only ever see these people in person when we’re at one of these actions. There are people in history that I’ve worked with for a decade, that I’ve gone whole semesters without seeing in person just because we don’t teach on the same day, and so you have to overcome people’s sheepishness to becoming activists and becoming more engaged, as well as having them overcome the structures that the university puts in place to try and separate everybody out.
Blair: Also, everybody’s traumatised. A lot of my colleagues are traumatised from mass redundancy, and bullying, and workplace trauma. They’re also fearful of management.
Carol: With the hesitancy to take action, you’ve also got international student workers who don’t have the accurate information around protesting and how that affects their visa, and sometimes just having misinformation about this prior to strikes, it happened last year, where some of the tutors I talked to this year that other people were not encouraging them to come because it might affect their visa, when it actually won’t unless they come into direct confrontation with the cops. Another thing is that there are certain fears about potential surveillance by foreign governments, or where they’re from, and one of the things within union organising is that if we wanted to engage more with diverse groups, we would need to very directly address issues and at least discuss certain security contingencies, for example if people didn’t want to use their real names organising, that would be fine, if they don’t want to be photographed, that would be fine. There are also other fears and self-interests that prevent people from taking that step, and the role of organisers is to have one on one conversations, build relationships and encourage people to build relationships with each other.
Blair: It’s worker led. It’s actually worker led, so you represent the workers.
Carol: It takes time and specific plans to encourage people to take that step, to be braver.
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: The university for a long time has had a lot of talking points and rhetoric about the value that they put onto decasualisation and putting people into meaningful jobs. This legislation gave them an opportunity to make good on that and to convert people into ongoing jobs, who were doing ongoing work. The way that the new legislation is set out is after a set period of time whilst in those roles people would become eligible for conversion and so what the university could have done was to allow that work that was being done to continue for those 12 months and allow for those people to have applied for conversion.
Unknown (possibly Carol): Those who want it?
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 and when sort of asked why and I’m appropriating Blair’s story here. So Blair if I get the details in this wrong please correct me, but in the meeting that Blair’s faculty or Blair’s school had with the dean. When the dean was asked are you actually going to reach out to these casuals and tell them the situation they’re facing? The dean’s response was: the faculty doesn’t actually employ them that’s a job for H.R. to do and they will probably get sent an e-mail.
Blair: And some people have been itching for 20 years and they’re being screwed over here with a so long good luck e-mail and that’s it.
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 with at all in this process. They weren’t going to tell them, the union told them. Because management weren’t going to tell them until who knows when I don’t know. We asked the dean and she couldn’t answer when they were going to tell the casuals but not yet because we didn’t know what was happening. So well the union’s got to do it because most casuals won’t have any jobs next year and many casuals depend on this work for their literal livelihood and some people have been doing this for 20 years, and that’s all they’ve done in their adult life.
Tony: And I need to be really clear. So I teach in SOPHIS, the School of Philosophy, History, and Indigenous Studies. Um, and sorry and our head of school called a meeting, emailed out all the sessionals working in SOPHIS to come to a meeting in which she said this is everything I know about the situation as it stands and gave everybody the respect of at least saying. Essentially, like this is a really grim situation, we don’t know what is going to happen, we’re doing the best that we can to try and secure jobs and positions for as many of you as possible, but we don’t know it’s out of our hands in terms of how much of that can be done. At the level of people that we engage with on a normal basis. Those people are trying to do everything they can to try and help but people at the level of dean and above that are sort of what we would think of as the management class rather than people that are sort of working class, whatever that means within the university. The people that are management like overwhelmingly, they just don’t seem to care like the real disconnect. It doesn’t affect their lives so they check out of the process, and it’s not their problem to be dealing with.
Blair: The dean didn’t approve of the changes, but it’s not going to happen.
Sam: It’s just a statement and not much else.
Blair: Yeah.
Sam: So I guess that ties into my next question, which was about the arts faculty in particular. So it seems these next rounds of proposed cuts. Possibly talking, cutting tutorials into workshops.
Blair: Arts is particular SOS, isn’t it Tony.
Tony: SOS is the only place that I’ve heard of those ideas.
Carol: Nothing from MFJ, which is the media, film, journalism.
Blair: Basically I was told we’re the guinea pigs, SOS. And then roll it out to everyone.
Sam: I wrote, I guess this new round of cuts has disproportionately affected the arts faculty now we know that’s social sciences. This follows on from cutting live lectures, I think that was done during COVID and they never brought them back. And paired with the Jobs Ready Graduates programme…
Blair: Oh my god.
Sam: …which has effectively doubled the cost of arts degrees for students. So why is it important that we continue to fund the social sciences when things are looking even more dire for staff and students?
Blair: I mean, I think it will affect all the faculty of arts. So it really is an arts problem as well. But i guess ground zero right now is the school of social sciences because we’re the ones probably gonna be having 75 person workshops. So the ratio is 75 to 1. So that’s why I use workshops in quote marks because workshops are supposed to be like you have the lecturer and the tutor and you have the tutor who can help facilitate and do the marking. But in a 75 person to one workshop the lecturer is doing everything. And the marking that the lecturer doesn’t do because we’re only paid to mark 60 students a semester, they’ll be taken by casual on two to three week contracts, who’ve never met the students, never done the course, don’t know the content. And so what will that mean is its just horrific for continuing staff. Casual staff won’t even be in the question, aside from those obviously being exploited on those marking contracts, who wants to do that I don’t know some people who are desperate enough. And it really depends on, I guess, the university’s moving the exploitation of casual staff onto exploiting continuing staff. And then casual in those really menial two week roles which is really horrific.
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? And it’s not just that, I don’t want to see students as customers because its a very neoliberal way to frame university. The commodification of education means that, you know, students are customers, we are like staff…
Sam: Customer service.
Blair: We are customer service people. Hello google reviews, otherwise known as SETUs. But that should not be education. Education should be about knowledge. Whether it’s knowledge production, or what’s the word? I don’t know transferral of knowledge. It’s for students to understand more about themselves, in social sciences it’s about understanding more about themselves, societies, power, hierarchies, the status quo, and to unthink and unlearn those things. It is to be critical thinkers and critical citizens in this country is to make society better. Is to make everyone better. And that is why universities, especially the arts, especially humanities and social sciences are so crucial, is because it’s not just the economic reasoning of it’ll add little to the economy. Yeah it’s an argument and yeah it’s true but they really add a lot of benefit in terms of the social good and that is what is at stake. If students don’t have the time to properly learn and think if they’re stuck in these factory-farmed classes and that’s what is going to be cut really. So we’re cutting education but also cutting an important part of society, which is knowing ourselves and knowing society better. So that’s why I think its really important to not make these cuts but get more funding. We are demanding, you know, to have not only better job security for the current casuals. But you know, for 20 to 1 class size ratio because 75 to 1 is too many, that is not going to lead to a good education. And we’re also demanding that students and staff fight this together because it just, it affects us all as we say in the union, as I always say, “our working conditions are student learning conditions. Sorry, that was a long rant I get passionate.
Sam: That’s good, it’s good.
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?
Blair: SOS is ground zero for the arts, not generally.
Tony: Oh yeah, so to what Carol is saying. SOS is sort of ground zero for the way that the university has responded to these particular changes that are happening. But in different parts of the university. So I know FIT, and law, and some of the sciences like they already run massive units. Like we have a member that organises with us, Elliot who works across a bunch of different faculties and runs like 80 to 90 person seminars in law.
Carol: Oh I talked to Elliot about that and he said not only sorry law, because that sounds bad on its own. But he says they also get tutorials. So they get these workshops or seminars as well as tutorials, not instead of.
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…
Carol: And students.
Tony: …And so like they have situations where like second year students are teaching in a first year unit…
Mandy: What?
Sam: What?
Tony: Yeah.
Sam: Is that like postgraduate?
Tony: So the teaching standards body, they’re requirement is that the person teaching a unit needs to have a qualification that is one level higher than what they’re teaching so normally that’s interpreted as a master’s student teaching an undergraduate course. The way FIT interprets it is that a second year student can be a tutor in a first year class, and a third year student can be a tutor in a second year class. And those students that are still very much students, not only on the one hand lack the more expansive knowledge and understanding that would come from actually having completed that degree. But also much more likely to feel like they can’t speak up and advocate for themselves because sometimes they know the person they are teaching for is friends with or a colleague of the person whose class they’re in. And there’s that implicit sort of fear about wanting to actually advocate for yourself and so yeah FIT is kind of a hellscape.
Sam: Insane.
Tony: I think I can put you in touch with someone from fit. Who can speak to it much more. Um, much more particularly if you want.
Blair: They won’t even let honours students teach because they’re too fresh. It’s insane yeah jesus.
Mandy: That’s also I can imagine with FIT specifically that could leave a lot of room for misinformation, if you lack the broader context, then you could just be teaching the wrong shit.
Carol: Well yeah.
Tony: Yeah, and like someone could be teaching what they think is their legitimate understanding of something and they just don’t know what’s wrong yet. Because they haven’t you know, they haven’t done third year, whatever.
Blair: It’s pretty dire, pretty dire across the university. And basically the university just needs to actually, like, spend money on education. That would be rare.
Tony: Yeah and it’d be nice for the university to return to like the actual idea of a university.
Carol: A core purpose.
Mandy: Yeah, feels like a bare minimum.
Blair: If you’re desperate enough you’ll take on these shitty contracts. In my meeting with the dean, my colleagues were like who’s gonna do… Why would the PhD candidates take on the shitty PhD fellows they’ve been offered which is quite exploitative and it doesn’t give enough money whatsoever. And the dean was like, well, it’s either that or they just don’t teach. These casuals are facing either you take on these shitty CPDAE (Continuing Periodic Defined Academic Employment) Contract where you’re only paid 0.6 on the job, but it’s teaching focused and you only get paid for 40 weeks per year and not have a job for 12 weeks of the year. Or they can choose a two week marking contract and again my colleagues are like who’s going to do that. And it’s like if you’re desperate enough…
Carol: I would, actually. I’ll be honest right, I don’t have a PhD. I quit my PhD in my second year because I didn’t really want to pursue an academic career anymore but I like teaching and its one of the things I can do, working from home because I kind of like need to work from home to not get COVID because my partner’s immunocompromised and we can’t like afford to like get sicker. Like so, I’ll be honest I would actually – money is money, for me – I would actually take one of these shitty two to three weeks marking contracts if it came to it. Yeah, yeah, I think there are casuals who are in that position as well, where it’s just kind of like, you gotta make ends meet so it’s like you kind of end up sucking it up but like you know that the issue is if you suck it up without sort of doing the organising. Because like if you suck it up by yourself and you’re an individual and you’re lonely and you’re isolated do that…
Blair: You shouldn’t have to suck it up.
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 do you organise. And that’s one of the huge things that I found constantly missing in like university, like education. You know, and there’s various reasons for that. Yeah I guess like the university being a business and profitable it’s not geared like that. Maybe certain tutors will try to like you know push towards like something practical. But yeah like I guess to come back to sort of like you know, what is the role of the university? Like under communism is one that is not so hierarchical, workers should be able to determine how it’s run along with students you know, it shouldn’t be like this fucking profitable enterprise that funnels money into wars and occupations overseas.
Blair: On that point. I see teaching as praxis, and that’s why I care so much about it. Like research is praxis, research is important but teaching is where you can make change and that’s where you can shape the students mind and I really do see it as a literature practice. You know, where we can educate students about our society. But also, as Carol said about how to change society for the better, it had to liberate from oppression rather than uphold the status quo which is what the neoliberal higher education sectors. They want to uphold status quo, jobs ready grads. They go into jobs, they make their money, they die done.
Tony: I fear this is just going to sound like a dirty plug and its not how I mean it. But I know that I’ve been in contact with both of you through the semester for the unit I’m teaching about activism in academic freedom, and like the faculty of arts is somewhere where a unit like that can exist. To try and foster something that is more student led and student oriented where they can critically evaluate in a way that they often can’t. Where these sorts of structures that exist and try to work out ways of challenging them. It’s really valuable because of its ability to, reasonably explicitly within the context of the university, to bring students to the point of actually engaging with those structures and trying to work out ways that can actually do shit that can actually help people.
Carol: And that’s why they’re cutting education.
Mandy: And I was quite excited reading that email saying that there were students interested in publishing their work or at least publicising it to a wider audience because that is something we want to do with Lot’s Wife this year. Have more activism and I think of course, it’s good to go to your classes and get that arts degree, but if you don’t engage with it and figure out a purpose. You’re turning the hypothetical neoliberal cogs of the machine. It doesn’t work, it doesn’t satisfy people the way that it should. That’s my take on it.
Tony: The faculty of arts is really different in that, because if you know if you do accounting or something. You go and do a bachelor of accounting, you’re going to get spat out as an accountant. Like yeah, you don’t do a bachelor of arts and get spat out an artist…
Sam: Despite what some people think.
Tony: If you’re doing fine art, then sure you kind of do, but like it gives you the opportunity to sort of invest in yourself in this whole range of deeper skills that aren’t directly linked to one particular job but are just useful to you as a person in the way that you move through the world and your ability to understand the world that you live in…
Blair: …and thereby useful for society. And when I say society I don’t mean the economy.
Sam: So last couple of questions now, I’m mindful of the time. So I guess a lot of students aren’t engaged with what’s going on with staff and teaching – possibly because their lectures are online – but why should students take interest in this? How can they show solidarity with NTEU members and their teachers?
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.
Mandy: Yeah, I think even like I was a law student and I did have 75 people workshop tutorials and I got way more out of my 25 person arts tutorial than I did in that tutorial and workshop and that is such a simple truth that we should be fighting and advocating for.
Blair: Yeah it’s an EDI issue as well and as I said today in my speech this will massively impact disabled students, especially neurodivergent students being such a big classroom space, and from a gendered perspective it will impact women students because research shows that male students around the world speak much more than women students. And so feels like mine, in politics, that it’s slightly more male dominated unlike literally the rest of social sciences and humans that women dominate. It means that men’s voices will continue to be the loudest and women’s voices will be less heard. And that really saddens me because we want to empower women and, you know, we want to encourage them to think about politics and the political and to question those power structures. But how can you do that when you’re constantly spoken over by men in your class. So it is an EDI issue as well and that’s why students should care.
Tony: And that said, those things affect neurodivergent and female staff as well, like and I know I’m being the guy on the call saying this, but a neurodivergent staff member will be absolutely burned out from trying to teach.
Blair: It’s already burned me the fuck out mate.
Tony: And like some of the shit that I hear my female colleagues have to deal with in tutorials that just never happens to me, that will only be magnified as the size of those classes get bigger. Like if you happen to get, you know, a collection of half a dozen dickhead boy students in your class that all feed off each other’s misogyny and ego, and then trying to deal with that. Like that’s much harder in a massive class than it is in a smaller class.
Blair: How are we supposed to control bullying when there’s 75 students? How are we supposed to control that sort of stuff? Because in some classes, especially politics classes, not my personal ones but the ones I’ve heard about, have extremely diverse views and some might be incendiary. So how can you manage that when there are so many students like it’s not great and as Carol pointed out gender marginalised and gender diverse voices as well, because I think it’s gonna affect a lot of people who aren’t status quo.
Mandy: Even in social sciences, I’m in those classes to unlearn those behaviours and it’s hard to unlearn things when they’re being exacerbated and they are falling on deaf ears.
Blair: You know, as a woman teacher, I’ve been teaching since 2016, I’d like to think I’ve got a lot of experience and I get good SETUs and that kind of stuff. I bloody work my ass off to do it. But I’m nervous about teaching 75 people it makes me really nervous. Like how is a PhD candidate going to get up in front of 75? What does that mean for them? Especially if they’re a woman, or a person of colour, or if English is their second language. As we know all of those things impacts the way students review people during SETUs. As Tony said it would be really harmful to a lot of those staff as well because purely the fact that 75 is a lot to control and if you experience racism, sexism, and that kind of stuff, it’s actually harmful.
Tony: And like there was a women who came in when we were at the Chancellory towards the end of the thing today. And she was like disabled people can teach too they just need to be given the chance…
Blair: and accommodations.
Tony: …and putting them in front of a class of 75 people is making that so much harder than what it would be for a smaller group.
Blair: And it’s not something universally designed either. So you have to specifically ask for accommodations. I can’t teach 75 because XYZ. It should be universally no one should be teaching 75 and that will benefit the students and teachers as well. And sorry Tony you were saying.
Tony: No no that’s fine I was done.
Blair: Sorry my ranty phases, I’m trying to knit to stop me but sorry.
Sam: Don’t stress at all. My last question was about just how students can show solidarity and what they can do practically to help you guys?
Carol: Um what comes to mind is, we do. Should we give the WhatsApp chat join link or something? What kind of format is this newspaper?
Sam: It’s printed but we have an electronic version. It’ll be on the website as well and we’ll post about it on our socials too.
Blair: Didn’t we have a student focused one. In wonder if he have a student focused WhatsApp chat.
Carol: Sorry can you repeat that.
Blair: A student focused WhatsApp. You know how we have the arts organising WhatsApp and then the casual organising WhatsApp. What if we had a NTEU student WhatsApp?
Carol: We would have to plan. Maybe this is not the forum to sort of like discuss that.
Sam: Feel free to email us.
Carol: But I don’t know is it a good idea to give a WhatsApp link.
Blair: I would say no because there might be some spy might enter.
Sam: Yeah true. Might want to vet them.
Carol: Maybe that would not be manageable. I mean we would super appreciate like your publication could keep sharing upcoming actions and things. Basically, for students to keep an eye out. You know your publication, like media and stuff on upcoming actions and join us in solidarity. Bring friends and yeah I feel like that’s the only thing really.
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.
Blair: Join the NTEU.
Carol: 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 like 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: Also it’s only 8 bucks a month for casuals.
Carol: Yeah 8 bucks a month.
Blair: it’s quite cheap. Tony.
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 says 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.
Blair: Let them know that this is just the start. We’re going to keep fighting until we get our demands met.
Sam: Thank you so much for your time, and all the best. We’ll be in contact soon.
