By Elizabeth Humphrys and Amy Thomas
Union members in the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) are in the midst of a turbulent debate over a proposed national Jobs Protection Framework (JPF). Universities have been excluded from the JobKeeper scheme just as international student enrolments are predicted to plummet. This is why a national haemorrhaging of jobs in higher education has already begun.
The JPF, negotiated by national union officers with the Australian Higher Education Industry Association (AHEIA), is at its core an opt-in agreement to cut wages and conditions in exchange for protecting jobs — in theory saving 12,000 of the 30,000 jobs forecast to go. The national union is arguing that branches should vote in support, and a national vote will go ahead on May 25. If individual branches vote in favour, and their management agrees, negotiations will start to officially modify existing union agreements at that university. If branches or VCs opt out, then the JPF will not apply.
Rather than focus just on the details, in what follows we argue that the NTEU strategy of pursuing a the JPF in the face of COVID-19’s economic impact is a deeply flawed one. The JPF is, for all intents and purposes, about our union and Vice-Chancellors managing the implementation of staff rationalisation and budget cuts. Here, we draw from the history of accord-style agreements to critique the idea that we can achieve job security through negotiation with employers, and the claim that this particular agreement can protect us (especially casual and precarious workers). Then we ask what an alternative union strategy might look like.
Are agreements between unions and employers a good thing?
In an economic crisis governments or employers sometimes pursue agreements about how to manage the impacts. At a national level this is sometimes called a social contract, and in the 1980s and 1990s there was an agreement between the Hawke-Keating ALP governments and the Australian Council of Trade Unions that lasted for thirteen years, known as the Accord. The Accord’s key promise was that wages would keep up with inflation, and this was not done.
At first blush this can seem this a fair and sensible approach — often justified as sharing the load and sacrificing through solidarity — but in practice, it isn’t. As with the Accord, the JPF is based on three problematic assumptions:
- The agreement or framework presumes that the parties have a shared interest, or that there is a ‘national interest’ or ‘sector interest’ across the participating groups.
- The agreement framework presumes the parties have equal power.
- The union party to the agreement believes the letter of the agreement is transparent and enforceable.
While many of us have heard Vice-Chancellors tell us that we are all in this together, the truth is our interests as members (maintaining our living standards and conditions of workers) are not the same as senior staff (who see themselves as operating the University as a commercial institution, and are quite removed from the concerns and working conditions of staff and students).
Since higher education moved to a competitive fee-paying model with the 1980s Dawkins reforms, the desire of academics to pursue quality teaching and research has very often conflicted with management’s vision. While it might be seductive to imagine university managers would consider expertise and fair and rational use of resources in their planning, our experience suggests otherwise.
The premise of the JPF also cedes a key point in the debate over higher education more generally: that costs should be borne by staff and students, rather than government funding.
From the perspective of managers in the midst of an economic crisis, one of the key expenses that is malleable (relatively quickly) are wages and staffing levels. This is particularly the case where such a large number of staff are casuals and have few legal protections. VCs are far less likely to sell off assets and shares, in part because it can be slower to do so but also because they see such assets as ensuring institutional viability. Workers, though, can be made to work harder for less or sacked.
In relation to the ALP-ACTU Accord, the letter of the agreement was not implemented and some clauses were altered over time by forcing the unions to acquiesce or by going to arbitration. They very promise of the Accord was undermined by wage suppression that kept wages below inflation. Other clauses were ignored entirely, such as price control, or the implementation of progressive taxation (instead, it became more regressive). The Accords (there were in the end a number of revisions) were made ‘fit for purpose’ in an era of advancing neoliberalism by the Government and industry, ensuring workers’ interests were eschewed.
Moreover, there is a bigger lesson in the Accord for university workers and the JPC: entering the agreement moved responsibility for and control over fighting for wages and conditions from workers, and placed it in the hands of national officials and bureaucratic processes. As Elizabeth argues in her book, in this way the unions disorganised themselves through the Accord because of the nature of the social contract itself. While the Accord and the JPF are not identical, in terms of a general strategic approach on how unions should approach organising in the midst of an economic crisis there are important lessons to be learned.
Power in the workplace
The NTEU argues that the JPC will have independent oversight, allowing unions to access details of university finances and enforce only rational and sensible financial decisions — but this presumes there is a shared interest between employers and workers and that there can be clear consensus on what is rational and sensible. This is not the case. These are political decisions as all economic decisions are and the interests of the parties are fundamentally different. Moreover, union activists will know that even the slightest ambiguity in a clause can prevent it being useful for staff. The only way to enforce a clause, usually, is to pursue a dispute. The NTEU leadership and many branch officers have argued the national JPF should be supported because it will be binding and enforceable, but the last thing we should want is to rely upon the courts.
The courts have consistently demonstrated that they will do what is needed to justify the actions of employers in the guise of ensuring an employer remains viable and or that it is ‘protecting jobs’. The Federal Court and Fair Work Commission usually rely on justifications made by employers. Our best chance to protect jobs is to defend them in each school and administrative unit at a time, backed by a vibrant university-wide campaign. We are in a chaotic time, but no national deal will end the upheaval — it will only shift the locus of action and focus from our workplaces to a remote committee overseeing it.
Even if a branch and Vice-Chancellor agree to the JPF, and then a university staff votes to amend an enterprise agreement successfully, the University can still take the enterprise agreement to Fair Work to challenge it, or even abolish it, as happened at Murdoch University in 2017.
One only needs to look at the case of Qantas’ stand down of employees to see that the Federal Court and Fair Work Commission are likely to accept employers’ logic. The case confirmed Qantas can stop paying sick leave to the 25,000 stood down employees, including a worker battling cancer and another waiting for a triple bypass. These legal bodies are not neutral arbiters: their interest is in ensuring employer maneuverability and profitability, and not workers’ wellbeing.
Low union density and a series of hostile industrial relations laws places workers in a difficult position. It is tempting to imagine that an agreement can provide us with security, but there is no way of getting around the difficult question of how workers can grow their strength and exercise more power in the workplace.
Most importantly, the JPF will not stop university managers from deciding if work should still exist. Universities are already cutting casual teaching staff by axing subjects, and instructing staff whose role involves research that they will have higher teaching loads in upcoming semesters. Casual staff in administration and IT have already been cut. Professional staff and those that do not teach are vulnerable in a time when VCs are entirely focussed on the balance sheet.
Agreement or no agreement, the same problem arises — how can the union organise locally to defend jobs and conditions?
Protecting casual jobs
In a sector rife with overwork, the loss of casual jobs (many of which have already gone) will be resolved by forcing more work on remaining staff. A survey of UNSW casuals found that one in three had already lost work in March.
There is a clause in the JPF which argues that casual workers with a ‘reasonable expectation’ of work can continue to receive it. However, the interpretation of that clause remains open to legal wrangling, and it does not cover a circumstance where the university deems the work to no longer exist. This reorganisation of work is the key issue for employment in the sector, and one the JPF offers little protection around.
Problematically, the JPF says that full time staff can protect casual jobs by taking pay cuts. Many permanent staff want to express their solidarity with casuals, and some feel that they can afford to take a temporary pay cut if it means helping others. Not only is the pay cut unlikely to directly defend a casual workers’ job, this frames solidarity with casual staff as a moral sacrifice rather than something in our common interest. The immense workload shouldered by casual staff falling onto the shoulders of ongoing staff will drive them into the ground with overwork, already a massive issue in the sector. Staff at all levels have an interest in protecting casuals and fighting for their rights to secure work.
There are no shortcuts
Many officials and members have argued that the union can’t fight because of the scale of the crisis, that we can’t organise effectively because of social distancing in the pandemic, that branch activists can’t win the majority of members politically or draw them into activity, or that a campaign is doomed because of low union density on campuses. All of these statements identify real challenges for us, but there is no substitute for organising and there are no shortcuts.
Leadership level arrangements are often seen as a way to fix a difficult situation without the chaos of a fight, but we cannot impose order on this situation in the way the NTEU leadership suggests. We certainly cannot rely on university management — who have overseen mass casualisation and overwork over decades — in any such project. We must organise to deal with that chaos, and not promise the false hope of a framework that can only obscure the need to build union power on our campuses.
The NTEU leadership very quickly gave up on the idea of agitating for a federal government bailout. While it is clear the Morrison government did not plan to bail out the sector (most obvious in their repeated, deliberate exclusions of universities from the JobKeeper scheme and their hostility to supporting international students stranded in Australia), this gives up the goal of boosting government funding of universities for years to come. It accepts the logic of existing competitive funding models in making decisions about the future of higher education. The fight for fully funded public education cannot wait for another (better) time, because the funding arrangements in the sector is the central factor in the way this crisis is playing out.
If the union had been prepared to push and organise their members in ways that disrupted university functions, like a work-to-rule, or even prepared high quality campaigning materials to be used by members, we would be in a far better position now. It is mind boggling that the national office has not sought to mobilise other stakeholders in the sector to backing federal funding to manage the crisis, such as seeking to involve university students, year 12 students and parents. This is campaigning 101, and it is not that these suggestions were not made to elected officials: they were.
Moving forward
Branches around the country are holding members’ meetings to debate the JPF, and we will vote nationally on May 25. It is important the No vote is as strong as possible. A number of members’ meetings, such as at Melbourne University, UTS, ACU and the University of Sydney and more have rejected the JPF. Some Vice-Chancellors have already rejected it, making the votes on those campuses instead symbolic of the wishes of the branch.
The end result may be that some universities start JPF negotiations, while others reject it. The acceptance of cuts and changes to conditions will stay with us for years, and will weaken the union as we enter enterprise agreement negotiations in 2021-22. Clawing back the losses will involve serious organisation.
Our best defence will be building power in the workplace. Attempts to cut casual jobs or force larger workloads onto permanent staff — or to cut wages and conditions — will need to be campaigned against. Immediately, we need much more emphasis on mobilising members in online and physical (socially distanced) actions, campaign materials and on building the case for public funding. We also need to stand in solidarity with other workers having their wages cut, such as public servants in NSW — including the nurses on the front line dealing with Covid-19.
Even in the best possible circumstances, building this sort of campaign won’t save all the jobs in the tertiary sector and nor will it involve ‘no concessions’. But the circumstances of the pandemic have opened up public debate about essential services, essential workers and providing a living wage. That is a debate that we should enter with confidence and willingness to organise. If we do so we can achieve the best results possible, build the union, defend the ideals of free public education, and build solidarity and goodwill within our workplaces.
Who are we?
Elizabeth Humphrys is a political economist at UTS. She researches work, unions and labour responses to economic crisis. Her recent book, How Labour Built Neoliberalism, is an analysis of the ACTU and ALP agreement on wages and conditions in place during the 1980s and 1991 economic crisis.
Amy Thomas has been a casual staff member at UTS since 2015, and a prominent NTEU activist and former Branch Committee member. You might recognise their name or face from the NTEU petition released in March, which demanded Vice Chancellors don’t make staff pay for the crisis.
