NTEU highlights education decline
By Jeremy Smith
The stand-off between the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the senior management at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) and Sydney University, along with a proposed strike at Wollongong University, highlight a deepening crisis in tertiary education. The sector is stretched to the limit by the depletion of public resources.
The NTEU's ambitious enterprise bargaining strategy is designed to help restore public investment in higher education by forcing the federal government to grant additional funds for salary increases. Core parts of the NTEU's claims include a 19% pay rise, job security clauses, and the rollover of award and superannuation conditions.
In response, UNSW and Sydney University have cried poor, pointing to a lack of supplementary funds from the Howard government for this round of enterprise bargaining.
A meeting on March 16 between the Australian Vice-Chancellor's Committee (AVCC) and education minister David Kemp showed that the government would not fund any pay rises for university workers. Before the meeting rumours had circulated that the government was considering hikes in the Higher Education Contribution Scheme (HECS) to offset salary rises.
Kemp indicated that the government wants to introduce individual contracts and make pay rises contingent on "productivity increases".
In the absence of further funding for enterprise bargaining pay increases, job cuts, higher HECS and worsening conditions are the main alternatives offered by government policy. A representative for the vice-chancellors, according to the Australian, ruled out job losses and noted that the NTEU would not allow performance-based pay increases.
In response to the crisis and the disputes in Sydney, the NTEU released highlights of its budget submission. It stresses the damage done by the Howard government's cuts, lack of supplementation for enterprise agreements, loss of funded student places, illegal fees and the general decline of education. It also calls for a review of the cut to Abstudy.
Higher education, the NTEU says, is confronting a choice between further deregulation and cuts or correction of "real shortfalls in funding and quality provision".
The government's intention to undermine students' ability to organise against the cuts by introducing"voluntary student unionism" (VSU) legislation is clear. University workers are now also being targeted.
Even AVCC head John Niland has called for a restoration of public funding and declared the AVCC's opposition to VSU. However, the AVCC's distrust of the NTEU remains an obstacle to a desperately needed sector-wide fight back.
Matt McGowen, Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology NTEU branch president and national vice-president, told Green Left Weekly: "Since the Coalition government came to power the higher education sector has been decimated. Funding cuts have created a climate of fear and cost cutting within Universities.
"What were once tutorials for 15 students are now seminars of 40 or 50. Students are paying more and getting less. To add insult to injury, the current VSU legislation will further erode the critical life in universities, turning them into graduate factories. We are loosing the soul of the sector."