Sue Bull, Ballarat
At a meeting on August 5, 90 National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members employed at Ballarat University vowed to fight any attempts by their administration to stand them down for bans imposed as part of a dispute over a new enterprise agreement.
The Ballarat University branch of the NTEU has been negotiating an enterprise agreement for the past two years. Vice-chancellor Kerry Cox, who heads the Australian Higher Education Industry Association, the employer body, is only prepared to offer a 16% wage rise to academics over three years and even less for general staff. This is well below the 22% agreed to by many other universities. Cox is even putting up a non-union agreement, to be voted on in October.
Consequently, the NTEU branch has refused to provide student results and on August 3 it reaffirmed a ban on staff attendance at the university's Open Day on August 21. It was after this meeting that NTEU members were threatened with stand-downs if the 50 academics still withholding students' results did not lift their ban.
At the August 5 meeting, NTEU members voted to walk off the job and hold a meeting to organise an all-out strike should any member be stood down. The motion was put by a general staff member and was overwhelmingly endorsed.
Ballarat University NTEU branch president Jeremy Smith told Green Left Weekly: "We are possibly the only group of NTEU members being threatened with stand-downs. Many of our members felt really nervous about the future going into today's meeting. Yet despite all the threats and intimidation, our members are prepared to fight on. It's a gutsy effort.
"General staff members are not threatened with stand-downs, but they showed that they will stand by their union comrades against the despicable threats of the vice-chancellor."
From Green Left Weekly, August 10, 2005.
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