Last Thursday afternoon, Western Sydney University (WSU) vice-chancellor and president George Williams sent an all-staff email thanking the two campus trade unions for their assistance in slashing jobs and restructuring the university.
“I am pleased to say that the dispute with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) over our change process has been resolved,” Williams wrote. “I thank the union for their goodwill and constructive engagement, and also the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU) and its leadership during this process.
“This means that our change process will now proceed and is back on track with the one week delay.”
That “change process” refers to the “Western Reset” restructuring of WSU to service the teaching and research requirements of the corporate elite, including the military industries. This is particularly occurring at the expense of arts and humanities, and the options available to students at the largely working-class university.
On Friday, the next day, Williams confirmed that the deal he had struck with the union leaderships meant that a “net loss” of 193 jobs would be imposed. Hundreds of other staff members in “disestablished” positions would be forced to compete against each other in a supposed “merit-based placement process” for “new roles” that are “suitable” for them.
This brutal process will enable the management to pick and choose staff members selectively, inevitably leading to more people being pushed out the door, including by demotions or transfers to distant campuses, far beyond Williams’ claim that the job losses will be confined to 193.
Williams’ message of appreciation came just hours after the NTEU bulldozed a resolution through a hastily-called online members’ meeting on Thursday morning to endorse the sellout despite considerable opposition and widespread questions of concern.
The NTEU branch president, David Burchell, anti-democratically prevented anyone from speaking against that motion, including WSU Rank-and-File Committee member Michael Head, defying numerous calls for Head and other opponents to be afforded the right to speak.
Burchell hailed the outcome as a “big win” for staff at WSU and across the university sector. He revealed that the agreement with Williams had been greeted with “jubilation” at an NTEU national council meeting—the day before the members were even informed of it, let alone asked to vote on it.
This bitter experience is a warning of what the NTEU is seeking to impose everywhere. It is another demonstration of the industrial policing role of the union apparatuses.
They are working hand-in-glove with university administrations throughout Australia to help suppress resistance to the destruction of about 4,000 jobs at the country’s 39 public universities, even as they claim to oppose the cuts.
Above all, the union officials are covering up the driving force of this assault—the agenda of the Albanese Labor government. It is restructuring tertiary education to satisfy the dictates of big business and develop a war economy, notably through the AUKUS pact against China.
That is the central thrust of Labor’s Universities Accord report, as highlighted by the recent speech of ex-Labor and union leader Bill Shorten, advocating the “fundamental reimagining” of universities as a “core instrument of our national power” under conditions of global instability and war.
In his message, Williams claimed that unspecified “additional non-salary savings” had reduced the overall job cuts from the originally threatened 400, and that numerous applications for “voluntary redundancies”—another device recommended by the unions—meant that forced retrenchments were no longer needed.
The reality is that many more staff members will be driven out. According to Williams: “From Tuesday to Thursday next week, people who are impacted by the changes will have conversations about their role. This will be for people in roles that are being disestablished, people in areas where there are more people than positions, and people in roles that are being relocated.”
Then the “merit-based” process—a “spill and fill”—will commence. “People will be asked to submit their resume and provide a written response to a question about how their skills, qualifications and experience demonstrate suitability for placement in a particular position.”
This is similar to the ongoing restructuring of the College—WSU’s preparatory feeder school—which, as the WSU Rank-and-File Committee warned last year, set a precedent for WSU as a whole and the entire university sector. At the College too, the NTEU opposed and blocked our calls for a unified national fight against this attack.
In an email to NTEU members last Thursday, Burchell falsely declared that the resolution pushed through the union meeting guaranteed that: “Everyone seeking a role in the new structure, who has applied for but not been appointed to a position, will be found a suitable role.”
Burchell also asserted that the work done by staff leaving WSU would be “appropriately managed within the agreed workloads of the staff who remain.”
The truth, as many participants in the NTEU meeting objected, is that this “suitability” will be determined by the management, and workloads will multiply.
Over the past three weeks the fraud of WSU’s “change proposal” consultation process under its enterprise agreements with the NTEU and CPSU has become glaring. Multiple Q&A sessions in faculties and departments have proved to be an insult, with questions unanswered.
During the NTEU meeting, Head and others intervened in the Zoom chat to oppose the sellout deal. Several people supported Head’s calls for the right to speak against the motion, but Burchell flatly refused to allow it.
One of Head’s chats on behalf of the WSU Rank-and-File Committee explained: “The NTEU and CPSU officials are covering up the underlying agenda of the Labor government by trying to blame mismanagement by individual vice-chancellors for the disaster across the entire sector.
“Not a word is being said about the fact that the Albanese government is spending hundreds of billions of dollars on military spending and developing a war economy, including via the AUKUS pact against China, while intensifying the financial pressure on the universities to restructure to align with the ‘national priorities’ set out in its Universities Accord in 2024.”
That financial pressure includes slashing international student enrolments and continuing the previous Liberal-National government’s “Job-ready Graduates” scheme that hiked the cost of three-year humanities degrees to more than $50,000, while cutting the funding to universities for delivering them.
From January 1, each university’s funding will be tied to a “mission-based compact” with the government’s new Australian Tertiary Education Commission to contribute to “national priorities.”
The record of the NTEU and CPSU can be understood only in the context of the transformation of the trade unions internationally from defensive organisations of the working class, always within the framework of wage labour, into industrial policing agencies. In Australia, this has taken the form of the anti-strike enterprise bargaining straitjacket first imposed by the Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) and the Hawke-Keating Labor governments in the 1980s and 1990s.
That is why we have concluded that there is no prospect of steering the union apparatuses away from this course. We are instead fighting for the development of rank-and-file committees (RFCs) as the new forms of organisation that the working class needs to defend itself and to develop the means for overturning capitalism and establishing genuine democratic and socialist workers’ governments.
Through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC), we need to link up with workers everywhere and with the educators’ RFCs in the US, where the fascistic Trump administration is demolishing public education and demanding the total subordination of the universities to the needs of the ruling class and the development of a war economy.
As outlined at a recent online public meeting, the WSU and Macquarie University RFCs are calling for a unified campaign throughout the working class against the job cuts and pro-corporate, pro-military reshaping of tertiary education.
We urge staff and students to contact us to take up this essential fight, via the Committee for Public Education (CFPE), the educators’ rank-and-file network.
Contact the CFPE:
Email: cfpe.aus@gmail.com
Facebook: facebook.com/commforpubliceducation
Twitter: CFPE_Australia