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Episode 19: Picketing the Paris end of Collins St.
147 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Kate & Tony give a wrap-up from Open Day, an update on the appeal at the Fair Work Commission, and talk about next week's half-day strike and action outside the University Council meeting in the CBD. Adam also has a quick interview with Tui McKeown about what the hell the University Council is and who is on it!
If you have questions you'd like answered, or any topics you would like to hear covered on the podcast, drop us an email at [email protected]
You can also stay up to date with everything happening with bargaining at our new bargaining website, and with the branch on Facebook and Twitter. All of which can be found here - https://linktr.ee/myunionwroteaneba
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Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgment
00:00:18
Speaker
G'day, everyone, and welcome to My Union Road and EBA. This is a podcast to chronicle the progress towards a new enterprise bargaining agreement at Monash University and is brought to you by members of the Monash branch of the NTEU. We're here to take the old agreement and hashtag change it. And unlike our namesake, my dad wrote a porno, do everything we can to avoid being fucked in the process. Those involved with the podcast would like to acknowledge that it is being recorded on the unsaid lands of the Kulin nations,
00:00:47
Speaker
on whose lands we live, teach, and work. We would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional custodians and elders past and present, and to the continuation of the cultural, spiritual, and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
Expired Agreement and Leadership Changes
00:01:07
Speaker
Hi everyone, my name is Adam Fernandes, your National Councillor at the NTE Monash Branch. Here with you today on your favourite podcast, My Union Road and EBA. It has been 426 days since our last agreement expired and 309 days since bargaining started. It has also been 23 days since Maggie G took a million dollar pay cut to kiss babies and cut ribbons.
00:01:31
Speaker
Hi, everyone. Welcome back to Episode 18 of the podcast. Apologies for the radio silence of late. Truth is that we've been in mourning. It's coming up on a month now since our dearly departed Vice Chancellor Margaret Gardner got out while the going was good. And we've just been lost without her visionary leadership to lead us through these dark times.
00:01:51
Speaker
Actually, we've all just been busy with different things, to be honest. We're all juggling a number of different projects and jobs and all kinds of things at any given time.
Call for Industrial Action
00:02:01
Speaker
And to be honest, there's just been depressing a little movement in bargaining to report back on. Which is why we're keen to ramp up industrial action, which you'll hear more about at the end of the podcast. But speaking of Margaret Gardner, she may be gone, but she's left behind a mighty legacy of wage theft.
00:02:18
Speaker
redundancies, restructures, and pointless multi-million dollar land purchases. She's overseen the continuation of a further drift of Monash University into a corporatized behemoth that is concerned with profit rather than pedagogy. But Monash isn't driven by a single ideologue. It's driven by a multi-headed hydro of people who are professional board members who have not set foot in a classroom since undergrad in the sixties when uni was free and now only stepped foot on campus to attend lavish events and have people kiss their asses.
00:02:48
Speaker
These people are the ones that make up the university council and senior management. And at the end of the day, they call the shots regardless of who the Vice-Chancellor is. Foremost among those are Simon MacKend, Monash University Chancellor. He's a man who contains multitudes, by which we mean he has his fingers in a lot of different corporate pies. He's been Chancellor of Monash since 2016, but also a big wig at Macquarie Group, the National Bank of Australia and Rio Tinto.
00:03:16
Speaker
In that last role, one that he gets nearly half a million dollars a year for, roughly the equivalent of what Maggie gets in her new gig. He was one of three Australian directors who were on the board of Rio Tinto when they blew up the Juchen Gorge, a 46,000 year old sacred indigenous rock shelter. Not bad for a bloke who was also the head of a university that continuously sprues its indigenous credentials. A few months after that, Neil Chenoweth of the Financial Times had this to say about it.
00:03:45
Speaker
There's been no public sign that McCann contemplated resigning from the Rio board at any stage during this debacle. The matter for Monash is its branding problem. It beggars belief to market yourself as a champion of traditional owners when two members of the Monash Council oversee the company whose 2020 contribution to Indigenous recognition involved 77 tons of explosives.
00:04:09
Speaker
That's why with Margaret gone and no permanent replacement on the horizon yet, the university council are the ones to address our claims too.
University Council and Decision-Making
00:04:18
Speaker
We do the work of the university, but they call the shots. If they wanted to end this, they could. They could send someone to bargaining who actually has the power to make decisions rather than HR goons who can't decide shit. It's very quickly coming up on a year since we started this bargaining process and it's already well over a year since the enterprise agreement expired. We've bloody well had enough.
00:04:41
Speaker
Anyway, we've got a few things to get due today. We're going to run through an open day wrap up and a Fair Work Commission update. And then we're going to talk through the action coming up this Wednesday at the University Council meeting at the Poshman Monash offices at the Paris end of Collins Street. We also got an interview at the end with Tua McEwen, who is a staff representative on the University Council and is also a branch committee member.
00:05:06
Speaker
She gives Adam a rundown of who the council are and what their deal is and why they're a good target for industrial action. All right. On to Open Day.
Open Day Concerns
00:05:15
Speaker
On the 6th of August, we had the Clayton Open Day. We had a great turnout of Monash members come out to Clayton for it. Members handed out over 4,000 flyers to prospective students and their parents explaining how poor staff working conditions will impact their education at Monash.
00:05:33
Speaker
It was wonderful to see so many members out in force, but it was also great to see people who came to Open Day be so supportive of our fight for better working conditions. They were appalled to hear that class sizes are ballooning and that tutors were getting as little as seven minutes to mark assignments and people were overwhelmingly in support of our action.
00:05:52
Speaker
We then gathered for a stop work rally where staff left their open day booths to join in in the festivities, where we heard from Professor Joo Chung Tham, Assistant Secretary of the Victorian Division of the NTU, who quoted Tony's life story, Blair, Ravi and Ben about some drama that Monash had started.
00:06:13
Speaker
like eliminating tutorials completely from the faculty of IT and raising the maximum tut sizes again in yet another move to erode student learning conditions. Thanks to everyone who showed up and got involved during Open Day. Getting involved and showing up is how we support our bargaining team and get better results at the table.
Fair Work Commission Ruling
00:06:33
Speaker
So onto the Fair Work Commission. Way back when we had industrial officer, Jacob DeBets on the podcast talking about the university's application to vary the enterprise agreement, uh, as a way of essentially neutralizing our claims for back pay and penalties in the federal court.
00:06:49
Speaker
The Fair Work Commission ruled against the university and found in favor of the NTU, which is great. But in true Monash style, they doubled down on paying their expensive lawyers a lot of money instead of their staff and appealed the decision.
00:07:03
Speaker
On Tuesday, the 22nd of August, so just a week and a bit ago now, a bunch of us went along to observe the hearing before the full bench of the Fair Work Commission. We haven't had a decision yet, but we think it shouldn't be too long. And when we do hear back one way or the other, we'll be sure to let you know. And over the last few weeks as well, we had a petition circulating in support of our key bargaining claims, a decent pay rise, proper job security and fair workloads.
00:07:32
Speaker
With the hard work of our members, we gathered nearly 800 signatures on the petition before we sent it off to University Council last week to be tabled at the next meeting of Council members on Wednesday the 6th of September.
00:07:46
Speaker
At around the same time it was sent off, we had an all members meeting to vote on a four hour strike.
Planned Strike Details
00:07:52
Speaker
The action will go ahead next week if the university's bargaining team continue to refuse to come to the table with a genuine proposal on job security and decasualisation at Monash. So the plan for the day is to stop work at 10 30 a.m. wherever you are and travel to Monash University Conference Centre at 30 Collins Street in the CBD
00:08:13
Speaker
where the university council meets. We'll be rallying and soft picketing the meeting so that the key decision makers at this university can hear from staff and students directly about the importance of enshrining fair workloads and job security in the next enterprise agreement.
00:08:31
Speaker
We hope to see you all there showing your support for our bargaining team to help them negotiate the best enterprise agreement possible, to overcome the lackluster approach that Monash has taken, and just to get out and, you know, stretch those strike muscles with your mates. And that's it from us. So now we're going to hand it over to Tui and Adam to have a bit of a chat about the University Council vibes. And as always, if you have any questions, just shoot us an email at myunionroteneba at gmail.com.
00:09:00
Speaker
And we'll see you at the strike on Wednesday.
Tui McKeown's Introduction
00:09:02
Speaker
I'm pleased to introduce to you today, Tui McKeown. Am I saying that correctly? I'm not quite sure. Now I'm not going to go into too much detail about who she is because I'm going to ask the lovely Tui to introduce herself and to tell us a bit more about what she does with the branch. So Tui, could you tell us a bit more about what you do and your involvement with the NTEU? Thank you, Adam. It's a pleasure to be here today. I actually started here back in the mid-1990s as a casual.
00:09:30
Speaker
So I've been around a long time. I was a casual, I then did a PhD, became a tenured staff member and working within the department of management. I was an active union member as soon as I could afford it, but probably we didn't do much. You know, I went on pickets, did the normal sort of thing with a t-shirt, et cetera. And it wasn't until COVID that really became active. And perhaps that's probably the reason why I'm here today, because a lot of the power grab we saw over COVID that we were all happy with.
00:10:00
Speaker
We haven't seen that change. So in terms of being an NTU member, I'm one of those stories about a person who's become a lot more active in the last few years, particularly since the death of our dear colleague, Sandra Cockfield, who was part of the negotiating team for the last EBA. So trying to carry on in spirit what she started. That's amazing.
00:10:22
Speaker
Now you happen to be an elected staff representative on University Council. Most people at Monash probably don't have much of a sense of what University Council is or what they do.
University Council Composition
00:10:32
Speaker
Would you be able to tell us what they are and who's on it and what on earth do they do? That's a very, very good insight. And this is also a story of somebody putting their hand up saying, yes, I'll do that without actually knowing much about it either. So I have been a member of the council since late last year.
00:10:50
Speaker
and it has been a huge learning experience. So just to give you the one-on-one version of it, Monash University, I didn't realise was actually established by an Act of Parliament back in 1958. It's been updated in 2009 and that put in place basically this board that is the Monash Council. Monash Council's had a number of permutations, so it has nine members on it that are elected either by the university
00:11:18
Speaker
or come from government representatives. So we've got some pretty esteemed sort of people on that. I'll tell you about them in a minute, but we also have two elected representatives. Now we've got a staff rep and then we've got the student representative. Of the representatives, everyone's paid except for the staff representative. Both the student representative and myself are there for two years. Everyone else, if you go and look at the profile and this information is all available on a Monash University website, including the meeting dates, et cetera.
00:11:49
Speaker
But if you look at the representatives of who we've got there, most of them have been there quite some time. So just start off introducing the one that most of us have no idea who he is, but he does get around a bit. So our Chancellor is actually Simon McKeon. Yeah, he does spell his name incorrectly. It should be McKeon like mine, but it is McKeon. He comes from the Quarry group and he's basically sitting at the very top. Under that, we've got the Acting Vice Chancellor at the moment is Sue Elliott.
00:12:18
Speaker
Maggie May for many, many years, just being replaced at the moment by Sue Elliott while they're on a global search for the new VC. We then have a number of people sitting underneath. So Dr. Megan Clark. Again, I've never heard of any of these people before. Quite an amazing person. She actually comes from the aerospace industry. So she's part of the Australian space race and quite an amazing lady. We have Jenny Sams, who has been involved for a long time in Aboriginal housing, looking at homelessness.
00:12:48
Speaker
Pizzabinian, who's the ex-principal of McKinnon High School, right through to people like Professor Jill Callister, who runs a group concerned with mental health. And then we've got a lot of corporate sort of people as well. So we've got Peter Marriott, who comes from an extensive risk background, including ANZ and KPMG. Peter Young, who is a KC. So it's an amazing wealth of experience on the board, but probably the number one defining feature of our council.
00:13:17
Speaker
is there's, it's very much upward and outward looking. People with on the ground experience who've actually know what happens at universities. Well, that's basically Pitts has got some sort of background, I guess, coming from high school, but basically it's the student representative, the lovely Ishka de Silva and myself. And we are sitting on that council for two years and yeah, it takes about six months to get your head around it. And in terms of the amount of power and authority we can wield,
00:13:47
Speaker
some interesting questions to be asked there. What a motley crew of people running our university, miners, bankers, CEOs, philanthropists, and of course yourself and Ishka being our people on the ground, staff and students.
Strategic Role of the Council
00:14:04
Speaker
Now the Monash branch is organizing a half day strike on the 6th of September, which is time to coincide with the next university council meeting. Monash NTU has submitted a petition and open letter to them.
00:14:17
Speaker
just recently for consideration at this meeting. Tui, what makes the council a good target for this action? Well, the council is the board. They are the governing body of the university, and they do have the power and the authority. But as I said, they're very good at looking up and out, and most of our council meetings do last five to six hours. I should say we meet eight times a year. There are also seven subcommittees sitting underneath it.
00:14:44
Speaker
There's a lot going on and what I've found out in the time I've been on, there's a lot of Monash resources devoted basically to looking at what's happening outside. And the majority of the time it is, well, to be blunt, happy, happy joy, joy. We're going up in the world rankings on THE, et cetera. And as far as on the world stage, Monash looks very, very good. What really is lacking and certainly at the council perspective is what it actually looks like on the ground.
00:15:13
Speaker
And perhaps you just, I'm going to use that terrible word that I know council hate, but wage theft. So they've called it unintentional underpayments and the legalese, the language behind it, and we know this from attending the fair work commission hearing the other day, you really do get baffled basically with the bullshit. So trying to explain to the council what this looks like on the ground, that as a chief examiner for a unit, I'm saying to Adam here,
00:15:40
Speaker
off you go and work for four hours, but we're only going to pay you for three. That one hour of student consultation is unpaid. That's what it looks like on the ground. And I think we've got a council that are good people. They really are concerned about what's going on, but they've not heard this story before. They do have the power. They do have the authority. And I think when they actually hear the stories and realize what's been going on, they are a force for change.
00:16:09
Speaker
And I'm hoping a force for good as well. But those two don't necessarily go hand in hand, but we have got some very good people on the board when they hear the story, when they actually see the amount of staff discontent, I think that there is a wave of change going to hit.
00:16:27
Speaker
Fantastic. Thank you. Thank you very much, Tui. And that's all I have for you today. We hope to see you at the rally next Wednesday, the 6th of
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:16:35
Speaker
September. By all of us coming together, University Council can realize that, you know, this is not a PR exercise. They see us as the very real staff and students walking on the ground at the university. All right, folks, that's it for this episode. Thanks to Kate, Danny, Adam, Bernard, and Poddaddy Sofio for all the work they've put into this. And we'll catch you next time.
00:17:24
Speaker
have turned us off of this beautiful end.