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Episode 26: One final push w. Ben Eltham
101 Plays8 months ago
In this episode, Kate & Tony welcome back Branch President Ben Eltham to update everyone on what has been happening. We discuss Margaret Gardner's lavish $127k farewell at the NGV, the cash grab that is the surge pricing on parking, as well as getting a bargaining update. We then finish the episode talking about the plan for the upcoming strike next Wednesday (the 20th), and why it is important that everyone turns out and turns up for it. This will hopefully be the last strike we have to take in this round of bargaining, so we need to send as powerful a message as possible that management need to start putting people before profit, and give as an agreement that we deserve!
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
Otherwise, we'll see everyone out on strike day!
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Transcript
New Enterprise Bargaining Agreement at Monash University
00:00:18
Speaker
G'day, everyone, and welcome to My Union Wrote an 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 to everything we can to avoid being fucked in the process.
00:00:41
Speaker
Those involved with the podcast would like to acknowledge that it is being recorded on the unceded lands of the Kulin nations, 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.
Staff Pay Issues and Financial Mismanagement
00:01:08
Speaker
Hi everyone, it has been a while since you've last heard from us and we hope that the start of semester has been kind to you. As always, I'm Adam Fernandes, one of your National Councillors of the Monash branch. Last year, we talked about how much Maggie G. earned while staff languished without a decent pay rise, and this year, we found out that her farewell cost us $127,000.
00:01:33
Speaker
Former Vice Chancellor, you sat atop your ivory tower, making decisions that affected the lives of countless students and staff. Yet, you remain blissfully ignorant of the real needs and aspirations of those you claim to serve.
00:01:47
Speaker
It's no wonder you took up the post of state governor, for a ceremonial position is what you are perfectly qualified for. And now, on to current issues. Let's talk about the parking situation at Monash University. If things couldn't get worse for staff and students, Monash has decided to take a page out of a drug lord's playbook and implement predatory marketing.
00:02:11
Speaker
This year, staff and students can expect the cost of parking to go up by 100% for nearly one third of the year. For some of our colleagues, this price hike in parking is equivalent to 2% of their annual salary.
00:02:28
Speaker
This means that any payoff by the university will be undermined by the fact that they can simply increase parking fees to collect that money back. And since many staff and students are expected to park at uni, our illustrious leaders have now found a new revenue system to fund future lavish farewells. Is it just me or does it feel like our new Vice-Chancellor is Pablo Escobar? Well that's it from me, I'm Adam Fernandes, signing out.
00:02:58
Speaker
All right, everyone, welcome back. And we hope you had a restful and relaxing summer break. So despite the lack of episodes coming out, the union has been really, really busy over the summer on a lot of different fronts. So we thought we'd take today to walk through what the union has been up to in the last couple of months and the status of bargaining.
Controversial Farewell Gala for Former Vice-Chancellor
00:03:18
Speaker
And we figured that there'd be no better person to do that with than our branch president, Ben Eltham. So welcome back to the podcast, Ben.
00:03:25
Speaker
Yeah, thanks, Tony. Thanks, Kate. So I thought we might start with Margaret's farewell gala at the NGV that was hitting the news last week.
00:03:35
Speaker
I came across an article in Independent Australia today that had a nice little summary of it for those that aren't familiar. Possibly the final fling party for Margaret at the NGV was a way of acknowledging the leap upwards for a career academic noted for overseeing job cuts at her previous university, RMIT, and being publicly outed for illegally supporting the sacking of an academic on the false grounds of redundancy.
00:03:59
Speaker
But this was all back in 2011 when Gardner, whose academic reputation was built on expertise in industrial relations and human resource management, was VC there. Now aged 70, she has executive positions with Deakin in Victoria and Griffith and QUT in Brisbane.
00:04:14
Speaker
With this experience and also the brilliance of her taking RMIT, a poison chalice in 2005, according to reports at the time, from basket case to profitability, Gardner is clearly much admired by the university governance folks who signed off on her $1.3 million annual salary in 2022.
00:04:33
Speaker
The university has, of course, defended this lavish sendoff of their highly paid VC. Possibly the unveiling of a huge commissioned portrait during the festivities embarrassed some of the attendees, but probably not the woman herself. The more distinguished one becomes, it seems, the less you need to take such niceties into account. It would be interesting to ask Margaret Gardner if she thinks this event was, as they say, appropriate. So Ben, appropriate?
00:04:59
Speaker
No, widely inappropriate, I'm afraid, Tony. So what are we talking about here? We're talking about $127,000 going away party at the National Gallery of Victoria, in which there's three courses of meals served. Some pretty high-class entertainment, including Kate Sibrano playing.
00:05:17
Speaker
and yes, the unveiling of a large oil portrait of none other than Professor Gardner herself. So a very lavish going away party for our outgoing Vice-Chancellor and one which the Union has a lot of questions about. We really do question the probity and the appropriateness of this expenditure by a public institution.
00:05:39
Speaker
And particularly at a time when, as that article noted, we're also fighting them in federal court for the consultation hours case. And I did the maths really quickly and the cost of the Gala not including the oil painting was the equivalent to 2497.23 consultation hours.
00:05:58
Speaker
That's quite a lot of teaching, isn't it? And I think that kind of highlights really the extravagance of this do. You've got to ask, what was the teaching or research outcome of these celebrations? How did they advance the mission of the university?
00:06:15
Speaker
in terms of educating students or doing research. You know, I think it's very hard to justify this expenditure, particularly in a time of cost of living crisis for ordinary staff and students. And we really do have questions we want to ask of the university management, like who approved this going away party? You know, were the appropriate policies and procedures followed? Monash policy on procurement says that if you've got an expenditure of over $50,000, five zero,
00:06:43
Speaker
then you need three quotes. We'd be delighted to see the University Commission three quotes for their $127,000 going away party. And further, why was it held at the National Gallery of Victoria? Monash has a very passable performing arts center, including a large hall called Robert Blackwood Hall.
00:07:02
Speaker
Well, this is where all the graduation ceremonies happen for the departing students. So our question is, if it's good enough for students at the end of their degrees to receive their diplomas at Robert Blackwood Hall, why is it not good enough for the departing vice chancellor of this institution that granted those degrees? Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, like, how long have you been teaching for, Tony, more than 10 years? This is my 11th year. 11th year. And yeah, the vice chancellor got 127,000
00:07:32
Speaker
dollar party for nine years of service. Whereas you've been teaching for more than 11 years and Monash won't even give you an ongoing job. So there's also some issues there as well.
Parking Fee Hikes and Their Impact
00:07:46
Speaker
The other thing that we have been talking about in the union, Ben is the surge parking rate hike at the Monash campuses. Can you tell us a little bit more about the unions work around that?
00:07:59
Speaker
Well, we received an email from the Buildings and Property Division shortly before the start of semester one, where they told us the parking fees would be going up. And not just a little bit either, but a very substantial amount. In fact, they were going to implement what they called surge pricing or peak period pricing. When we looked into it, we found out that the peak period, so-called, actually stretches for the first four weeks of semester and also includes graduations.
00:08:27
Speaker
So a bit more than a little bit of a period, quite a long period of so-called peak prices. If you look at the percentage increase of the parking fees, in the worst case scenario, it can be as much as 106% increase on last year's parking fees. There's actually pretty significant imposts, particularly on staff that are traveling to the university by car and obviously on students as well.
00:08:52
Speaker
And we just think it's price gouging, basically. The university can put these fees up. It owns the car park, obviously. And so it's trying to increase its bottom line. It's a revenue grab. There's really no justification for it beyond that. I don't think the university has really tried to justify it, apart from some particularly disingenuous lines about carbon neutrality. And there's been no consultation
00:09:19
Speaker
People are pretty grumpy about it. There's an open letter going around opposing the parking fee hike. We've had almost, I think, 1,500 signatures on it. Students are very upset about it, understandably. But the university's, well, it's not even really taking any notice.
00:09:35
Speaker
in their inimitable way, Monash University just rolls on with their unpopular decisions. And it must end up being a lot of money that they're gaining out of this. Like there's thousands of parking spots around, even just Clayton campus, not thinking of the other ones. And that during this sort of fictitious surge period, that all of that doubles. Maybe this is how they're paying for oil paintings and NGV galas.
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, maybe they are. I mean, this has to be hundreds of thousands, if not millions of dollars of extra revenue. You know, and I just wanted to talk about that idea of peak pricing. You know, students and staff are not surged to the requirements of this university, right? Semester teaching is actually what this university is supposedly about, right? We're about teaching students and educating people.
00:10:25
Speaker
So I failed to see how you can just nominate the first four weeks of a teaching semester and say, this is the peak period. Isn't this what we're meant to be doing here at Monash University? You know, to me, it just underlies the kind of business principles that this place runs on. It's no longer an institution of education. It really does seem to be like a corporation that's seeking to maximise its bottom line.
00:10:50
Speaker
Yeah, all about the cash grab, it seems all too often.
Stalled Bargaining and Upcoming Strike
00:10:53
Speaker
So we're recording this on Tuesday, which means there's a couple of days until the next bargaining meeting that you'll be in with management. Could you give people a bit of an update of where we've been at? We've been having some intensive bargaining at the beginning of this year, which people will have been getting emails about. I think the easiest way to explain where bargaining is at is to say that
00:11:15
Speaker
We're a long way behind where we'd like to be. You know, we would like to have wrapped this up and have an agreement with the university that enshrines better wages, better conditions, better workloads and better conditions for students. We haven't got that and that's because the university hasn't wanted to give that to staff. The university has been playing hardball in recent weeks in negotiations and it refuses.
00:11:40
Speaker
still refuses after all this time, after 18 months, they're still refusing to give staff a meaningful offer on job security. They're still refusing to give staff any concessions at all on workloads. They're still refusing to give staff some kind of conversion process so that people who are in insecure and precarious work like casuals or fixed term employees can get a pathway to conversion to an ongoing job. They're still refusing most of our claims in that respect.
00:12:10
Speaker
So it's very disappointing from the union's point of view. We don't think that they've been serious. They've certainly made a few minor concessions on a few small areas. From the union's point of view, we've been trying as hard as possible to try and get to an agreement. We've been prepared in some cases to make concessions that we think will protect members' interests, but will get us further along in negotiations. And they're being refused by the university.
00:12:36
Speaker
So, you know, we're very disappointed with where things are at. There's been a renewed hostility from Monash HR in the bargaining room. And, you know, it's fair to say that the university is dug its heels in really in the last week or so on some of our key claims. Yeah, that's such a shame to hear that with the change of VC and the change of management that there hasn't really been a shift in how management approaches bargaining.
00:13:03
Speaker
But I suppose on that note, we could also move to the key thing that union members can do to support our colleagues in the bargaining room, such as yourself and the whole bargaining team, industrial action. Could you also give us a bit of an industrial action update, Ben?
00:13:20
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, so this is the kind of inevitable corollary, right, of the fact that the university is refusing to play ball and offer meaningful concessions to staff, staff pretty grumpy about that. So we talked to members last week, we had a meeting with
00:13:35
Speaker
very large number of members at Monash University, and they voted for another strike. So we're going to have another strike on the 20th of March. And that's really a direct consequence of the intransigence of Monash HR, Monash management at the bargaining table so far. I mean,
00:13:53
Speaker
We're nearly 20 months into negotiations now. We've had 41 bargaining meetings. It's difficult to convey to people on this podcast just how difficult they can be. Some of those negotiations with the university will argue over almost the spelling of words or the placement of punctuation and always with a view to the university's bottom line and the university's workplace interests rather than the best interests of staff and students.
00:14:23
Speaker
So we're gonna go on strike again. We hope that this moves the dial. We hope that it shows management that stuff are actually pretty serious. When we had our last strike in October last year,
00:14:34
Speaker
I think it did shift management a bit. I think it shocked them a bit, actually, seeing stuff go out for three whole days. The level of animus, I think, and the level of emotion that staff feel towards these stalled negotiations and just the general corporatized nature of the university. So, yeah, I mean, once again, I think the university management are out of touch. They don't realize how angry staff are.
00:14:58
Speaker
And this strike is really a way to show them that we are really serious, that things are really serious, conditions are deteriorating, particularly teaching conditions and workloads, and that staff won't just roll over and accept a substandard agreement. And so I guess that brings us to the nitty gritty of the industrial action itself. So what are the plans for the 20th for strike day? So we're going to go on strike. We're all going to go out at midday on the 20th.
00:15:25
Speaker
And we hope to have as many members join us in that industrial walk off as possible. And we're going to be protesting to Monash University Council, to the board, the people who have the ultimate governance responsibility for this university. We're going to be making our displeasure at management known to the Monash Council, led by Chancellor Simon McKeon.
00:15:48
Speaker
who we believe has an increasingly significant series of questions to answer for his failures in governing this institution. He was right there beside Professor Gardner for the unveiling of the oil painting. He was at the $127,000 going away party. He's been the chancellor throughout the period where Monash is admitted to unlawfully underpaying its staff.
00:16:12
Speaker
We really are starting to ask some questions about the governance of this institution and we're going to be making those feelings known to Monash University Council on the 20th. On the morning of the Thursday, the 21st, we're going to have a picket. So we're going to have a picket at Clayton Campus where we're going to, again,
00:16:31
Speaker
be showing our solidarity and be showing that our intent is very strong so that's another opportunity for staff to get involved with the industrial action and we're also going to be looking for some other kind of fun more relaxed activities throughout the 24 hours for staff to get involved with maybe some more kind of relaxing refreshments
00:16:56
Speaker
on the Wednesday afternoon and maybe a morning tea on the Thursday morning after the picket. So there'll be a mix of activities, some more militant, others more collegial, but we hope that staff can join in with some of those actions and really show management how serious we are.
00:17:13
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And I find as well the sort of so-called more militant actions also can be like super collegial and fun as well. So hopefully it'll be a nice break from the overwork that everyone kind of experiences every day in their work with the university.
00:17:35
Speaker
And just a note as well that if anybody is keen to get more involved in industrial action, do more than just walking off the job, being involved in organizing things, send an email to the branch. The email I think is in the pod description saying that you're keen to get involved. You can also send an email to the branch asking about how you can get your workplace organized for strikes and all that kind of thing. So definitely get in touch with you to help.
00:18:04
Speaker
and help make the strike as good as possible. So please do get in touch.
00:18:09
Speaker
Yeah, and as Ben said as well, like if anybody has any ideas for things that they think would be cool to do over that 20th, 21st strike period, shoot us an email and let us know. And if it's a good one, then maybe you'll say it up and having hundreds of your colleagues involved doing it. So you can either email the branch, so monash at ntau.org.au or email the podcast if you want at myunionrodaneba at gmail.com.
00:18:36
Speaker
Ben, was there anything else that you wanted to tell folks or update them about?
Alleged Wage Theft by Monash University
00:18:43
Speaker
Well, I don't know if we've mentioned this on the podcast yet, but we've got our day in federal court for our latest allegations of wage theft against Monash University. So there was a formal hearing of the federal court of Australia.
00:18:56
Speaker
where the NTU formally alleged that Monash University is unlawfully underpaid as many as 3,000 casual academics. This is the latest tranche of wage theft allegations that we've brought against the university. The university
00:19:12
Speaker
has agreed to defend those allegations and we're looking for a day in court later on this year. So it's a very significant moment. I think it shows firstly, just how intransigent the university has been, like they've still refusing to really acknowledge the degree of their underpayment in this case. In fact, of course, they're saying there's no underpayments at all and there's nothing to see here.
00:19:37
Speaker
But I think we're about to see all the evidence being presented by the union in this case. It's a very compelling body of evidence. And I think it will be very hard for the university to defend these allegations once they are made publicly. And indeed, in the court of public opinion, I think there'll be a lot of pressure put on the university once people understand the nature of these underpayments and how the university has imposed them on some of the most vulnerable and insecure workers at this institution.
00:20:08
Speaker
Monash again proving itself to be a leader in the university sector, just this time leading the way into federal court.
00:20:15
Speaker
Leading from the rear, a little bit like their student satisfaction scores where we found out recently that they are the sixth worst in the country and the second worst in the group of eight for student experience. And these are the independent scores done by the quality and learning and teaching process. That's an independent government ratings. It's funny how this university loves talking about rankings.
00:20:38
Speaker
when it comes to research and how are they doing in times higher education and so on and so forth. But when it comes to student rankings, student experience, well, they're trailing well behind. Yeah, exactly. Maybe getting some paid consultations with their tutors might kind of help the student satisfaction a little bit there, you never know. So I think that kind of covers most of the
00:21:04
Speaker
action-packed summer that the union has had. So I think we'll leave the podcast there. Thanks everyone for tuning in and we will see you all at the strike on the 20th and 21st of March. 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.
00:21:30
Speaker
What?