Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Bonus Episode One: Gavin from Western Sydney University
174 Plays2 years ago
In this bonus episode, Kate & Tony talk to Gavin from Western Sydney University about their recent round of bargaining, Western Sydney's conversion, and job security clause, and what lessons we at Monash can take from Western Sydney to help in our own bargaining.
If you haven't already, you can find the link to register for Wednesday's mass meeting here - https://linktr.ee/myunionwroteaneba
If you have questions about the process you'd like answered, drop us an email at myunionwroteaneba@gmail.com
You can stay up to date with everything happening with bargaining and at the branch by following us on social media:
Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/NTEUMonashBranch
Twitter - https://mobile.twitter.com/nteumonash
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Acknowledgments
00:00:18
Speaker
G'day, everyone, and welcome to My Union Road and EBA.
Bonus Episode Announcement
00:00:22
Speaker
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.
Casual Employment Issues with Scott
00:00:41
Speaker
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.
00:01:07
Speaker
This week we're bringing you a special bonus episode. It was originally going to be the second half to the episode that we had last week about our casual conversion and job security clause with Scott Robinson. But the discussion went a bit long and it was too good and full of too many useful and insightful points from our guest to chop it down to fit into the normal length of an episode. Our guest was Gavin from Western Sydney University and as we noted both in the last episode and in this one,
Western Sydney Influence on Monash Clause
00:01:31
Speaker
their conversion clause was the basis for our own.
00:01:34
Speaker
So being able to talk with him about what inspired theirs and how they were able to achieve it was a really great opportunity. Just before we get into that chat, though, there is another important thing that I want to just quickly update you all on. You may have seen in the bargaining notes published by the university from the meeting on the 29th that the university has brought the continued participation of Scott, a casual bargaining representative who you heard last episode, into question.
00:01:58
Speaker
The problem, in big old scare quotes, because it's something that is very much a problem of their own making, is that Scott, like most casuals, effectively ceased working for the university at the start of this month when his casual contract ran out.
00:02:10
Speaker
When
Details of Conversion Clause
00:02:11
Speaker
our bargaining team raised the issue in the meeting on the 29th, the HR goons, I mean the university's consultants and representatives, refused to continue to pay Scott for his participation in the bargaining team, citing what they called difficulties. There are no difficulties. Every semester, casual academics are slapped in the face with petty, disrespectful, and dehumanizing reminders of how little the university values our contributions.
00:02:37
Speaker
As if it wasn't bad enough that we have to reapply for our jobs every semester, we also get cut off from a whole raft of university services that ongoing staff retain full access to, like our email accounts. It was 1am on October 31st when I got the email telling me that my IT access was going to be cut off on December 1st.
00:02:56
Speaker
This is all in spite of there being a clause in the EBA, you know, the one that expired 160 days ago that specifically states that the university will, and I quote, provide teaching associate staff with library cards, out-of-hours access, email accounts, network and internet access, and inclusion in the university's telephone and web directory on an equivalent basis as other academic staff, including during non-teaching periods over the calendar year.
00:03:26
Speaker
End quote. As not an issue of money, God, no. With their $416 million operating surplus in 2021, the amount that they are giving Scott is a drop in the ocean. Our 3K a day university chancellor gets the equivalent of what they are paying Scott in time
Bargaining Process and Strategies
00:03:41
Speaker
release every 90 minutes. It's yet another example of the university not engaging in this process in good faith and another example of how disrespectful they are towards their employees.
00:03:52
Speaker
the very people that make the university what it is. Anyway, hopefully the university does the right thing and stops playing games. Here's our chat with Gavin. In our interview with Scott, we got a bit of a lay of the land about our casual conversion course.
00:04:08
Speaker
The Monash Clause was actually heavily influenced by a clause that is just about to be agreed upon by Western Sydney University. So we thought it would be a good idea to hear how that process went from union members and organizers at Western Sydney. They're a bit further along in the negotiations than we are, so it gives us a really good opportunity to see how we can fight and how we can win.
00:04:28
Speaker
And so we've got Gavin here with us today from Western Sydney. Thanks for coming to speak to us. Just by way of a beginning for the discussion, could you tell us a bit about yourself and your time in higher ed? You start off as a casual academic, I think, and now you're in a different role, is that right? Yeah, that's right. So I've spent most of my adult life at Western Sydney. I was a student, undergraduate, did my PhD.
00:04:50
Speaker
I was a session tutor there for five years, up until the end of 2017, and I've been a professional staff member since the beginning of 2018. So I've been heavily involved
Union Team and Communication Strategy
00:05:01
Speaker
in many facets of university life at Western Sydney. But in terms of my employment history, I started as a casual, that's how I got involved in the union. And that's how I'm still involved in the fight for casual employment rights.
00:05:19
Speaker
Cool, thanks for coming today, Gavin. Can you talk us through a bit about the clause that Western Sydney put to management around decasualisation? What does the clause aim to do and what will it look like in practice?
00:05:31
Speaker
Sure, those are really good questions. So this clause actually has a fairly long gestation period. And it does kind of stem from work that has begun at Western City quite a long time ago. We've had conversion-like clauses. You've got the commitment to 30 conversions over the life of an agreement, which is just not a lot. But there's always something in there in terms of trying to uplift your session stuff. So we've had those. The roots of that have been in our agreements for a while.
Impact of Conversion Clauses
00:06:01
Speaker
But I think that the strength of this agreement and why it's orders of magnitude larger than anything we've ever had is in part because of on the back of COVID. I think that our Vice Chancellor was willing to listen.
00:06:16
Speaker
It was probably the biggest item on our log of claim, it was the biggest item that we kept returning to. Because it is large, it is big for us. We know that Sydney is going to probably eclipse the total number, I mean Sydney is much larger than us, but Western Sydney will lay claim to being the first there.
00:06:36
Speaker
But it did fluctuate. We did need to do some escalation. We did go on strike. I think that our, I do want to give a plug to our branch president and David Burchill, a wily and shrewd operator. This is his fourth round of bargaining. So David was probably the best man to be in this, but he knew how this thing works. So definitely a shout out to the branch president.
00:07:03
Speaker
Good. And are there any sort of mechanisms or safeguards in the clause to make sure that the university follows through with their end of it?
00:07:11
Speaker
So we're talking about enforcement there. So the number is 150 FTE. That's not 150 headcount. So some of the things that we need to, that the university wanted to insist on being in that clause was we don't want to be, they don't want to be wedded to just 150 full-time positions. There's part-time. And there's
Campaign Reflections and Tactics
00:07:31
Speaker
some merit to that because different people have different sort of lifestyle needs, right? So there's a bit of flexibility there in that clause.
00:07:37
Speaker
There is a confirmation period. So the university needs to be allowed to ensure the quality of its permanent academics. Once you become a permanent academic, it gets kind of hard to remove you, which is a good thing, I must say. But in order for us to keep the university on board, we needed to give them some assurances in the clause that there would be that ability, first of all, to ensure that they get quality candidates. But they also need to provide the support. There's no point setting these people up to fail.
00:08:06
Speaker
And that's just, so there is some stringent requirements on the university to provide that support through the probation period, through that confirmation period. But it's really not greatly different from what it would be if you were to come to be employed by the university externally. It is over three years, so it's not a 150 mass conversion all at once and there's just chaos. We're gonna start out with a bit of a,
00:08:36
Speaker
a slow boil of 30 FTE by July of next year and then 60 in the following March and then another 60 in the following March after that. So they can stagger it and we can develop some casual academics and this is the thing I think is most exciting to me as a former casual academic is there's an opportunity to uplift quite a large number of session academics developmentally over that
Addressing Skepticism and Enforcing Changes
00:09:01
Speaker
time. They may not be ready by July,
00:09:03
Speaker
And I've already had meetings with session academics asking for advice. I've been giving them advice. You may not be ready in the first tranche, but then there's a second tranche and then there's a third tranche. So there's a great opportunity for the union and for the university to actually do quite a massive uplift in terms of the capabilities of their session staff and to meet that quality threshold, to meet that quality goal.
00:09:29
Speaker
That's kind of how the program will kind of be shaped over the next three years. Yeah, that sounds great. And it sounds like it gives opportunities for the staff, union and also the university management as well. So that's really good.
00:09:44
Speaker
The other thing we wanted to ask you about, Gavin, was you were in the room for bargaining when you presented your claims to management about casual jobs and decasualisation at the university. So we were wondering, how did they respond initially? What were their talking points against the Secure Job Clause? They weren't really talking against it. They were talking around it, I guess you would say, is they were trying to, this had become a high profile item and you couldn't really, no, no, we're not, couldn't
00:10:12
Speaker
rejected out of hand, right? Like that wasn't their position. It was about, well, how do we actually make this work for us? And part of that was, you know, trying to at
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
00:10:21
Speaker
least rhetorically tie, well, money's got to come from somewhere, you know, it's $7 million. I mean, I'm not a numbers man. So let me, my PhD is in philosophy and poetry. So numbers are just not my thing. So the numbers were more their IO and our branch president, they knew, they kind of knew what they were talking about.
00:10:40
Speaker
But it was, you know, at a certain point, as I mentioned a little bit earlier, they did drop the number. So it went from 150 to I think 125. It fluctuated. They were kind of trying to shift the margins around. That, of course, didn't go down very well. And that was one of the things that I think precipitated some action from us.
00:11:01
Speaker
David Burchill is very good at writing communications. He's gotten very good at that. And that's actually was a really important piece of the puzzle was the way we were able to communicate not just to our members but to management via those communications as well to sort of signal to them the displeasure and to demonstrate that we weren't happy. The VC kind of was responsive. We were able to get him and make him responsive to the mood of the membership.
00:11:28
Speaker
And that's kind of how that went. It was a bit of a tussle at the table at times, but the experience of our branch president, the other members of the bargaining table and the IO, they maintained quite strong discipline. I think that's definitely a really important message is that the team was disciplined and that really allowed us to sort of stay together on our side of the table so that the communication and the messaging was always clear.
00:11:56
Speaker
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I think one thing that I think is interesting to think about is like what the division was in terms of you being able to be successful in putting that claim. How much of the success do you think is down to what happened in the actual bargaining meetings in the room versus what was going on outside? And you said you took industrial action and struck over the issue. Can you tell us a bit more about that as well?
00:12:23
Speaker
So yes, we did take a strike. It was a half-day strike. You've got to put this into a bit of context. We've got six campuses. So we've got to be quite, again, shrewd about how and when and over what we strike. Our strike took place on the campus where our chancellor is in the hope that the VC would be up on the third or fourth floor and would hear us.
00:12:49
Speaker
The senior DVC was there and she did hear us and we at least made our present time. The Chancellor was also there. I bumped into him quite by accident out of the side of where we were getting the barbecue. He was sort of wandering around. I don't know what the Chancellor does exactly but he was there. He's a nice man.
00:13:06
Speaker
It was actually quite a sophisticated mix of things. We have to take that distributed nature of our campuses into account. We can't have 500 people all on the one campus striking and making noise that way. But that's a necessary tool in our arsenal.
00:13:22
Speaker
communications, not just emails to staff, which is obviously going to get circulated to the VC eventually, but also using other mechanisms in the popular press as well, being able to communicate what's going on so that, again, the management doesn't control the comms channel and that the alternative message was there, that what we were trying to achieve was there. Because it was all done on Zoom, we also were able to leverage video recordings.
00:13:53
Speaker
There are quite a number of video recordings of us as a bargaining team immediately after the day of bargaining summarizing the events. So really quickly trying to turn over all the messaging to our members. Because the university tried that tactic at the last round of bargaining. They had lovely video production. The DVCA was the lead negotiator. So she was on screen. But we were able to
00:14:18
Speaker
use what we had, use the tools that we had and communicate to our staff so that there was a consistent presence and that we had control of the messaging. So it was a mix of things. It was not a single thing that kind of pushed him over the edge. Again, I think it came down to the strategies and the tactics from the branch president who leveraged his experience quite heavily and was able to make the right decisions and escalate at the right time. Yeah, that's great to hear. And it's great to hear that your VC was responsive as well.
00:14:49
Speaker
We're really hoping the same thing's gonna happen at Monash. So fingers crossed on that one. And that also gives us some really good insight onto what sort of tactics we can use and how we can use the structure of Monash to our advantage as well. So that's really great.
00:15:04
Speaker
The other thing we wanted to ask you, Gavin, is about job security and casualisation. You know, with the media and all that kind of stuff, they have become, you know, kind of buzzwords that get thrown around a lot. But can you tell us or give us a sense of what this new cause will actually mean for people's lives, being a former casual academic yourself? And that's a really great question. And I think is going to be really important in any campaign that you run around the casualisation.
00:15:33
Speaker
because it can be quite transformative. The reason why, I mean, I'm employed full-time as a professional staff member for the last four years. I don't need to be in this space, but I've stayed in this space because it's a passion of mine, and I know what sessional staff bring to the table. I would have liked somebody like me at the table when I was a sessional academic as well. And that's one, and again, I guess this also goes, partly goes to the previous question. One of the reasons I was at the table was I was a sessional academic.
00:16:02
Speaker
And I have the narrative and I have the stories. And that's actually really powerful. You need to tell the stories of session academics to show what it means, what the current state of affairs means. It means precarious employment. It means mental health issues. I had a fantastic drinking problem when I was a session academic early on because it's stressful.
00:16:25
Speaker
Not the job itself, I love teaching and I was good at it, but the thing that really gets to you and grinds you down is that precariousness. I'm only employed for five months and then I'm unemployed and then I'm employed again for five months and I did that for five years. I know people who have done it for 10 years, who have done it for 15 years. Somebody's going on 20 years.
00:16:46
Speaker
Now, every casual is different. Some people have other jobs, and there's a good reason why you want to be a casual because you've got other things going on. But I was just casual. That was it. But it is going to mean a lot to a lot of people. And it's going to have a beneficial effect for students.
00:17:04
Speaker
This casual, and this is probably the same at your university, the casuals are the face of the university to the students because most of your tutors are probably casual. Yeah, absolutely. Your primary point of contact is a casual academic who may not be employed next year. You want, you want, oh, I want to be in your, I'd love, what are you teaching next semester? I have no idea. I'm not even sure I'll be here next year. And those are conversations I've had and lots of sessions will have had. They form a captions with students, students like and build a rapport with academics.
00:17:34
Speaker
But it also had beneficial effects for the permanent academics as well. There's a lot of energy.
00:17:40
Speaker
amongst the permanent academics because they've all got a cohort of two, three, four, five session staff that they have employed for years. They are mentors to these people. They are coaches to these people and they will want to get involved and they want to see their proteges, let's call them, be successful. So there's a lot of benefit here for the students, for the culture of the university
00:18:05
Speaker
And most importantly, for those academics, those session academics that are successful, and it will be life changing, but it's the stories you've got to tell. Yeah, so I'm, Kate and I are both casuals at Monash, and I'm sort of, I'm a TA, I've been, I'm coming up on 10 years of doing it and sort of reapplying for the job every semester. And so yeah, a lot of the stuff that you said then, like, really, really strongly rings true for me in terms of those connections that you build
00:18:31
Speaker
both with the students and also with those mentors like I've had a couple of academics that I've worked with sort of multiple times over the course of the years and you develop those those sort of bonds with them and so yeah that's definitely something that resonates really strongly with me strongly with me.
00:18:50
Speaker
I'm interested as well, and I guess we're interested now as well, in how you feel about the campaign now. So now that you're sort of coming to the point of securing that win and having that new cause in place, how you feel looking back is that things that you would do differently are the things that you think in addition to the comms and stuff that you've already mentioned that you think worked particularly well.
00:19:17
Speaker
I thought the campaign for it was dealt with really, really well in a really mature and sober minded way by our branch president because we knew we were breaking some ground and he knew that and he understood the gravity of the situation and he understood what our constraints were as a union.
00:19:35
Speaker
given our dispersed nature. You know, we understood what technologies were available to us. We had just come off, we were just coming off two years worth of Zoom. We knew how to use Zoom, right? We knew how to use Zoom. Very important tool to use. So he understood all of that. He recognised, and so did, you know, we've got to get my hat to the VC. This is something that he wanted.
00:19:56
Speaker
He needed to struggle and to negotiate and to push and pull, and he did elevate it to, I think, an appropriate level where the two IC of the university, the senior DVC, was involved trying to really hammer out some of the harder details of this, particularly around how many sessionals do we actually have? What will the impact actually be of 150 FTE?
00:20:20
Speaker
what the reduction in the commensurate reduction in casual work would actually be that's in the clause as well as a percentage goal there. In terms of what I would do differently I don't think I think it was it was handled exceptionally well in uncharted territory and we had somebody in our branch president who had more than a decade of experience negotiating and kind of knew how to step it up
00:20:47
Speaker
you know, one rung at a time and didn't get a rush of blood to the head or white line fever. I don't know if that's a saying down in Victoria. The try line is just there and you're just trying to push and you push too hard and then you lose control of everything and you've fumbled it. He understood the stakes.
00:21:06
Speaker
And he understood how to slowly turn up the boiler. So I'm not in a position to say what would have been done better. I think we did it exceptionally well. And it was the discipline, and it was the communications, and it was the connection back to the members.
00:21:22
Speaker
I can't tell you how many times we had members meetings and numerous votes. We had an indicative vote before we went to an endorsement vote. The vote, the all staff vote is live now. I voted this morning. So the vote is actually going on as we are recording this. Congratulations.
00:21:39
Speaker
And actually, the head of HR, I think, actually put this best. It is a process that needs to be owned by everyone. And I agree with that. It's a community building exercise for the university in general. Those permanent academics, those social academics, the students, even the professional staff, there's an opportunity to seize that energy.
00:21:59
Speaker
and to engage in some cultural transformation at the university. I think that's the collateral benefit that isn't... It's hard to quantify at this point. We can quantify 150 FTE. Having an impact on the academic culture of the place is a harder thing to do, but it's something that I think will come with this process.
00:22:19
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And also, you know, Western Sydney Uni is really breaking ground in this, as you said. And it's going to hopefully have this positive impact across the industry as well, and not just at Western Sydney. So, you know, we all congratulate and thank you all for putting in this hard work.
00:22:39
Speaker
And hopefully it inspires our VC as well to make good on her talk about wanting to increase secure jobs. Good to hear, good to hear. Yep. That's kind of one of the hopes that we're going to get out of this. Yep, fingers crossed on that one. The other thing we wanted to ask is what message do you have for people listening who might be skeptical at our chances of not only winning, but enforcing something like this?
00:23:05
Speaker
I think there's, there's, I understand the scepticism where we've, if you've been in this sector a long time, you've seen it change, right? You've seen it change and you look at it and you go, you know, if there's a risk of the Americanisation of the system of, oh, it's going down to, you know, to degree mills, you know,
00:23:25
Speaker
I get it and I understand that and I deal with that in conversation a lot as well. I have to tell them, well, here's why I'm involved in the union. Here's what I believe the university should be and is. The word university can be translated as corporation or it can be translated as community.
00:23:43
Speaker
It's a community of masters and scholars, of teachers and students. And I always emphasize that community piece because we are concerned about the corporatization of higher education. Absolutely. But we can win. I think now is a really important time. I think the timing is right. It's not about the buildings or about the technologies. We love a good technology. Technological digital transformation is the thing. It's about human transformation.
00:24:10
Speaker
And it's the humans that are the ones that do the real transforming. It needs to be a human-centered approach. And that's why the narratives around sessional academics work so well. Tell the stories of the humans that are actually in the classroom with other humans, the students, doing that transformative work. That's what education is supposed to be. And that might sound like naively optimistic. I'm quite deliberately naive about these things. I want the university to be that community and to be that place of learning for everyone, not just the students.
00:24:39
Speaker
But in terms of, you know, when you're thinking about, okay, we can win, but how? We can see that we can do it, but how do we do it? And a lot of it has to do, I think, with being human-centered and coming back to the fact that these are human beings, their stories matter.
00:24:57
Speaker
But it's also about being disciplined about it as well. And I think that was probably the most important underlying feature of the union's approach, our branches approach was the disciplined nature of our team, both at the table, outside of the table in terms of the actions that we took and the way that we escalated them appropriately.
00:25:17
Speaker
and the communications that we were able to put out to the rest of our members, but also that communication goes to other people. It goes to the VC, it goes to non-members, it goes to everyone. So you can do it. Now is the time to do it. You've got to be disciplined and focused on achieving a goal that can be enforced and defended.
00:25:40
Speaker
And that means being intelligent and practical. You're aiming for a goal. We're not going to transform the university in one agreement, but we'll get 150. Sydney Uni could get 300 FTE. They're still negotiating, but they're a bigger university, a bigger branch. Where we were tapping at the wall with a hammer looking for all the weak spots, they could come in with a sledgehammer and blow a couple of holes in it. And if we get to that level of 150, 200, 150,
00:26:10
Speaker
That's going to be transformative across the sector and it's going to start to lay the groundwork for the next round of agreements. There's always a next round and I think that that's how I would communicate it to people who are sceptical, but I understand the scepticism. I absolutely do. The last thing I would mention is
00:26:26
Speaker
particularly if you're a permanent academic or if you're a session academic is to reach out to your network and to communicate with your colleagues and to learn about what's going on in this process to get involved because it isn't entirely one at the table. It requires a bunch of different activities at the table, outside the table,
00:26:48
Speaker
are at a strike in emails and in communications. So you've got to get involved and that's to the long-term benefit of you as an academic and it's really only through that strength of unity that we actually get these kinds of outcomes. Well thank you Gavin for coming to speak to us today and for all the hard work that you and Western Sydney University have done in sort of blazing the trail for us to all sort of follow along with and hope to live up to the to the example that you've all set. It's my pleasure.
00:27:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And then that's probably a good point for us to say. If anybody listening has any questions, you can shoot us an email at myunionroadineba at gball.com and we'll get one of our members to answer them on the podcast. All right, folks, that's it for this episode. Thanks to Kate, Danny, Adam, Bernard, and Pod Daddy, Sophia, for all the work they've put into this. And we'll catch you next time.