This article is more than 5 months old

This article is more than 5 months old

The tertiary education union is facing a major revolt from its members over a confidential plan to negotiate with university management on staff pay cuts during the Covid-19 crisis.

The Australian university sector has been thrown into financial turmoil since the coronavirus pandemic began, with border closures and forced campus shutdowns crippling revenue and forcing some universities to make drastic budget cuts.

'A downward spiral': coronavirus spins Australian universities into economic crisis Read more

Faced with the possibility of wide-scale job losses among its members, on 3 April the national leadership of the National Tertiary Education Union held talks to plan their strategy to respond to the crisis.

The national executive made a series of resolutions that were to either be kept internal or for “confidential, limited sharing”.

The list of resolutions, obtained by Guardian Australia, show it ordered national officers to “commence a national level negotiation in response to the Covid-19 crisis” with universities.

The union resolved that “concessions may be made”, including “concessions on pay”, which could include a pay freeze, deferral of increments, or “in extreme circumstances, temporary general reductions in Agreement rates”.

Such concessions would only be made if they were needed to prevent job losses, the union resolved, and would only be made as a “last resort”. Any cuts that were conceded would need to be made in a way that protected lower-paid workers and had “a greater effect on higher salary earners”.





“Any salary concessions should be accompanied by relatively larger cuts in VC/senior executive salary packages,” the union resolved.

But the decision has prompted furious backlash from within the union’s membership.

More than 500 members, many of them senior academics from universities across Australia, have now signed a petition rejecting the NTEU’s position and attacking its leadership for not consulting with them before passing the resolution.

“We reject concessions to our wages and conditions,” the petition reads.

“There is no guarantee that sacrificing hard won conditions will save a single job [and] many of us live in households with people who have already lost jobs or hours, and can’t afford more sacrifice. [If] workers in some of the richest institutions in Australia decide to give up conditions, it sets a terrible precedent for workers everywhere.”

A meeting of about 150 member activists on Thursday, convened by the union’s RMIT branch, censured the union for proposing that “our members sacrifice pay and conditions to cover losses”, while calling on the government to provide added assistance by covering all lost student revenue.

The activists unanimously resolved to campaign against any loss of pay or conditions, and urged the union to convene state and federal meetings for members.

“We commit to escalating actions to defend our pay, conditions and jobs – up to and including industrial action,” the members said.

The NTEU’s general secretary, Matthew McGowan, said the union had been forced to move quickly to try to protect jobs in a rapidly evolving crisis.

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“As you’ve seen … workers are actually finding themselves out of work almost overnight, and our fear is that this is going to happen in universities very quickly,” he said.

“So we’ve moved very quickly to try and address that problem, and to try and do what we can to protect people’s jobs and their income.”

McGowan said he welcomed the debate on the union’s position and would ensure that members were consulted widely. No agreement would be finalised without member endorsement, he said.

The union had communicated its plans with members in an email on 8 April, he said, less than a week after the national executive resolutions and initial talks with Universities Australia.

But furious members say the email did not disclose the resolution to consider negotiating pay cuts.

After the email from the union’s leadership outlining parts of their position last week, branch members from the University of Sydney passed a motion censuring the leadership and opposing “punitive cost-save measures”.

The motion demanded that the NTEU “not make substantial offers to the government or employers” without convening a vote of members.

Nick Riemer, an academic at Sydney university, called the NTEU’s position a “very serious breach of solidarity”.

“Not only is the NTEU leadership signalling that pay losses are OK; it’s also giving managements a green light to throw casualised staff under the bus,” he said.

Australian universities warn Covid-19 relief package not enough to stop 21,000 job losses Read more

Other branches have since followed. The University of Melbourne passed a motion censuring the NTEU leadership “for undercutting our industrial and political response by already offering wage and conditions concessions to our employers”.

Members at the Victoria University voted to express its deep concern about the position and demanded “the rescinding of any deal already negotiated”.

Fleur Taylor, a member of the Victoria University branch, said staff felt the union was entertaining concessions on pay and conditions before properly campaigning for federal government support.

On Thursday RMIT staff said they would “prepare a vigorous campaign to urge members to vote ‘no’ to concessions on conditions and pay” and committed to “escalating actions to defend our pay, conditions and jobs – up to and including industrial action”.