Susan Price, Sydney
On the night of November 22, following threats of eviction, the University of Newcastle moved to changed the locks on the offices of the National Tertiary Education Union on the campus.
The NTEU had previously made attempts at negotiating a commercial lease with the university in order to secure their space, but these attempts were refused.
The attack on the NTEU at Newcastle is just one of several similar threats to the union being made on campuses in Lismore, Armidale and Sydney. These attacks precede the November 30 deadline for universities to comply with the Howard government's draconian Higher Education Workplace Relations Requirements (HEWRR).
Announced in April, the HEWRRs make $260 million in federal government funding to universities contingent on compliance with requirements that include restricting union involvement in negotiating enterprise agreements and forcing staff onto individual contracts (Australian Workplace Agreements). Yet there is nothing in the HEWRRs that states unions cannot have office space on campus.
Chris Game, NSW secretary of the NTEU, responded to the attack with a media release in which she stated: "Rather than understandable attempts to secure scarce government funding, it appears that these managers now want to pro-actively use the HEWRR to attack the union. We will work with University management to secure HEWRR funding for the University of Newcastle, but will resist management's attempts to pander to education minister [Brendan] Nelson by adopting a belligerent anti-union approach. In the mean time, we're not going anywhere."
On November 24, a meeting of Unions NSW called on all trade unionists in the Newcastle and the Hunter Region to express their disgust at this attack on the NTEU and to offer solidarity to it in its struggle to regain its office space on the campus.
[Susan Price is the vice-president of the University of NSW NTEU branch and a member of the Socialist Alliance.]
From Â鶹´«Ã½ Weekly, November 30, 2005.
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