Take action for equity

Alison Barnes, NTEU National President

Almost two years on, it’s clear that the COVID-19 crisis has had a greater impact on women in higher education than men, and often in different ways.

Not only do women shoulder more home schooling and carer obligations than their male partners but, in higher education, it has been those departments where women predominate – particularly the professional and general staff areas – that university managements have targeted for redundancies. The Centre for Future Work’s recent report, An Avoidable Catastrophe: Pandemic Job Losses in Higher Education and their Consequences, found that of the 40,000 jobs lost in the sector over the last 12 months, 61 per cent were performed by women. Moreover, a disproportionately larger number of women in casual and fixed-term positions lost their jobs in the first wave of cuts. Eliza Littleton examines the report on page 8. In addition to job losses and issues around balancing work and carer obligations during COVID, 2021 has also exposed broader issues affecting women. The most immediate of these include sexual harassment, sexist and gender-based discrimination, brought to the forefront by parliamentary staffer Brittany Higgins when she went public with her account of being sexually assaulted in Parliament House.

In doing so, Ms Higgins exposed the underlying misogyny and sexism in a system that was more concerned with reputational damage than with confronting sexual assault in a workplace. The subsequent cover-up and lack of action by the Morrison Government exposed the toxic culture of sexism and discrimination against women in what should be a ‘model’ workplace for the rest of the country. Sadly, Ms Higgins’s account was treated as an isolated incident, when in fact her experience was the experience of many, many other women in our workplaces. It was, therefore, not surprising that tens of thousands of people around the country joined the Women’s March 4 Justice rallies in early March to protest against sexism and gendered violence. One of the core demands of the rallies was for the Morrison Government to finally implement the recommendations of Respect@Work, a report on sexual harassment in the workplace that the Government had commissioned in 2018 from Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins.

Bowing to pressure, in 2021 the Government announced – with great fanfare – that it was planning to fully implement the recommendations of the report. But, when the dust settled and the provisions of the legislation were examined closely, it was obvious that the Government had fallen well short of its stated intention. Terri MacDonald’s account on page 10 outlines the Government’s failure to include many of Respect@Work’s recommendations and our appearance before the Senate inquiry into the legislation in August. The Government ignored many recommendations including those relating specifically to the higher education sector (see page 11), which the Respect@Work report had found to be subject to more complaints about sexual harassment than many other sectors. The higher levels of sexual harassment and gender-based discrimination were reflected in a 2018 NTEU survey that found that nearly one in five respondents had experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, and that, despite universities having reams of policies and procedures in place to deal with allegations of sexual harassment, 60 per cent of respondents were dissatisfied with HR complaints procedures. The evidence indicates that the regulatory and legislative frameworks are failing – the Respect@Work recommendations would have gone some way towards fixing them. This is such an issue for staff in higher education that the Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, will be giving a special online presentation as part of the NTEU’s Bluestocking Week (the theme of which is ‘Take Action for Equity’), which will also be our NTEU Annual Lecture.

The way forward is through bargaining

COVID-19 and the Federal Government’s abandonment of higher education during this crisis (as well as its inaction in addressing sexual harassment in the workplace) has made the current round of bargaining especially critical to tackling the pressing issues of secure jobs, safe workloads, and workplaces free of harassment and discrimination. The only effective mechanism to overturn the agenda of corporate university managements and hostile neo-conservative governments is for university staff to join together in the NTEU to push for a different vision of what our universities can and should be, for staff, students, and our communities.

But the extent to which we as NTEU members can address these issues depends, not on our will, but on our influence and power. As the Bluestocking Week theme for this year says, we need to ‘Take Action for Equity’. What this means in practice is that we need to work on increasing our collective strength across our workplaces. We need to build our network of NTEU workplace Delegates so that there is one in every department, school and work unit. We need to grow our membership by inviting every staff member to join us. Our Branches are taking a fresh look at strategies to engage with more members and university staff to build the Union’s strength in the lead-up to bargaining so we can all support our colleagues and better the outcomes for staff at the negotiating table. We can do this with effective member-led campaigns. Bargaining is an opportunity to achieve our vision for the sector: workplaces not built on crippling workloads, where our jobs are secure, and where the value of our work is recognised. At the same time, our collective strength will add to the momentum we are seeing in the broader movement for equity, one that seeks to drive the legislative and cultural changes needed to counteract the ways in which our society continues to discriminate against women.

Alison Barnes is NTEU National President and editor of Agenda. abarnes@nteu.org.au