Transparent, open, collective bargaining in our Branches

Fleur Taylor, Victoria University

I work in gender-based violence prevention programs at Victoria University (VU) in Melbourne. I’ve been in this role for about three years and I like how it brings me into contact with a wide variety of staff, students and community partners.

I’ve only been an NTEU member since I started work at VU – previously I worked as an editor and was a member of the MEAA for nearly 20 years. I’ve been a socialist and community activist for most of my adult life. I joined the Branch Committee of our local NTEU Branch not long after I started at VU and was recently elected to the Vice-President (Professional staff) position.

We gained lots of new Branch Committee members out of the recent elections, and there is a new sense of energy and determination in our Branch. VU members lost important conditions in the last Enterprise Agreement and we are determined to win true gains this time round!

The key industrial issues at VU, as at so many other unis, are workloads and insecure work. The fact that these issues are so widespread should mean that our universities are in ferment and fighting back everywhere. The NTEU is definitely impacted by the long and disastrous decline of union density and militancy in Australia since the 1980s. That is the legacy of Hawke and Keating’s ‘Accord’, in which Labor and the union leaders systematically crushed independent union militancy and paved the way for WorkChoices.

Australian industrial relations laws are some of the most anti-worker in the developed world – even workers in the US and the Philippines have more scope to organise a strike or refuse to cross a picket line.

Can this be turned around?

It won’t be easy, but we have to start with what we have. Our membership density may be lower than it used to be, but universities are still unionised workplaces with Enterprise Agreements that include enforceable rights. Being in the Union is normal at universities.

These two facts are a huge advance on many private sector workplaces, and we can use these to be 'talking union' with the people around us on issues big and small – from why we should be allowed to organise our personal spaces at work how we like, to why our upcoming bargaining round should include fighting for big, bold and specific claims that will make a genuine difference to members’ lives.

The process of how this happens is as important as the issues we choose to fight around. The goal is active, confident members who know their rights, feel involved in making branch decisions and can carry them out locally.

One thing that has caught my imagination recently is the concept of radically transparent bargaining meetings, in which discussions and negotiations about a workplace agreement involve the whole union membership, or as many workers as want to be involved.

I found the way our last Enterprise Agreement was negotiated at VU deeply disempowering. Infrequent members’ meetings were dominated by local and national office bearers taking up the whole meeting time by reporting on the minutiae of how the University proposed to attack us and how there was little we could do in response. Negotiations took place exclusively behind closed doors.

I firmly believe that the process of transparent, open, collective bargaining would transform the energy and involvement in our Branches. If nothing else, campaigning for it would shine a spotlight on University managements – what have they got to hide? What do they want to tell a small group that they can’t say openly?

The process of members scrutinising their agreement in detail, and working out exactly how to achieve genuine fairness and work-life balance, could be the most powerful recruiting tool the union movement has ever had.