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More than 500 university tutorials have been called off and thousands of students affected as union members step up industrial action at one of the country’s richest universities just weeks out from exams.
University of Melbourne staff cancelled week 10 classes across all faculties in what the union says is the longest strike action at the university since 1856.
Six of Victoria’s eight universities have been in enterprise bargaining negotiations for months.Credit: Penny Stephens
National Tertiary Education Union University of Melbourne branch acting president Chloe Mackenzie said staff were at breaking point.
The week-long strike, which started at midday on Monday, follows similar action in August by members of the Faculty of Arts, Melbourne Law School, the Victorian College of the Arts School of Art, student services, stagecraft and the library.
Comment has been sought from the University of Melbourne.
Union members have sought a 15 per cent wage increase over three years, or a pay rise in line with increases in the consumer price index (which measures inflation) plus 1.5 per cent.
Other concerns include job security, workloads, flexible working arrangements and limiting restructures.
“The University of Melbourne is a hugely rich institution with crushing workloads, wage theft and insecure work and yet in so many respects it wants to maintain the status quo,” the union’s Mackenzie said.
“Staff are fed up with it and the students are too. What are they paying their fees for after all?”
The union estimated more than 500 tutorials had been cancelled as part of the action. It is calling on Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell to personally come to the bargaining table.
Melbourne University Vice-Chancellor Duncan Maskell.Credit: Justin McManus
Six of Victoria’s eight universities – Melbourne, Monash, La Trobe, Swinburne, RMIT and Victoria University – have been in enterprise bargaining negotiations for months. Federation University has already finalised negotiations and Deakin has reached an in-principle agreement.
Jeff Sparrow, a senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Advancing Journalism, said disruption varied from faculty to faculty but that the university on Tuesday felt like a ghost town. “Higher education is just so deeply broken now,” he said.
“[The University of Melbourne] has got this big reputation as number 14 in the world at one stage, tonnes of money in real estate, but in all student surveys comes down the absolute bottom, they just did a recent staff survey and the level of discontent among staff is just extraordinary.”
Sparrow said “corporate suits” had been successful in monetising higher education and raising money from overseas students, “but in terms of delivering educational outcomes, it’s been an absolute train wreck”.
“Universities are supposed to play some kind of social role and if we just turn it into this cash cow, where all that matters is money, then the society as a whole pays the consequences,” he said.
University of Melbourne Student Union president Hiba Adam said the strike action was “definitely causing the disruptions as they are intended to” but students’ anger was directed at university management, not the staff.
“It’s a branch-wide strike, it’s week 10, for almost all students there’s only two weeks left of content,” she said.
“It’s cutting really close to exam times. Students are definitely worried if they have enough material to prepare for exams.”
Sparrow said: “Education should not be something that corporate. It should be seen as a public good and should be run as a public good.
“That just seems to me to be obvious. And if you don’t do that, you end up with the kind of broken system that we’ve got.”
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