On Wednesday 22 February 2023, I attended a rally of striking workers at the University of Queensland. Sadly, under the enterprise bargaining system, a strike is like a Checkov play. This is not the fault of the strikers who are left with no option but to take industrial action because of the failure of their employer. This process is scripted, where all the moves of the unionists are blocked (every move that an worker makes – teaching, walking across the uni, marking online essays, climbing stairs to the library, sitting at her desk, falling in a chair exhausted, getting down on bended knee – every movement falls under the term “blocking” in theatre-speak).
Yet nothing new happens in this play. UQ management is Uncle Vanya. Uncle Vanya is deeply embittered over having spent his life toiling for the benefit of Serebryakov, a once-worshipped scholar that Vanya has discovered to be a charlatan.
University admin has spent 600 days in negotiations with the union – but, in the EBA process, the bosses are holding out, there is no offer from them for their exploited workers. This, despite UQ having big reserves. This may surprise you. UQ lost income during the pandemic but did not have to reach into its reserves.
The enterprise bargaining process with the University administration is led by provost Professor Aidan Byrne. His resume is that of a nuclear physicist. After the rally in the Great Court I asked to speak with this man, this provost (= head of certain university colleges, especially at Oxford or Cambridge). It is at least 40 years since UQ departed from the Oxford model … despite all the sandstone that suggests otherwise.
I was informed by security at the front door of the J. D. Story administration building that the professor was not accepting any queries from the media. And he ordered that the doors be locked. Who am I? A Chinese spy? It was not that I really wished to hear the University’s side of the dispute. Why? I had worked at this same University from 1967 till 1977 and was a student there from 1969 till 1975 when I received a Bachelor of Science. I knew the University to be a conservative place. They even stooped so low as to give an honorary doctorate of laws to the undemocratic and corrupt former Premier if Qld, Joh Bjelke-Petersen. For some reason the Beattie Labor government even gave the same man a state funeral. Despite the corruption, his government’s genocidal treatment of aboriginal people, his declaration that the day of the political street march was over, his mining and export of the deadly and dangerous Uranium, his denial of sex education in schools … the list of injuries to the people of Qld is endless.
Back to the strike.
The ghosts of the past were upon us. The first rally I attended in the great court was in 1970 during the Vietnam war moratorium (depicted here).
One of the major concerns of staff present was the precariousness of casual employment at the University of Queensland. At the back of the rally I could see a woman standing defiantly holding up what look like like a photo diary. I do not know her story but there was something in her defiant manner and the pictures that she held up that told me here was a tragedy behind job insecurity at the University of Queensland.
I received this txt from a young scientist when she read my article on Uni’s wages theft: ‘And this doesn’t even address the problems of casualisation of the workforce in unis, especially for younger academics. Working in short term, casual contracts doesn’t allow the stability or space for the next generation of researchers to grow! Maybe a rant for another time…’
Ian Curr
24 Feb 2023
Photos by Lachlan Hurse and Ian Curr.