Victoria University (VU) staff will launch a half-day strike action on Wednesday 5 June, from 12pm to midnight, at all campuses as anger rises over a failure to give staff a fair pay rise and safe workloads.
National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members says that, despite receiving the union’s claims more than a year ago, VU management has failed to make a concrete offer on pay. Unmanageable workloads are a major sticking point due to VU’s controversial ‘block model’ and recent job cuts. The VU workforce has been reduced by almost 20 per cent since 2023 – something the NTEU says has put enormous pressure on remaining staff.
VU’s ‘block model’ teaches students one semester-length subject in four weeks at a time, rather than multiple units concurrently like at every other university in Australia.
In a move described by NTEU Victorian Division Secretary Sarah Roberts as “deeply antagonistic to the Union”, last week VU management provided a draft Enterprise Agreement (‘EA’) which sought to:
- Remove the NTEU as a party to the Agreement
- Remove NTEU from the Joint Consultative Committee (the mechanism for open and regular consultation on workplace matters)
- Reduce staff rights to representation
- Remove professional reclassification rights.
And for NTEU VU Branch President Brandy Cochrane, “enough is enough”.
Following a previous protest at the university on 28 May, NTEU VU Branch President Brandy Cochrane told EducationDaily “the mood of the protest was energetic, and we were able to pass on our open letter and our sentiments on to the VU Council members”.
“The protest informed VU council members about our concerns on the state of bargaining without the filter of management in between,” she said, adding that the next steps were about heading “back to the bargaining table” and that the NTEU was hoping to see “some movement of management beyond the offer of the current agreement which is crushing staff under its workloads”.
“If management does not move on important claims, we may have to take protected action,” she told EducationDaily.
Fair workloads must be on the table, says union
She described the block model of teaching, “in and of itself, is not necessarily the problem”,
“Instead, it is the lack of transparent and fair workloads for academic and professional staff who work within the system,” she said at the time.
In the announcement of today’s fresh protest action, Ms Cochrane says “staff have endured hundreds of colleagues being made redundant, an unsafe teaching model and a cost-of-living crisis, yet management clearly thinks they don’t deserve to be paid fairly”.
NTEU Professional Staff Representative, Fleur Taylor agrees and says “the irony that an ex-Labor premier leads a university that, in the experience of staff, relies on overwork and excessive hours as a core part of its operational model is not lost on us”.
“Steve Bracks must bring senior management into line and ensure the university’s top decision-makers get serious about a real pay offer.”
With NTEU Victorian Division Secretary Sarah Roberts pointing to WorkCover data she says reveals that VU has had more claims against it in the last two years than any other Victorian university, Ms Roberts says VU’s model forces staff to work “huge hours of unpaid overtime just to get marking and course administration done”.
“Staff need a fair pay rise, reasonable workloads and secure jobs.”
