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Responding to the global Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) campaign, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) National Council on October 3–5 overwhelmingly supported an academic institutional boycott of Israeli universities.

The council is made up of more than 100 rank-and-file representatives from about 40 branches of the 27,000-strong NTEU. Together with the leadership of the union’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Policy Committee and its elected national and division officers, the delegates discussed defending and extending workers’ rights in higher education.

Palestine solidarity has been a critical focus this year. Many staff backed the student encampments supporting a ceasefire in Gaza and opposed the police-backed university management crackdown on the right to free speech and assembly.

This position was reflected in a May statement by the NTEU National Executive that supported a ceasefire and called on universities to cut ties with the Israeli military. Some activists said it didn’t go far enough, including to explicitly call for a boycott, identify Israel as the perpetrator of the genocide and to properly describe the destruction of Gaza’s universities as “scholasticide”.

Also in May, the Sydney University NTEU branch passed a motion calling for an academic institutional boycott. It said the state of Israeli is responsible for apartheid, genocide and the occupation of Palestine and called for the university to cut ties with institutions enabling the genocide in Gaza, including Israeli institutions and all weapons manufacturers and militaries.

Four more branches, including the largest at Melbourne University, have now passed similar boycott motions. The union’s smaller ACT and Tasmanian divisions have also backed the boycott call over the last months.

Those supporting the council adopting the academic institutional boycott motion had agreed on proposals for action, including pushing back on the militarisation of universities through the near-monopolisation that militaries and weapons companies often have in research funding.

Immediate actions to cut ties with militaries and a longer-term strategy to demilitarise higher education were proposed.

More than 90% voted in favour of the boycott. Councillors also supported a motion committing the union to make a public statement condemning scholasticide — the bombing or demolition of all universities in Gaza, Israeli’s attacks on West Bank universities and dissenting scholars and students, as well as the general destruction of education systems. Identifying the scale of harm being caused in Palestine allows the union to do more effective work.

A separate motion to promote a National Day of Action on October 23, across all campuses, in support of the union’s Palestine policy, was agreed. It means members can remobilise to provide effective support to Palestinians, along the lines of how the union helped the South African anti-apartheid movement succeed. NTEU members are organising rallies, speak-outs and other actions at their respective universities on this day.

Structural crisis

Higher education faces a structural crisis created by the decades-long, escalating, large-scale withdrawal of public funding for teaching and research.

At the same time, as university managements and governing bodies become increasingly corporatised, staff and vulnerable disciplines (for example, those not protected by professional accreditation standards) are targeted for cuts, insecure work, high workloads, wage theft and rising fees.

Staff and students have borne the burden of the crisis in higher education.

International students, who are already subject to exploitative fees that cross-subsidise not just research but corporate management structures and the million-dollar salaries of vice-chancellors, are now being scapegoat by the Labor government for the housing crisis. Through delays and caps, their numbers are being driven down.

The neoliberal funding model for higher education is broken. The Australian National University has now started what is expected to be a round of new job cuts which the union needs to resist.

Solidarity with CFMEU

An emergency motion opposing Labor’s law forcing the construction division of the Construction Forestry Maritime Employees Union (CFMEU) into administration received overwhelming support.

Councillors saw the threat this move poses to all unionists and, in part, criticised the stand taken by the Australian Council of Trade Unions, which has supported Labor’s undemocratic law.

The NTEU’s approach to a new round of enterprise bargaining was perhaps the sharpest debate, given the difficult industrial circumstances. Current workplace laws favour employers, and the Labor government changes to these laws, since 2022, have had almost no positive impact for higher education workers.

In the past, the NTEU has been able to coordinate its university-based branches for rounds of bargaining. Doing this means it has been able to win leading conditions in areas such as leave entitlements. But, maintaining pay levels over the last decade has faltered.

Employers have dragged out bargaining at many universities for two or more years. The last branches are only completing bargaining now for early 2025, even as others are preparing to start bargaining again.

Employers are able to do this not just because of the law, but because the NTEU’s membership, which can be variously measured at as little as 10% of the workforce, is not enough generally to compel management, through industrial action, to quickly reach agreements.

Furthermore, the NTEU’s bargaining activity has, at best, only contributed to short-term, not long-term membership growth. The union lacks a good organising model to enforce its wins between bargaining rounds and to sustain membership growth.

The union’s national industrial officers reported that the intensity of industrial action in different branches was not related to what was then won in recent enterprise agreements

Militant councillors argued from the floor that branches that have taken significant industrial action tended to be those that had grown and also achieved significant gains. The Melbourne University branch is the outstanding example, having grown by more than 40% in the last eight years.

At the University of Sydney, a sustained strike campaign also led to an increase in membership, sector-first casual sick leave and the retention of evenly balanced teaching and research workloads (“40/40/20 positions”) for academic staff. 

In the end, the national officers’ proposal for the new bargaining round was the only one tabled. The proposal aims to try to secure agreements quickly. Untested laws introduced by Labor allow employers to claim bargaining is “intractable” if it has taken more than nine months.

University managements could then get agreements arbitrated, most likely according to standards below those found in the enterprise agreements currently in place at all universities.

Many councillors argued that bargaining cannot be an instrument for organising unless its claims, whatever their number, are ambitious and its approach confronts the employers.

The discussion centred on pushing forward on claims that reflect the most advanced conditions won in some enterprise agreements, such as a clear conversion path to continuing, permanent employment, paid leave for casuals and reversing past wage losses.

Councillors also warned that a top-down approach in bargaining would subdue member-led engagement and activism on workplace rights.

[Jonathan Strauss and Markela Panegyres are NTEU national councillors and members of the .]