Candidate statement for John Buchanan, General Branch Committee representative

Current position: Professor, Business Information Systems, Business School and Co-Director of the University’s Mental Wealth Initiative.

Relevant experience:

1975 – 1985:           Activist in the environment and student movements

1985 – 1991:           Workplace delegate, Delegates’ committee chair and Vice Present of CPSU (ACT Branch)

1992 -  present:      USyd based researcher specialising in the transformation of work, especially the changing connections between work and education and work and health

2021 – 2022:           Member, NTEU Bargaining Team for new Enterprise Agreement.

Time for renewal

This is an exciting time to be a unionist in the university sector. It is clear the operating model of the last 30 years (ie the Dawkins’ legacy) is unsustainable. Change is coming.  It is important unions shape and not just react to rapidly changing circumstances.

Key challenges requiring immediate action are:

-          Excessive workloads

-          Excessive reliance on casual staff

-          The erosion of job security even for continuing staff

-          Wages falling behind inflation and improvements in aggregate productivity. 

Over the medium term we need to take the initiative.  For me the key priorities are:

-          Rebuilding our core teaching and research academic workforce.  This now constitutes less than half the University’s academic EFT

-          Making specialised education focused and specialised research focused roles more attractive.  Over our working lives many of us are interested in doing different things. Having the ability to change the balance between our teaching and research pursuits is important.  Such rebalancing should not be determined by management prerogative rather opportunities for specialised work should be based on peer review

-          Protecting professional staff from ongoing ‘change processes’ that typically cutback staffing levels.

More ambitiously we need to engage with the reality that the 30 year experiment with centralised, managerially based control arrangements has failed.

-          We need to renew forms of university governance to ensure they are more collegially based.

-          We need effective and creative power-sharing between professional managers and the University’s workforce – not the ongoing drift to a situation where academics and professional staff are increasingly treated as ‘challenges’ to be ‘managed’.

A central issue here is pay.  While it will take some time, we need to embark on a long run campaign of reigning in excessive executive remuneration.  Million dollar salaries for senior university managers have sapped the entire tertiary education sector of legitimacy when it deals with government and other stakeholders.  Brian Schmidt (ANU’s VC) cut his annual salary to around half a million dollars.  This is roughly equivalent to what the Prime Minister earns.  This seems like a good model to work towards. 

These ideas will take years to achieve – but we need to start somewhere.

Compared to other Australian universities, USyd NTEU is relatively well organised.  We deserve representatives committed to renewing not just the University but also the Union.  Industrial action involves more than strikes.  Zoom and Canvas have transformed our work processes. In taking industrial action we need to be creative in a world of increasing automation.

If elected I will contribute with other mindful activists to renewing both our University and our Union.