I'm really lucky to have a continuing academic job at Sydney Uni. I have great colleagues, students are awesome, and I’m proud to be working with them on some terrific teaching and research initiatives. But there are some things driving me nuts at this place right now. Thread.
Staff in Student Services are required to ‘code’ every minute of their working day. If they’re on a call helping a student or staff member, they code the call, their response time is measured. If they take a toilet break, or make a personal call, they need to code that too.
To quote management advice: “Regardless of what service point you are on if you going to the bathroom, getting a quick snack or taking a little breather please ensure you have selected the break option.” Maybe there are plans to display staff rankings on a board somewhere…?
Other staff who are going through a ‘change management’ process which proposes over a dozen redundancies came to work a couple of weeks ago to find posters installed in their workplace telling them to “Be positive in the face of change”. They got desk calendars too.
Elsewhere, management are about to roll out a new corporate app to help managers ‘assist’ staff who are dealing with ‘change fatigue’. Sadly, the app does not tell managers to stop rolling out change that is poorly justified, poorly conceived, and poorly communicated!
I guess this package and others like it explain the massive growth in our University’s spend on external consultants and contractors: up from $42.3 million in 2013 to $96.2 million in 2017.
Some of that money was spent on a consultancy recommending redesign of our websites. School-based staff have lost a lot of control over their School websites to Marketing folks, and are having to mop up a giant mess after new websites had missing or incorrect information.
For instance, for a week or so, my School was listed as having a speciality in "plate tectronics". (They should have gone the whole hog, and listed "techno-tronics"!!)
Dozens of Admissions, Faculty and Student Services staff have been told, without any consultation, that their unit is working through the Christmas shutdown. Unlike everyone else, they have to apply for leave if they don’t want to work in this period.
If this happens, some academic staff will be asked to be ‘on call’ while they are on leave during the Christmas shutdown, so they can answer questions from those same Admissions and Faculty Services staff.
Meanwhile, of course, staff with excess leave will be told they need to take it. I can't imagine why excess leave is piling up in some parts of the university...
Academic staff who started the current round of their ‘Academic Performance and Development’ found a new section to fill out about ‘Education Data’, that is supposed to incorporate their student survey results. This despite everything we know about the flaws in those surveys.
And this despite the fact that our Enterprise Agreement stipulates that any changes to Performance Management and Development must involve consultation with the unions – it hasn’t happened.
Some of our younger colleagues on parental leave. Folks I know are getting 14 weeks of paid leave, not 22, because it’s 2018 and our Uni only gives its full parental leave (22 weeks) after 2 years of service.
It’s not like any junior academics have spent their 20s doing PhDs and working in precarious jobs before finally getting that full-time job in their 30s when they might be able to start a family … right?
Other academics tell me they are contemplating working part-time (some are already doing so), because the full-time workload they’ve been given is making them sick. They’re working for free a day or more a week in order to be able to do research.
Meanwhile, last year there were over 6000 casual staff at our Uni, a huge number of whom are doing work that is absolutely not ‘casual’.
Professional staff moving into a new admin building have CCTV cameras in their grill, right on top of their kitchen and hang out spaces. This despite the concierge downstairs preventing public access to the building, and CCTV cameras in the lifts and lift lobby areas.
When we politely handed out union leaflets about this and gave away some free pot plants to help staff personalise their open-plan workspaces, we got hassled by building security about ‘intimidating’ staff. It wasn’t exactly a hard picket, folks!
Meanwhile, the VC is ‘consulting’ staff about a MoU he plans to give to the Ramsay Centre for Western Civilisation about the terms of any partnership. But “there will be no vote” about this MoU at Faculty or Academic Board, he said.
OK. That's probably enough for a sunny Friday afternoon.
Sydney people, there’s one thing standing in the way of all this -- our willingness to act in union. It’s time to re-possess those parts of our wonderful institution under attack from the dark forces of managerialism!
Sign the petition on change management. nteu.org.au/sydney/securej… And be at the NTEU rally, 1pm on October 3. For secure work, for genuine participation in decision-making, and for an end to workload intensification.
