Concession-bargaining in Australian higher education: the case of the National Jobs Protection Framework

ABSTRACT

Australian universities suffered significant financial losses due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) responded with a concession-bargaining strategy, offering university managements a National Jobs Protection Framework (NJPF), which traded pay reductions for job security measures. This article provides an account of the development, promotion, and eventual collapse of the NJPF. We analyse the arguments for and against the NJPF, drawing on contemporary material from its supporters and opponents, and insights from the literature on concession-bargaining. We conclude that concession-bargaining was an unsuccessful strategy for the union, and put forward an alternative industrial strategy.

KEYWORDS:

• Unionism
• union strategy
• higher education
• National Jobs Protection Framework
• concession bargaining

Disclosure statement

The authors are members of the National Tertiary Education Union.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Alexis Vassiley

Alexis Vassiley is a Research Associate in the Centre for Work and Wellbeing, Edith Cowan University. He recently completed his PhD in Curtin University’s School of Management on the rise and fall of trade unionism in the Pilbara iron ore industry. He has previously published on trade unions and social issues, and union development in the mining industry. His research interests include union strategy, union renewal, the future of work, and labour history.

Francis Russell

Francis Russell is the coordinator of the Bachelor of Arts Honours course at Curtin University. He has a PhD in Literary and Cultural Studies from Curtin University, and researches the political and philosophical implications of mental illness, alongside conducting broader research into neoliberal culture. He has published in Culture, Theory & Critique, The Journal for Cultural Research, Deleuze and Guattari Studies, Space and Culture, Cultural Studies Review, and Somatechnics. He is the author of Screen Therapies: Digital Health, Sanity, and Ideology, forthcoming from Routledge in 2022.