One hundred and thirty-seven staff at the University of Wollongong are facing the sack by Christmas. According to information provided to the National Tertiary Education Union local branch, these sackings are the first of three rounds. To add insult to injury, the union was told that some staff will receive their letters on 20 December. 
On 8 November, students received an email from management announcing that 25 study disciplines were facing cuts under the “UOW Transformation” plan. These cuts are being forced through under the managerial leadership of Interim Vice-Chancellor John Dewar. The former chair of Universities Australia has a notorious track record of slashing jobs and streamlining courses, including sacking hundreds of staff at La Trobe University when the pandemic hit. Dewar also helped implement the “Melbourne model”, in which 96 undergraduate courses were reduced to just six when he was provost of Melbourne University in 2011.
The UOW Transformation plan stipulates that cuts will be made to entire study disciplines, such as cultural studies and human geography. Languages will no longer be offered in 2025, forcing an entire cohort of staff out of a job, and leaving students already enrolled in language courses in the lurch. Additionally, the university plans to reduce subject offerings and jobs in disciplines including history, maths, statistics, physics and engineering. 
These cuts are part of a longer-term plan to overhaul UOW’s degree structure. This overhaul, set to be implemented by 2026, will create a new type of “comprehensive” degree for non-accredited courses. The degree will be more generic and standardised, and follow an 8-8-8 subject structure: all students enrolled in a Bachelor of Arts will be required to study eight of the same core subjects, regardless of their chosen major and minor. This will limit the amount of specialist subjects the university needs to offer at any given time. Disturbingly, the document outlining the restructure flags a potential “no-major option” for degrees. The university is likely to cut professional staff numbers as part of this process, citing that the current degree structure is “complex for UOW staff to administer”. 
These attacks are part of a longer-term trend in the commodification of degrees and the corporatisation of universities. Scandalously, Dewar is a partner in consultancy firm KordaMentha, the same firm that has been awarded two contracts to advise the UOW in its slash and burn policies. Universities function like any other corporation, primarily interested in raising revenue, undermining staff pay and conditions, and gaining lucrative research partnerships. Citing a loss in revenue of $35 million less than forecast due to lower international student enrolments, management is attacking staff and students to boost margins. 
NTEU members held a rally to protest the cuts on 20 November to coincide with the university’s academic senate hearing. Student activists are planning to fight the cuts into the new year.
Follow @fight_uow_cuts on Instagram to get involved in the campaign.

Megan Guy

University of Wollongong to sack 137 staff by Christmas

Wollongong Friends of Palestine community activists successfully organised a picket on 15 November against Australian company Bisalloy Steels. Bisalloy has a factory in Unanderra, a suburb of Wollongong, and manufactures steel plating used in tank armour. 
The company’s business manager, Justin Suwart, previously boasted that Israel is the largest export market for Bisalloy’s armour-grade steel and cited the “strong opportunities to further increase sales in the region” in a report on the company’s website. In other words, some of Bisalloy’s profits come from supplying a state that is perpetually waging war on the Palestinians.
Roughly 200 people gathered early in the morning to protest outside the company gates. This is the fourth time since Israel’s current genocide in Gaza began that Wollongong activists have organised a picket. The previous time, the company shut down for the day. This time was no different, although the company dubiously invoked a “picnic day” as its reasoning. At any rate, we celebrated the win. 
A week earlier, the company’s shareholders moved their annual general meeting to Zoom after discovering that we planned to protest the event.
Our protest occurred on the 86th anniversary of the Dalfram dispute—when dock workers refused to load pig iron onto ships headed for imperial Japan to be used against the Chinese. Wollongong Friends of Palestine activists are standing in a tradition of anti-war activism and finding ways to do what we can to disrupt the business of genocide. 
Bisalloy Steels will continue to be a target as long as they are involved in manufacturing materials for war.

Wollongong Palestine solidarity activists picket company supplying Israel

It’s a great time to be a corporate executive in Australia. While the rest of us are pinching pennies to afford a $9.50/kg block of Woolworths tasty cheese, Amanda Bardwell, the new CEO of Woolworths, is clocking in a salary of $2.15 million. That’s almost 227 tonnes of cheese per year! 
Industry bosses have grown accustomed to avoiding the people whose lives they are destroying. That’s why I seized the opportunity to confront Bardwell when she visited the Woolworths store in Warrawong, a suburb in NSW’s Wollongong, earlier this week. Approaching Bardwell near the fruit section, I asked a straightforward question: “What do you have to say to the fact that your company is profiting off price gouging in the context of a cost-of-living crisis?”. 
The response I got was baffling. It was like receiving an AI-generated email reply, “Thank you for reaching out to us”. As a former Woolworths employee who recently received back pay I was owed for seven years, her claim that she was there to support staff members was even more offensive. 
Woolworths and Coles are systematically ripping us off. Both chains are being sued by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) for scamming customers with their “Prices Dropped” and “Down Down” schemes. The supermarkets have been temporarily jacking up the price of some goods by at least 15 percent, and then reducing them to an amount that is still higher than or equal to the original price to trick people into thinking they are saving money. We are being swindled under the guise of a bargain. 
Then there is the outright price gouging. Anyone who has been to a supermarket in the last two years can attest to this. For instance, in March 2020, that 1kg block of Woolies cheese was $7.90—that’s a 20 percent increase. Since the pandemic, Woolworths has recorded its highest ever food business profit margins at 6 percent in the 2023 financial year, according to the Guardian.
The problem is that, for the most part, what Woolies and Coles are doing is completely legal. The ACCC is not empowered to stop them from hiking prices; it’s only empowered to sue companies that are reasonably believed to have broken consumer law. It’s not illegal for the owner of a billion-dollar supermarket chain to hike prices during a cost-of-living crisis, even if it means that the average person in Australia is now consuming fourteen grams fewer vegetables and twelve grams fewer fruits per day compared to last year, according to a report by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. So much for “the fresh food people”. 
Private companies should not have the right to control the supply of an essential good like food and deny it to those who cannot afford their outrageous prices. At a minimum, the Albanese government should be enforcing price controls. Further, the government could be taxing the mega-profits of these corporations and redistributing them to help those who can’t afford the weekly grocery shop.
My confrontation of Amanda Bardwell struck a chord with ordinary people—a video of the encounter has been viewed more than 1.5 million times on TikTok. Maybe she’ll think twice before her next publicity stunt parading in front of the same customers she is bleeding dry.

Why I confronted the new Woolworths CEO

About 60 machine operators at Fenner Dunlop in West Footscray began an indefinite strike on 16 September. The company, owned by Michelin Group, supplies mining companies with industry grade conveyor belts. Its customers include the Adani Group, currently developing the Carmichael Coal mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin.
The workers, who are 100 percent unionised in the National Union of Workers, are highly skilled, but you wouldn’t know it from the paltry pay and conditions on site. Earning between $25 and $28 an hour, they depend on overtime to make ends meet, sometimes working 72-hour weeks. Their demands include a 6 percent pay rise and no mandatory overtime. The company is attempting to enforce a 52-hour working week, up from the usual 38 hours.
“We didn’t come here for fun”, a night shift worker told Red Flag. “It’s more about how much they value us. If they valued us, we wouldn’t be out here.”
In the lead-up to the strike, the company has sought to squeeze the workers by enforcing a speed-up and hiring private company Secora to introduce new work discipline practices, including policing workers’ productivity and individually targeting those who can’t keep up. After a decades-long mining boom and no pay rise since 2009, these workers are out to show management that it’s high time they had a share of the company’s huge profits.
Interview
Kevin has worked at the West Footscray Fenner Dunlop plant for more than 30 years. He spoke to Red Flag’s Oscar Sterner.
What are you on strike over?
Better conditions and a wage increase. We’re low paid here, and the guys deserve a bit more. They want us to work some silly hours. In the first initial bargaining, they wanted us to work 50 hours locked in rather than 38 hours locked in, and then they also looked at shift structures. So they were trying to eliminate overtime initially. It was only last week they actually decided to drop that part of it, so now we’re starting to move a little bit forward with the agreement.
How do these issues affect the workers here?
At the end of the day, people want to live. With the price of petrol going up, the cost of living, you want to be able to have a good life, you don’t want to be stuck here doing 70 hours a week and not getting anywhere in life. Uneducated ... unskilled people deserve to live as well; we can’t just be pushed to the side.
How long have you been on strike?
We went on strike Monday, so this is our sixth day. It’s getting along all right. The company’s been coming out having a few chats here and there ... they’ve made a little bit of ground, but not much. It took three days before they finally came out and spoke to us, and that was only because we went to Michelin and done a little protest there. We’re trying to get a bit of pressure on the company so they will come and talk to us rather than just letting us sit out here. The guys are willing to sit as long as it takes.
How much do the bosses here make compared to what it costs them to pay their workers?
There’s rumours that by the end of the year they’re going make about $15 million. Wages here are only like, maybe 13 percent of the belt price, so it’s a small part of the belt price.
What do you think about the climate strike movement?
We do mining – we supply stuff for the mining industry. But at the end of the day, you can see that it’s slowly killing the planet, so there has to be changes. How it’s all going to work, I don’t know, but you look back 10 years ago, people were allowed to smoke everywhere and no-one thought the car industry was going to disappear. So it’s all going to turn around in the end.

Oscar Sterner

Indefinite strike in Melbourne’s west

You receive a phone call. It’s your boss. That night’s shift is cancelled, you’re told, so don’t bother coming in. And you’re suspended until you come in to a disciplinary meeting the following week. 
This is what happened at the start of May to a fellow delegate at the Melbourne call centre where I work. The call centre, which is organised by the National Union of Workers, has a union density of over 90 percent. Through the efforts of a small number of socialist activists, and the accumulation of some small but important victories, we have built up a union culture at work. 
Our victories include the right to read and snack at our desks, which is now a custom in the workplace. We’ve prevented a number of sackings. We have the right to delegate-run union inductions. We’ve marked out a space in the break room for union notices, artwork and posters for upcoming protests. And we have a tradition of taking solidarity photos for social justice causes and organised contingents for union rallies. 
Liz, the delegate under suspension, has been integral to winning backpay for workers who weren’t being paid the correct rate, and to winning union induction rights. She’s also part of our current campaign for company-provided pads and tampons, and for the right to be on a weekly pay cycle instead of the current fortnightly one, which sometimes means waiting up to 20 days to be paid for a shift. 
Liz’s suspension is based on a number of trumped-up charges. Management have tried to label her a bully, accusing her of intimidating a male supervisor and another co-worker. They’ve also claimed that she hung up on people on calls during a shift. How can they argue this? Because they monitored her for 2.5 hours of her 4-hour shift. But the data they’ve provided doesn’t prove their claims, and it is the workers’ view that the charge of bullying and intimidation is being cynically used as part of management’s union-busting agenda. 
As a delegate, Liz has been under heavy surveillance from management. She can’t take a break without them checking her timer (break time to go to the toilet, make a cup of tea, eat dinner is all monitored on our computer screens). She has also been subject to intimidation by the overwhelmingly male management team. 
Luckily, our workmates, along with numerous other workers and students around the country, see this for what it is: targeting an effective union delegate. 
We’ve taken a solidarity photo for Liz at work, held a number of meetings and distributed “Where’s My Delo Liz?” stickers for people to wear on shift. We’ve been sent solidarity photos from workers in a range of other industries, including the Chemist Warehouse workers who were recently on strike, and even workers from a print store in Vietnam. 
We would appreciate more solidarity photos, all the better if they are union endorsed. Please send any to <a href="mailto:louise@redflag.org.au">louise@redflag.org.au</a>.

Campaign launched to defend sacked call centre delegate

Young people have come to expect the worst from working life. For many of us, our first experience of work is in the hospitality industry, where we are lucky if we are paid legal, award wages. Workers aged 20 to 24 are the worst unionised of any age group in Australia: only 7 percent belong to unions, according to 2017 figures. 
That’s why I am proud to be a delegate at one of the best unionised workplaces for young people in the country: a call centre in the Melbourne suburb of Cremorne where 96 percent of workers are members of the National Union of Workers. 
Having a few socialists in the workplace has been key to getting the place organised. For months, we have been signing people up to the union, taking action in defence of our rights on the job, taking a stand around broader political questions and showing that the best kind of union is an active one in which members feel a sense of solidarity and collective identity. 
Outsourcing work to call centres is an easy way for companies to save money. A lot of the surveys we do are on behalf of the government, and formerly would have been done by workers in the public sector in more secure employment and on higher wages. 
Call centres are often called the satanic mills of the 21st century. The work is repetitive. We dial numbers over and over and read through the same script throughout the shift. Our behaviour is constantly monitored, our conversations are recorded, and how long we spend on the toilet, on break, waiting between one call and the next, is all timed. 
Market research is a billion dollar industry, and as in all workplaces, the bosses need workers to make that profit for them. 
It has taken hard work and time to build up a culture of unionism at work. One of the main ways we have done it has been through taking solidarity photos for social causes. In recent months we’ve taken photos in solidarity with the Indigenous families of the victims of the Bowraville murders, with whistleblower hero Chelsea Manning when she was barred from entering the country and with refugees in offshore detention camps for the #kidsoffalloff campaign. 
But the biggest show of our collective strength as unionised workers came when we campaigned to defend our right to read at our desks and save my job. 
A few months ago, I was sent home early on a shift one night when a supervisor told me to put my book away until I got two more surveys. I argued that we all had the right to read. 
Later I was pulled into a disciplinary meeting and told that I would no longer be given shifts. In response, a core team of union activists organised an emergency meeting. Eighty percent of workers on the job simultaneously left their desks to go to the emergency meeting. There was widespread outrage that someone could be sacked for reading at their desk – something we all do. The feeling was that if this could happen to one of us, it could happen to any of us, so it was important that we collectively took a stand. 
Our campaign was successful. The management backed off and we saved my job. Now, another call centre has started its own campaign to read. As per our tradition, we sent them a solidarity photo to spur them on. 
We’ve now got a team of delegates at our call centre. We were some of the youngest members of the NUW contingent at the recent Change the Rules rally. 
To build on our success, there is a plan in the works to start an industry-wide newsletter to spread the word about our campaign and to help improve working conditions across the industry.

University of Wollongong to sack 137 staff by Christmas

Wollongong Palestine solidarity activists picket company supplying Israel

Why I confronted the new Woolworths CEO

Indefinite strike in Melbourne’s west

Campaign launched to defend sacked call centre delegate

Call centres getting organised

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