I've replied to Andy off-list...the excerpt that he included below, written
by two reporters for wsws wasn't my main interest - it was bemoaning the
return to an era of more elitism in higher education in Australia. I'm not
in a position to comment on the NTEU, as a retired lifer is!
Phil
At 21:31 2/10/03 +1000, you wrote:
>Can I just object to the repetition of this cheap shot at the NTEU, the
>union fighting for its life against a "Higher Education Reform" whose only
>logic is the destruction of the NTEU, a union which has managed to
>maintain national standards and even achieved legal ruling against
>casualisation of university staff, despite 15 years of "enterprise
>bargaining", funding cuts and deregulation, coming from an outfit (wsws)
>that has never contributed anything to this or any other workers' struggle.
>
>Andy
>(a Life member of the NTEU, now retired)
>
>At 05:59 PM 2/10/2003 +0700, you wrote:
>>The NTEU's track record has been one of accommodating itself to these
>>requirements, presiding over enterprise bargaining agreements that have
>>traded off traditional conditions, allowed academic salaries to slip by
>>25 percent compared to average weekly earnings since the early 1980s, and
>>permitted student-staff ratios to deteriorate from 14.5 in 1993 to 19.9
>>in 2001.
>>The Howard government is now exploiting these deteriorating conditions to
>>declare that the only way to save the universities from prevailing
>>"mediocrity" is to expose them to unmitigated market forces. The results
>>will deprive hundreds of thousands of students of the right to higher
>>education.
>
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