Clock Strikes Twelve: Pay up Dawn!
The morning of Thursday 6th of March was straight out of a Disney movie. Warm sun beaming down on the Clock Tower, blue sky with not a cloud in sight, birds chirping, the whole works. It would’ve been exactly like a Disney movie were it not for the Tertiary Education Union (TEU) strike taking place.
From 10:30am, staff members started to arrive, some wearing t-shirts stating they were ‘proud to be TEU.’ With Aretha Franklin’s ‘Respect’ setting the tone for the day, members began to help each other set up the speakers and signs, handing out fliers to staff members and students walking by, and a number of people wearing neon high-visibility vests collected chalk buckets for the protest activities later on.
Nicole Wallace, an organiser for the Auckland regional branch of the TEU spoke briefly to me, amidst the rush of everything, outlining the key reasons for the strike occurring. According to Wallace and the TEU, fair pay, in all aspects, is the reason that the nearly 1600 TEU members at the University of Auckland decided to strike. They demand that their pay needs to keep up with the cost of living which has been in crisis since 2021, and that there needs to be more transparency in systems that determine pay progression for staff. In addition to this, Wallace highlighted the need for all members to be paid a minimum of a living wage.
By 10:53am, there wasn’t a free spot to stand in, and the speeches from the TEU organisers, and members of staff began, during which it was revealed that since September of last year, there had been 29 meetings between the negotiating team of the TEU, and the University. Put together, that would make nearly a month straight spent at the negotiating table, which according to those striking, has reached no outcomes due to the University’s refusal to cooperate.
The list of speakers consisted of a wide variety of people, from Deborah Russell, the Labour spokesperson for tertiary education, to a gardener who expressed that having worked at the University of Auckland since the 80s, he was annoyed by conditions not improving. Topics such as trust in the institution and hypocrisy from the University were discussed, as well as the issue of the University’s anti-unionism, and its favouring of staff members who are not part of unions by giving them higher pay rises. By show of hands, it was seen that the majority of those striking were lecturers, teaching assistants or non-academic staff, however, Professor Paula Lorgelly, who noted that she was now earning a good salary, stated that “once upon a time I was a lecturer too,” and that she sympathised and understood the struggles of being underpaid and overworked.
Living wage was perhaps the most talked about topic throughout the strike, with Victoria University and Massey being named as two universities that pay staff a living wage. In Auckland, however, the TEU haven’t gotten anywhere with the Vice Chancellor, Dawn Freshwater, who reportedly expressed the opinion that casual staff, many of whom are also students at the university, “don’t need a living wage,” which seems like a very ‘let them eat cake’ type of comment to be making, although not particularly surprising when taking into consideration that in 2020 Vice Chancellor Freshwater’s salary was $755k. To put that number into perspective, the Prime Minister of New Zealand’s yearly salary is estimated to be between $400k-$500k. The Vice Chancellor’s view on living wage was labelled as “very problematic” by Wallace, and a nearby student helping out with the strike mentioned that as someone planning to get into academia, she was preparing herself for the need to have two jobs in order to be able to live.
The minimum wage in Aotearoa is set to increase to $23.50 on April 1st of 2025, and this will be the minimum that employers are legally obligated to pay their employees. The living wage, however, is voluntary, and as of September 1st of 2024, is $27.80 an hour having been increased from $26 an hour. This increase happens every year in order to keep up with inflation. According to the Citizens Advice Bureau, the living wage is the amount that a worker must be paid in order to “live with dignity, and participate as an active member of society,” something that most people would presumably want to do. Unfortunately, due to not being a legal requirement, many employers opt to not pay living wage, the University of Auckland being one of them.
When questioned about whether they had considered moving to work at other universities due to the conditions at the University of Auckland, Holly Bennett, a Student Hub Advisor, and Rosaria, a member of the Reading List team at the library, both said yes. Bennett, who told me that she’d done both her Bachelor's degree and her Master’s at this university pointed out that “AUT is just over the road, and they pay much better, which is frankly shameful because this is supposed to be the top university in this country.”
Rosaria said that in addition to having personally thought of moving, she was aware of multiple coworkers who had also considered it. She, like Bennett, previously studied at the university, and expressed that while she loves the university, “love doesn’t pay when I go to Pak’nSave, or to get my car gassed up.”
The strike’s final location was the Clock Tower on Princes Street, a symbol of the University of Auckland, one that tourists and graduating students take photos in front of. In a matter of minutes, the pavement was covered in colourful chalk writings of ‘LIVING WAGE’, ‘FAIR PAY’, and ‘PAY UP DAWN’. Not even three hours later, the chalking was washed away by the University, all traces of the strike trickling away into the drains.
Is censorship the best look for the top-ranked university in New Zealand? Regardless, this won’t be the last we’ll be hearing from the TEU, nor the last strike to read about.
