#UsydStrike photos

What is it like on Usyd campus when staff go on strike? Academic and professional members of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) at University of Sydney voted to take industrial action. On 11 and 12 May, 2022, they went on strike. Supported by students, staff formed pickets at campus entrances, as well as a digital picket. Anyone trying to get on to campus were told about the reasons for the strike and asked to not cross the picket line. While some people showed their lack of support for improving Usyd and crossed the picket line, they were a minority as demonstrated by the ghost town feel of campus on both days of the strike. Scroll down to see all the photos or click to skip to day 2. Please check out the photos below. I hope you get a sense of who the people are that were on the pickets, they are academic and professional staff of Usyd. They are students of Usyd. And they are community and union supporters. In the third gallery are images taken by Jeffrey Kong, a Usyd student. He did a great job of capturing moments from all around campus on day 2. To see photos from the Usyd strike in October 2022, click here.

Day 1

Day 2

The images below were taken by Jeffrey Kong, a Political Economy Honours student at Usyd. Check out his Instagram and Twitter

Why are NTEU members striking?

NTEU members are currently renegotiating the Enterprise Agreement, the collective contract that governs pay and employment conditions at the university. Negotiations have been going on since August last year. NTEU is seeking:

• An end to forced redundancies;

• Improved rights for professional staff to work from home;

• Protection of academics’ right to our current research allocations;

• Enforceable targets for First Nations employment;

• A fair pay increase; and

• An end to overwork and exploitative casualisation.

But management are resisting NTEU’s vision of a more humane and efficient workplace, so taking industrial action is on – just like what happened in previous Enterprise Bargaining rounds, and like teachers, bus and train drivers, paramedics, and nurses have all done in NSW in 2021 and 2022.