16/07/2020
Our community has been shaken by a number of major news:
- the faculty of Art & Design is about to be absorbed into one mega faculty, along with the fellow former faculties Social Sciences and Built Environment.
- 493 fixed term jobs will be cut across UNSW. It is understood by us here at SWT that fixed term employees do not get any severance pay. When it comes to ending employment of FTE’s, UNSW doesn’t treat them as staff but as contractors, and therefore does not consider them as eligible for severance pay - regardless of how many years or how many rolling contracts they have been employed under.
- Countless casual workers, whose existence wasn’t even addressed, also expect that they will find themselves out of work.
As we grapple with these major changes, we couldn’t help but notice a prominent name amongst the victims of these restructurings: Ross Harley will no longer be the dean of UNSW AD.
This is the picture being painted: Ross Harley wrongfully fired beloved staff member Tess Allas. An International campaign ensued to demand that she be kept on due to her outstanding contribution to the institution. The university stonewalled the campaign and eventually told us off the record ‘yes we know this was a bad call, she is clearly very important to a lot of people, but management has to stick together and cannot be seen caving to students campaigns or it will loose its authority, so no matter the consequences this decision is going ahead’. Six months later, Ross Harley gets quietly fired amidst COVID restructuring. In our eyes, this decision is clearly management’s non-response to what happened.
We see the irony in this decision - Ross firing Tess and losing his own job over it - but our statement is not here to gloat. What we would like to comment instead is: is this the best institutions can do when they f**k up? We asked for explicit accountability, for reparations, for an apology; all actions oriented towards repairing relationships and safekeeping communities. The institution gave none of this.
Instead, they gave us Ross’ head.
The issue with a system that treats unemployment as punishment, and workers (all workers) as disposable, is that this is the only form of accountability that is ever on offer. Punishment but never reform.
Whatever petty solace we might find in seeing that some of the people who have exploited this toxic institutional system are now finding themselves at the other end of it, it doesn’t change the fact that the goal has to be to create a better, safer system for all, where actual accountability is possible.
We know this is the institution’s language of apologies: the managerial way of condemning his behaviour is to quietly fire him without ever explicitly discussing it. But this isn’t what our campaign asked nor good enough. This is still an expression of the same systemic issues of lack of accountability, lack of communication, lack of care that got us here in the first place. The institution needs deeper reforming, because while a single bad apple might be gone now, the system very much stays broken and unable to offer reparations. It seems like all it knows is how to occasionally shift the direction in which it distributes harm.
(with all this being said, we are only human, so lol BYE BYE ROSS, you racist weasel. Good luck getting a going)
