MWEB Forums: COLIN BUNDY condemned

PUTTING PROFIT FIRST

THE SOWETAN, 7 September 2000

Wits is rapidly turning into a market university that serves the wealthy,
while excluding working class people, writes Lucien van der Walt

Just more than two month ago, the University of the Witwatersrand retrenched
613 support service workers. Their jobs - in catering, cleaning, grounds,
and maintenance - have been taken over by outside contractors such as Fedics
and Supercare.

While Wits vice-chancellor Colin Bundy says that the new companies have also
taken on about 250 of the retrenched Wits workers, he says rather less about
working conditions in the new companies.

Wages have been halved and benefits slashed. A worker in one of Wits' retail
outlets, for example, now earns about R1200 a month - down from more than
R3000 - and with no benefits. Among the benefits lost is the right of
children of all Wits employees to study free of charge. This situation has
placed Wits workers in an extremely precarious financial position, and many
fear that more outsourcing is coming.

Further, many supervisors in the new companies actively discourage
unionisation. The mighty Wits branch of Nehawu - once a union stronghold in
the tertiary education sector- is still reeling from the blow. Over half of
its 800 members, including shop stewards, are amongst those who have lost
their jobs, and the union has no real base in the new companies.

The support service retrenchments are part of Wits' ongoing restructuring
plan: Wits 2001. Like the controversial iGoli 2002 plan to restructure the
greater Johannesburg municipal area, Wits 2001 aims to save money through
outsourcing and retrenchments. It also aims to generate profits from its
"core" business of research and teaching.

And as teaching and learning become more and more orientated towards the
market and to profit making, rather than to providing a social service,
academic departments that do no generate sufficient revenue also fall. In
the Arts faculty, for example, at least three departments facing closure,
and at least 25 academic posts face the axe.

Both iGoli 2002 and Wits 2001 must be seen in the context of government's
controversial Gear economic programme, which has slashed funding to higher
education and local government, and which promotes "flexible labour," the
downsizing of the public sector, and the commercialisation and privatisation
of state assets.

On the one hand, Wits University expels loyal workers, some with many years
of service, and brings in low-wage contractors. On the other hand, it
markets itself to middle-class students as the "best academic address in
Africa" through the "Wits by appointment" programme and organises research
contracts with big business and government.

This process of "privatising" Wits has not gone unchallenged. Whilst other
campus unions buckled and bent in the face of administrative pressure, and
encouraged their members to sign up for retrenchment packages, Nehawu stood
firm to the end. It never signed on for the University's "social plan" and
picketed daily for four months, recognising that, as worker activist
Severino DiGiovanni once said: "The right to life is not given - it is
taken."

Faced with Bundy's refusal to negotiate on the key issues, student
organisations fought to support the workers, organising an occupation of
Bundy's office, as well as rallies and marches. Many students also fear Wits
2001 will mean rising student fees, excluding poor students from higher
education.

The protest movement came to a head at a prestigious international
conference on Urban Futures co-hosted by Wits and by the Greater
Johannesburg Metropolitan Council in July. During the week of the
conference, there were several protests by the Anti-Privatisation Forum - a
coalition that brings together groups organising against Wits 2001 and iGoli
2002, including retrenched Wits workers- culminating in a non-violent
disruption of the final session.

But protests have taken place in the context of an increasingly
authoritarian management style. The issues raised by Nehawu and the other
protestors have fallen on deaf ears since the restructuring began in earnest
in 1999.

And, following the Urban Futures disruption, Bundy's administration applied
for court interdicts against Sasco, the SRC, the Postgraduate Association
and Nehawu, as well as 14 named individuals, including Nehawu's president
Vusi Nhlapo. The interdicts will, if obtained, ban protestors from
activities such as making a noise, occupying or blockading offices, and
"intimidation," and empower the administration to use police to arrest
activists.

This attempt to place the campus under police rule is matched by the iron
discipline imposed on workers in the outsourcing companies, where management
aims to extract the most labour for the least money.

It also has its echo in the shift in academic governance structures, away
from traditional, participatory collegial institutions such as faculties,
senate and council towards a parallel structure of appointed restructuring
committees, ranging from the Academic Planning and Review Committees at
faculty levels to the Academic Restructuring Review Committee and the Senior
Executive Team at the top. And academic restructuring has encouraged many
academics to hold their tongues, despite their deep disagreements with Wits
2001.

At the same time, the pay gap at Wits has widened radically: Bundy earns
around R59, 000 a month, the new "executive Deans" who will be appointed in
late 2000 will earn corporate-level salaries of maybe up to R500 000 a year,
while lecturers in the most profitable courses and faculties seem set to see
their pay packets jump.

This is the new face of Wits: a market university that serves the wealthy
middle and upper classes, including the black middle class, while excluding
working class people from decent jobs and university education, as well as
excluding working class needs from its research and teaching agenda.
Colin Bundy, an ex-Marxist whose appointment was supported by labour and
students, has certainly kept his inaugural promise to link Wits to
Johannesburg, but this promise has changed into a threat: that of Wits 2001
blending with iGoli 2002 in a neo-liberal recipe for social inequality and
polarisation.

(The author lectures at Wits, where he is a member of the Concerned
Academics Group and Nehawu.)