Nicole MacDougall

I am a staunch union member who works in the HDR Admin Centre with Alma Torlakovic. I have been an active member of the NTEU since I started at Sydney Uni in early 2016; fighting to protect our working conditions and playing a leading role in helping to stop individual performance metrics from being introduced into our department. I have argued to safeguard job security and conditions in meetings with management and have helped organise and speak at local and wider union meetings. I have consistently raised health and safety issues from air quality in the JFR building for COVID-19 safety measures. I was the local Health and Safety Rep in 2020 where I fought for the right to work from home during the ongoing pandemic. 

During the 2020 ‘crisis’ in higher education, I attended meetings and helped campaign to defeat the highly controversial ‘Jobs Protection Framework’; an effective wage-cutting deal thought up by our national leadership. 

I have played an active role in helping develop our log of claims for the current enterprise bargaining agreement, attending meetings, and making the case for detailed and ambitious claims such as a wage rise above inflation. I believe we need strike action to win. 

Our union can tend to focus on academic issues, and as a professional staff member, I would like to raise the voice and profile of issues faced by professional staff. We need workload protections, a real wage rise, and job security. We must absolutely strike to protect the internal advertising of roles as one example and keep pushing against attempts across the university to use performance targets on staff. 

I care about social justice issues beyond the workplace and have rallied on and off campus for action on climate change, helping create placards for global climate strikes, and organising a staff contingent for it. I have also campaigned for LGBT+ and education rights. I am a proud member of the LGBT+ community. 

To build strong unions today, we need to be staunch activists who are willing to take a stand on basic union principles. I am running with NTEU Fightback because it is the only group of activists on campus who have a strong stance of ‘no concessions’ on our wages and conditions, and who have a strategy to win. 

NTEU Fightback is a crew of the staunchest, most dedicated unionists: Alma Torlakovic, Jeremy Heathcote, Jennifer Huch-Hoogvliet, Nicole MacDougall, Catherine Sutton-Brady and David Allen.

A vote for Fightback is a vote for real action:

● A real pay rise: above inflation

● First nations rights

● Protect 40/40/20 and permanent jobs

● Workplace flexibility and a right to WFH

● Strike to win!