In August 2023, National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) members at the University of Melbourne took the longest strike action in Australian higher education history. For a full week, union members from the Faculty of Arts, Student and Scholarly Services, Melbourne Law School, and the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music walked off the job. Just over a month later, NTEU members across all departments at the university followed it up with a second week-long strike.

The two strikes at Melbourne University are part of a global wave of labor militancy in higher education, which has seen university workers take unprecedented industrial action in the United States, the UK, and elsewhere. And the action at Melbourne University has not been an outlier in Australian higher education. Last year saw a number of strikes at other Australian universities, including Monash University, the University of Sydney, and the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT), among others. And these actions come in the context of growing public awareness of the crisis in higher education. Australian universities have come under criticism over their reliance on precarious casualized labor, widespread wage theft, and their links with arms manufacturers.

In short, there is an opportunity to transform our universities, and this will necessitate industrial strategy. One significant problem, however, is that in the modern university, strikes usually only entail a minor disruption to the production of the university’s primary commodity, namely, education. However, if we better understand the nature of the commodity that universities produce and how they produce it, it could help union members plan more powerful industrial actions.