DURBAN, 8 FEBRUARY 2006 – On the third day of their strike two thousand University of KwaZulu-Natal staff marched on campus today in defiance of management’s ban on mass action. All four unions at UKZN (COMSA, NEHAWU, NTESU and UNSU) had called for Wednesday to be a day of stay-aways and marches at UKZN’s Westville Campus and the large turnout proves the strength of the UKZN strike, which has been ongoing since Monday and has, according to unions, severely impacted on registration of students at the university.

Staff at UKZN are on strike because the 2006 wage negotiations deadlocked when management only offered a 4% annual increase. In addition, unions accuse UKZN management of an “increasingly authoritarian style of management” and accuse them of “erod[ing] academic freedom”.

In recent months UKZN has been beset by conflict, including the furore over the banning of Ashwin Desai from campus, the treatment of the Banana City informal settlement (located on Westville campus) by UKZN management and the harassment of UKZN activist academics by the National Intelligence Agency and police intelligence. At the same time as staff are on strike, students are protesting over academic exclusions and high registration fees. All of these issues are flowing together to shine a spotlight on UKZN as a model of a neo-liberal university, where concerns of openness, accessibility and freedom are sidelined in order to emphasise the power of management and ‘market based’ principles. As some commentators have pointed out the struggle at UKZN today echoes earlier struggles over the direction of higher education in South Africa, struggles that themselves form part of a global struggle.

All indications are that the UKZN strikers are displaying a level of militance that has become rare at South African universities in recent years. Indymedia will continue to post updates about this struggle, and readers are also referred to the online strike news being produced by strikers themselves.

(source: http://southafrica.indymedia.org)