Socialist Alternative member Rick Kuhn was recently received into life membership of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). It is an honour well-deserved.

Rick cut his teeth as an activist at Sydney University in the mid-1970s. As he later wrote of this time: “Experience with the Students’ Representative Council, the Australian Union of Students and various official university bodies over the next couple of years helped me develop useful skills in debate, caucusing and the negotiation of bureaucratic structures.

“But participating in different campaigns that involved (or at least tried to involve) large numbers of students, especially the PE [political economy] movement, demonstrated that real politics was about mobilising people to shape their world. The other stuff could be important, but only to the extent that it contributed to the struggle.”

After getting his first university job in 1987, he was a local delegate and on various union committees by the end of his first year. At that time, the union was much more a professional association than a workers’ organisation.

Not surprisingly, Rick was and remains a strong advocate of the importance of the general staff in improving what had been an academics-only body: “Most admin staff are not high paid managers but workers, who have fewer illusions in the myth that if you work hard and are clever you will prosper. The sooner that deference to academic status inside campus trade unions dies and is replaced by respect for competence in leading industrial struggles against management, the better.”

Rick played that role himself in the late 1990s, the last time the union had strikes in which picket lines regularly turned away deliveries and gave scabs a hard time. His arguments for militancy, often in the face of opposition from the union leadership, made him a well-known figure in the union, but he was never just a union activist.

From the 1970s, Rick’s union activism (and the role he has played in campaigns from anti-war activism to Palestine solidarity) has been an outcome of his commitment to building Socialist Alternative and its predecessor organisations.