It’s profoundly disturbing when you had asked the organisation that exists to represent workers for help, only to reach the point where that organisation has become another source of harm.
That’s what happened to me with the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU).
I was a union member in parallel to the workers’ compensation claim from May 2020 and into 2021, when I complained to the NTEU and tried to seek answers.
I was dealing with a psychological injury arising from the employer’s retaliation to my request for WHS compliance. I was trying to protect my employment, understand my workers compensation rights, obtain a safe return to work, and stop conduct that I had repeatedly reported as harmful.
I didn’t need another adversary.
I had needed my union.
The records I retained from 2022 show how badly that relationship had deteriorated. They also preserve my words at the time — sometimes angry, sometimes frightened, sometimes desperate to be heard.
I’m not going to sanitise those records now.
But nor am I asking readers to treat every conclusion I expressed during an extraordinarily traumatic period as an independently established finding. Where these documents refer to fraud, collusion, mobbing or other wrongdoing, those words record allegations I was expressing at the time unless I specifically identify an independent finding.
What matters here is what I was telling my union, what the union knew, and what happened when I asked for help.
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I wasn’t approaching someone with no responsibility for these issues
One of the most important records is the professional profile of the NTEU officer I had approached for assistance.
His LinkedIn profile described him as working in:
“Work Health & Safety, Organising, & Industrial Relations”
His professional description said he was an Industrial Officer responsible for industrial advice and coverage at three large NTEU branches in NSW. More significantly in the context of what I was experiencing, it said:
“With a deep experience and expertise in Workplace Health and Safety over the past six years, I am the main NTEU contact for health and safety matters in NSW.”
The profile also recorded that he had previously been a branch organiser at the University of Sydney, Australian Catholic University, and Western Sydney University.
He was supposed to have assisted me, answering my questions about entitlements under a statutory scheme, replying to my pleas to stop the relentless harassment from ACU’s national manager of employment relations and SAFETY! Rena Christmann continued to stalk and badger me under workers’ compensation regulations to injure me as adverse action for requesting a psychosocially safe work environment! And the NTEU knowingly allowed it!
This now former branch organiser knew I was being deprived of my weekly payments that I should have been receiving under workers compensation law! It’s WAGE THEFT. He knew I was trying to return to my work! The NTEU branch organiser withheld information that I had a legal right to know as a union member! The ACU branch president knew too!
What kinds of creepy and unconscionable people was I dealing with across each organisation in this psychological thriller?!
This was the branch organiser’s area of responsibility!
I was raising workplace safety, industrial rights and workers compensation issues with an NTEU officer whose own professional description identified industrial relations and workplace health and safety as areas of responsibility!
And I had been asking - pleading - for help and safety! And continued to be left in the hands of the perpetrator, “on behalf of the university”, to finish the job of annihilating me out of existence and steal my income, twenty years of leave entitlements accrued and all my WHS and workers compensation statutory entitlements I had a legal right to!
This NTEU branch organiser and ACU branch president knowingly allowed this WHS harm to continue! To a member! HOW CAN THEY LIVE WITH THEMSELVES!
——
18 September 2022
On Sunday, 18 September 2022, I finally confronted the NTEU officer directly through LinkedIn.
My message was raw.
I wrote:
“As a union member, I pleaded with you to help me stop the harassment. And you remained silent.”
I questioned why I hadn’t been properly informed about the workers compensation entitlements that were supposed to support my efforts to return to and recover in my continuing HEW 8 employment.
I described what had happened to my leave entitlements, my health and my financial security.
And I said something particularly important:
“And all my emails and forms and membership details and legitimate factual investigation report prove you knew and did nothing.”
That was my allegation in September 2022.
I wanted the union’s conduct investigated. I wanted somebody to look at the records rather than dismiss what I was saying. Most of all, I wanted the harm to stop and the support that should have been available to me to finally begin.
Then something happened that affected me far more than a social-media interaction ordinarily would.
The NTEU officer blocked me on LinkedIn.
——
“And there it is. He immediately blocked me.”
I documented it that same day:
“And there it is. He immediately blocked me.”
A LinkedIn block, standing alone, proves nothing about the underlying workplace matters.
But this didn’t occur in isolation.
I had just confronted a union official whom I had previously approached for help. I was telling him that the union had failed me in circumstances involving my health, employment, workers compensation rights and livelihood.
My contemporaneous note from 18 September 2022 records what that interaction did to me.
I described myself as frightened and alone. I wrote about my blood pressure and the physical effects of what I was experiencing. I said I was pleading with the Fair Work Ombudsman and my federal representative for somebody to intervene.
For me, the block represented another closed door. More creepy mobbing. Another incident of harm.
By this point, there had already been too many.
——
Then the President of the NTEU’s ACU Branch viewed my profile
Another LinkedIn record from this period shows that the then-President of the NTEU’s ACU Branch viewed my profile.
A LinkedIn profile view doesn’t, by itself, demonstrate wrongdoing, surveillance, collusion or any improper purpose.
But I can describe what it felt like to me in the circumstances.
I had contacted the NTEU officer. He had blocked me. I was already deeply distressed about what had been the union’s failure to assist me. About two hours after I confronted the former NTEU branch organiser for ACU, the President of the union’s ACU Branch had viewed my profile.
Perhaps contact was made between the two after my direct message to the NTEU officer. I could see that I was attracting attention.
What I didn’t see was meaningful intervention to help me when I needed it from mid-2020.
——
Later on 18 September, I complained directly to the NTEU
On 18 September 2022, I emailed the NTEU nationally under the subject line:
“Further to my complaint to the NTEU”
That decision says something about how little confidence I had left in internal processes. I wanted an external record of what I was reporting.
The language of that email shows my condition at the time:
“Stop the bullying NTEU! I’m completely distressed, frightened and severely creeped out with what you’re doing.”
I also directly confronted the NTEU officer about what his conduct had contributed to.
These are difficult words for me to read now.
But they’re evidence of something important.
The NTEU was being told that its conduct was causing me further distress.
These are contemporaneous records.
This isn’t a story I constructed years afterwards.
——
I took my concerns about the NTEU to the Fair Work Ombudsman
My concerns became serious enough that I also reported the NTEU’s conduct to the Fair Work Ombudsman.
I described what I was providing as:
“a recent incident with my industrial association, the NTEU”
and alleged that it represented further evidence of:
“serious safety violations, mobbing and collusion”
Those were serious allegations. They were my allegations, and I wanted them investigated.
But look at what surrounded those words.
I told the Fair Work Ombudsman that I was experiencing further financial harm.
I said I needed the abuse to end.
I described being alone and without the support I needed.
And I identified the NTEU - the industrial association that I should have been able to turn to - among the organisations whose conduct had harmed me.
There’s one sentence in that correspondence that remains fundamental to everything I have been trying to explain:
“I had a right to recover in my job and I still assert my right.”
That was what I wanted.
Safety.
My employment.
My entitlements.
A genuine opportunity to recover.
And somebody with the authority to make the system work as it was supposed to work.
A reminder to readers how the Fair Work Ombudsman responded and that creepy undisclosed conflict of interest too - http://mystory-myvoice.blogspot.com/2026/09/the-fair-work-ombudsman-when-another.html!
——
27 September 2022: I went back to the NTEU again
Nine days later, on 27 September 2022, I wrote to the NTEU nationally again.
By then, my allegations had become explicit.
The subject line was:
“Complaint in which I expect restitution as a victim of employer fraud under worker’s compensation regulations that NTEU agreed to allow.”
The email records that the NTEU officer appeared by then to have unblocked me on LinkedIn.
But blocking or unblocking me was no longer the point. And the distress from that incident had already been caused.
I wanted answers about what the union had done while I was asking it for help.
I wrote:
“I’m exhausted, traumatised and alone. None of this should’ve happened.”
I again raised the workers compensation benefits I hadn’t received.
I referred to my Injury Management Plan.
I referred to the enterprise agreement.
I referred to my repeated attempts to obtain cooperation.
And I wrote:
“The university and the NTEU must cooperate to stop the financial and psychological abuse immediately and start repairing the damage.”
That sentence perhaps says more about what I wanted from the union than all the angry words around it.
I wanted action.
——
The anger in these records didn’t come from nowhere
Reading these communications is confronting.
But I will not rewrite history by pretending I wasn’t angry, traumatised and distressed.
I was.
I won’t pretend I wasn’t frightened.
I was.
And I won’t remove every uncomfortable sentence merely because institutional correspondence is easier to digest when the injured person remains calm, restrained and polite.
The emotional intensity itself is part of the evidence.
A worker who had been asking institutions for help was becoming increasingly distressed while continuing to ask for help.
The appropriate question is not simply:
Why was she so angry?
It is also:
What had happened before she became that angry, and what happened when the organisations receiving these communications could plainly see how distressed she had become?
——
What did my union do with what it knew?
That’s ultimately why I’m publishing this part of my records.
This doesn’t need to become a personal attack on individual NTEU officials.
The institutional questions are more important.
- What did the NTEU know about what I was reporting?
- When did it know?
- What records did it hold concerning my requests for assistance?
- What industrial advice was provided to me?
- What workers compensation assistance was provided?
- What WHS assistance was provided?
- What communications occurred concerning my circumstances?
- What happened when I repeatedly told the union that my health, employment and financial security were being harmed?
- And when the NTEU itself was told that its conduct was adding to that harm, what did it do?
Those questions don’t require inflammatory language.
They require records and answers.
——
A union should be somewhere a worker doesn’t have to fight alone
There’s an enormous imbalance of power when an injured worker is simultaneously dealing with an employer, workers compensation insurer, regulators, lawyers and an increasingly complicated administrative system.
That’s precisely when union representation can matter most.
A worker should be able to go to their union and say:
I don’t understand what’s happening.
I don’t feel safe.
I need somebody who understands these systems to help me.
That was what I needed.
Instead, by September 2022, I was contacting journalists, politicians and the Fair Work Ombudsman because I had come to believe that I also needed outside scrutiny of the conduct of my own industrial association.
That should never have happened.
I paid union membership fees because I believed representation meant something.
I believed workplace safety meant something.
I believed solidarity meant something.
And I believed that when a union member was injured and asking for help protecting her employment and exercising her workplace rights, somebody would stand beside her.
(NOTE: I did, however, have this terrible gut feeling and reservations about the union. That’s why I had taken so long to join and only did so on the advice of employment lawyer #2. What I had instinctively felt, that was now proven in the conduct of the NTEU).
——
This isn’t about one LinkedIn block
That’s why reducing this story to a LinkedIn dispute would completely miss the point.
The block is simply one documented moment in a much larger chronology - which I’ve now been writing about on this blog.
The real story is about representation.
It’s about what happens when a worker repeatedly raises workplace safety, workers compensation and employment concerns with the organisation that exists to represent workers.
It’s about what happens when that worker becomes increasingly distressed.
And it’s about accountability for what was — and was not — done in response.
My contemporaneous correspondence from 18 September 2022 and 27 September 2022 shows that the NTEU wasn’t being left to guess how serious the situation had become. I was telling them directly.
I cannot change what happened.
But I can preserve the record of what I said while it was happening.
And I can ask the question that should matter to every union member:
When a member asks her union for help, what should she reasonably be able to expect it to do?
Source: contemporaneous record of events - Documents 477-478, 484.
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See NTEU chronology in my story.
