That casual university staff do it tough is all but universally agreed – and not just university managements but also the NTEU are to blame, according to a new paper.
Peter Woelert researches the way universities work and adds to his oeuvre with an analysis of the conditions that created the casual academic workforce that keeps HE running, in a new paper with Gwilym Croucher and Sam Hoang (all Uni Melbourne).
They argue that actions in four areas are responsible; employment legislation, national policy, university management and the behaviour of other academics.
Overall, they analyse how public funding models and university managements’ focus on cost control created the conditions for casualisation, but their focus on specific university policy and culture issues should be disquieting for the academic establishment.
Some of their findings are no surprise – for example that teaching-only casuals exist in numbers because they can be hired and fired according to student demand, “to the end of creating the teaching revenue surplus necessary for strategic investments in research.”
“By and large, research as an activity has gained a disproportionate amount of prestige due to the increasing internal fixation on research and research ranking performance,” they state.
However they also argue the National Tertiary Education Union and permanent staff have a good deal to do with the plight of the teaching precariat.
The authors suggest the union over-time has, “inadvertently contributed to the institutionalisation of casual academic employment.” By campaigning against fixed term contracts, the NTEU normalised managements replacing such staff with casuals. They also state that in 2012 the union accepted teaching-only positions as a pathway to continuing employment for causals, thus legitimising a workforce divide between teaching-only and teaching-research-service staff. (In the union’s qualified defence there are more recent enterprise bargaining negotiations where it campaigned against converting continuing staff to teaching-only positions).
The authors also allege that the union has increased “polarisation and stratification of the academic workforce,” by campaigning against under-payment of casuals, “yet it also has remained largely silent on universities’ use of pay loadings for senior academic staff and the associated repercussions for income stratification.”
Continuing staff do not always care about casuals’ conditions – and the NTEU must represent the interests of (tenured) members. However, there were sufficiently aggrieved casuals in 2022 for there to be a ticket for the three national leadership positions in the NTEU national elections with candidates winning 33-41% of the vote.
Certainly Woelert and colleagues acknowledge, “a hierarchical division of labour has become taken for granted among members of the academic establishment, according to which casual staff have responsibility for what is referred to as the “delivery” of teaching, including the associated administration and marking, but are excluded from all higher order consideration and decision-making.”
“The academic profession, finally, has reinforced the institutionalisation of casual academic employment either through inculcating such normative separation of academic work into local academic practices or through labour union activities that, at least indirectly, have contributed to legitimating and normalising the reliance on casual academic staff within universities.”
