The precariat is still not a great career-space.
Carolyn Sutherland (Monash U) examined enterprise agreements since 2022 to identify the ways new industrial law improves conditions for academic casuals. She argues their teaching tasks are still, “equivalent to the components of an academic production line.”
Despite Labor Government legislation to protect casually employed workers, she points to continuing problems for sessionally-employed teaching academics.
- Employment insecurity: ‘though a high proportion of casual teaching academics work at the same university over successive semesters, they have no certainty that the work will continue”
- Low control of their hours
- No time for research, which deskills teaching-only casuals
Professor Sutherland does readers a service by explaining the complex process of adapting laws to protect continuing workers unjustly considered casuals to the university employment model and how the intent of legislation has been applied to university enterprise agreements.
She lists institutions which have variously converted casual positions into a range of ongoing employment, including continuing positions for specified periods. These, she argues, are particular improvements on casual teaching, providing the job security of an ongoing appointment plus set income and regulatory protections.
Better, but not good enough. Periodic employees are still treated as “second class citizens” who, like, casuals, are only paid for teaching not the time they take to “review units and revise materials in preparation for the next semester.” And they will still struggle to secure continuing positions given no paid time for research.
And employment wins now come at a long-term cost. Professor Sutherland argues managements have created entry-level ongoing teaching positions at the expense of teaching and research jobs.
This may, she suggests, be as much as can be achieved by the National Tertiary Education Union negotiating enterprise agreements. “For any transformation to be lasting, a new model of employment needs to be devised that addresses the concerns of universities about funding and expenditure and the concerns of academic teachers about the precarity and status of their contribution.”
And so she proposes more public funding to assuage management budget fears. Plus, the Australian Tertiary Education Commission will need to less be involved than lead. “Given that the Commission will have the capability to engage with government, universities, and unions, there is an opportunity to overcome the piecemeal shifts in employment arrangements that have developed in a low-trust environment through enterprise bargaining,” she suggests.
Really involved. Professor Sutherland suggests ATEC could convene talks between government, universities and unions to sort out a new teaching model.
Really, really involved. “The opportunity should also be taken to develop some model provisions for inclusion in enterprise agreements.”