Despite a contract with no guarantee of regular work, Macquarie University academic casual Gregory Baker has made his case for continuing employment – and paved the way for significant changes to the employment of academic staff.
His win in the Fair Work Commission will set a benchmark for universities across the country now in enterprise bargaining and is a breakthrough in the push for academic teaching-only roles.
This week’s ruling sets out how the Government’s 2024 casual-conversion laws will apply in universities.
Mr Baker has consistently taught computing subjects at Macquarie U since 2023, working regular and scheduled hours during semesters. According to Fair Work Commissioner Crawford, he has performed a “critical role,” lecturing in a core Computing school subject and “there would obviously be significant disruption for the students if Mr Baker had the ability to decide whether to perform lecturing work from week to week.”
“The teaching work Mr Baker has been performing is required by Macquarie University on an ongoing basis. Macquarie University is more reliant on Mr Baker performing regular and scheduled work than would normally be the case with a casual employee,” Commissioner Crawford stated.
He concluded this means Mr Baker’s employment fits “recurring fixed-term periods of part-time employment, rather than genuine casual employment.”
Macquarie U argued that Mr Baker could not be a continuing employee, because its enterprise agreement requires academics on staff to undertake research. However, Commissioner Crawford ruled that requirements under the National Employment Standards prevailed over the EA. And he suggested that there is flexibility in job classifications in the Macquarie Agreement for Mr Baker to be a continuing staff member.
This is a win for casual university teachers, notably in Information Technology who may not want full-time academic teaching and research careers, but will welcome the security and benefits of continuing jobs. In a new study of casual teachers in a sample of Australian universities Gwilym Croucher and Liz Baré (both Uni Melbourne) estimate they do 27 per cent of IT teaching.
Despite the prospect of converting casuals to more expensive continuing positions, university managements will also welcome this precedent. The flexibility and savings from more teaching-only continuing staff is an all-but universal ambition.
But the judgement will not please the National Tertiary Education Union, which is committed to the long-standing convention that academics should work on teaching for 40 per cent of their time, 40 per on research and 20 per cent on service. This is now a live industrial issue at the University of Sydney where the NTEU has dug in against more teaching-intensive jobs.
The result for Mr Baker is that on his existing workload, he will be employed by the university for 180 hours allocated over the year.