The argument that casual academics are underpaid and overworked has been widely accepted as fact for decades – but recent data suggests it might not be true.
A new report by Gwilym Croucher and Liz Baré (both Uni Melbourne) has lifted the lid on use of casuals in Australia’s university sector. Analysing data from multiple sources and universities, they found that casuals account for less than one third of all hours of teaching and just a quarter of their time is spent on lecturing or marking.
While published stats turn people into EFTS, actual headcount numbers exists if one knows where to look. Croucher and Baré do, using two datasets to provide insight into the proportion of teaching and research done by casual academics and the numbers who work long hours over many years.
One source is stats for staff by employment contract, teaching 21,780 subjects at 12 universities across the country that enrolled nearly a third of students in 2022. The other is an anonymised sample of payroll records at five universities, of 2.3m academic casuals hours in 2021.
Croucher and Baré’s work will encourage questions about the oft-claimed widespread casualisation of teaching. Hours paid for lecturing by casuals represent a small proportion of the total time allocation, they find.
This has to be a resource that will support all sorts of statistically-informed studies; but for now they address two major issues;
How much of teaching is done by casuals
Just on 25% in all units of study, but less than a third of all hours. But there are differences by Fields of Education, with four leading: Education (30% of paid hours), Bized (29%), and (mostly) HASS plus law as well as IT (27%).
The work they do
A bunch of other academic tasks ( including meetings, training, course coordination and related administration) take up 33% of their time; tutoring (31%), marking (21%). Lecturing is but 4%.
Payroll codes for three of the universities show the spread of teaching tasks across disciplines. Lectures soaked up most time for bized, where casuals worked 134 hours on 44 hour-long lectures and education the least (14 paid hours).
Overall around half the academic casuals at the three were paid the equivalent of three full-time weeks in the year. Half the casuals were paid less than four FT days for marking. “The data raises questions about the claims around the widespread casualisation of lecturing, where hours paid for lecturing represent a small proportion of the total time allocation to lecturing,” Croucher and Baré suggest.
Length of a sentence to the precariat
Of the 14,000 casuals at the five universities in the main set, around two-thirds had worked for four years max. “This likely aligns with the fact that many academic casuals are enrolled in a higher degree,” they found.
However 15% had been employed for over a decade and most casual lecturers and tutors were employed for at least five years. Casuals paid for marking are more commonly doctoral students in strong science disciplines.
Takeaways
The authors place caveats on the stats and the conclusions supported and they do not dismiss the “permanent casual” problem. But overall, they suggest:
- 75 % of units of study are “likely to be majority taught by continuing or fixed-term academic staff”
- Lecturing, “the core work of teaching,” is done by continuing/fixed term staff
- Ex IT and bized, casuals mainly contribute to tutoring and marking
- That long-serving casuals working more hours cluster in HASS and bized, which “raises the question of whether there is something about how these disciplines are funded, structured or taught that results in the need for an experienced casual workforce.