In their own words

A number of NTEU members have given evidence to the Senate Inquiry into Job Security. Without exception, their testimonies provided moving and effective judgements of the casualisation of the Australian higher education system. Here are some of their statements.

Dr James Stratford

I began teaching at the University of Melbourne in 2000 as a 25 year old Masters student. By 2011, I had graduated with a PhD and two Masters degrees.

Over those first years I taught 9 subjects, published regularly, won grants and built a wide network of professional and institutional relationships both in Australia and abroad. In the 10 years since, I’ve taught an additional 33 subjects in two different areas. Over this time, the cancer of casualisation has set in and we have also seen the emergence of a generation of academics like me – long term casuals on whom the universities rely. This reliance is born out by the sheer volume of work done. Last year for example, though casual, I was employed for an average of 39 hours a week spread across a 48 week year. The problem is that as a casual tutor there are only about 40 weeks at most, so the average was closer to 47.5 hours per week.

This just underscores the fact that the University is utterly reliant on casuals, men and women like me – seasoned professionals, masters of our craft and yet given the same recognition and rewards as those who are just starting their careers.

This really challenges the myth that casual work is short term, and done by young, highly mobile individuals who don’t bear significant responsibilities, it’s just a few hours here and there - that casuals like being casual.

This myth may have once reflected reality but no longer. Rather than a short term period in which one might prove their merit, long term sequences of casual contracts have become a structural condition for the majority of workers.

Work is typically only assured for one semester at a time, creating chronic instability that affects all aspects of personal and professional life. Often, it’s only a week or so before semester that employment is confirmed. One year I was actually asked to coordinate and lecture on a week-by-week subject.

At the end of the academic year I face 3 months without work, at a cost of approximately $13,000 after tax. This is true even under the new periodic contracts. In effect, I pay for a European holiday without leaving home. And that home can be very hard to secure as a casual employee. I don’t mean buying a home – this is a remote fantasy as a casual worker. Even rental housing is hard to secure, further undermining the basic conditions needed to provide for my son and I.

One of the most serious effects is that on mental health and wellbeing. Chronic insecurity breeds chronic anxiety. This constant insecurity also fosters a culture of fear. Indeed I was afraid to speak here today, especially knowing that senior management would be present – I was afraid that by speaking up I might be seen as a trouble maker. Given the precarious nature of our employment, I and I would say most of my colleagues, have always been afraid to speak up, afraid to complain about our situation. This fear, as subtle as it is, is utterly corrosive to the quality of life, just as it is to the very heart of the University itself.

And the gross power balance underscores one of the most harmful effects of this casualised system. It creates a two-tiered system, where casual staff aren’t even really acknowledged as proper staff, because no matter how much expertise one has, no matter how many years of service one has given, a casual is just a casual.

After 21 years as a casual you’ll understand my jubilation when late last year I was offered a permanent full time teaching role. The offer came out of the blue, so to speak. I joked with my manager that finally my mother could stop asking when I was going to be converted to permanent. It was one of the happiest days of my life.

My son and I discussed what this meant for us. It meant that we could finally get our own home, that we could plan for holidays. We could live with a degree of security that we’ve never had. It was life-changing. Five days later I received a second phone call telling me the offer was off the table. It’s difficult to overemphasise how crushing this was. It was utterly humiliating.

Like many casual academics I have accepted these costs because I love what I do and it’s my passion for teaching and the subjects I teach that makes me very good at what I do. The universities are as reliant on this, on the commitment that academics like me bring, and it’s this commitment that they continue to find new ways to exploit year after year. ◆

A week after he gave this statement , James was provided with a full reinstatement of his original contract, backdated to 1 Jan 2022. He had been a casual employee since 2000.

Paul Morris

Paul Morris

I have been working for the University of Newcastle on a casual contract since 2004. I was studying between 2004 and 2008. Since 2008 I have been a casual, non- continuous academic and this has been my professional and financial mainstay.

It's a mainstay that's founded on a very precarious basis, being open to the vicissitudes of often questionable management practices, practices that see me as a cost rather than an asset. In such a relational profession as teaching, which I see as a calling, this treatment not only devalues staff but disrespects and undermines the future of each of the students that we mentor.

Precarity at work pervades personal life and impedes the ability to take opportunities such as marriage, family and, increasingly, retirement planning. It creates anxiety, which persists as a matter of course in my everyday life and intensifies each Christmas, when I again become unemployed, leaving me wondering whether I'll be picked up again in three months time and contemplating my ability to cope in the meantime.

This is but one example of management's choice of shifting burden onto others, proclaiming that in doing so the reduced operating costs will bring a better future to the management.

This is a proclamation that simply never becomes realised, regardless of the amount of change that occurs, change that adds to already existing anxiety. I say this with two decades of experience of so-called change management.

I have seen change in the workplace pit employee against employee in an increasingly competitive environment as opposed to the collegiate environment that academia has traditionally been founded upon. In the main, the spoils go to the organisation rather than the employees, and very rarely to our students. C

hange has ensured a race to the bottom for all except those making the decisions, who invariably move on to better things. The future I hope for is one in which employees are recognised and respected for who they are, as people first and foremost.

I hope for real recognition of the contributions we make as productive members of our organisation, and I hope that the indifference and disaffection that insecure work often engenders within the workplace becomes a memory for the betterment of ourselves and those for whom we work – our students, who after all are our future leaders in business, the wider community and politics. Thank you. ◆

Dr Liz Adamczyk

Dr Liz Adamczyk

I'll quickly give a brief intro to build on what Paul [Morris] said. We're appearing here today to humanise what we know of the numbers and the stats, to make sure that there's a face that is put to this problem.

Part of the reason that we see a little bit of strength in appearing together is that we are married.

We have lived precarity through both of our employment in the university sector and through Paul's employment in the private higher education sector and in the TAFE sector.

We have lived this for the last 10 years together, and Paul has lived it for two decades.

I think you can see in Paul's testimony the way that we embody and internalise the emotional costs of these things. We know all the really visible, monetised costs like the wage theft and underpayment that goes on, where we're often misallocated, misclassified or underpaid for the things that we do, which then reflects in the classroom, as Paul noted.

It's a systematised set of logics that is marginalising and excluding casual staff, but it comes with an emotional cost as well. For some, it erodes a sense of self. I've seen this in my work as a casual rep.

I get a lot of really disturbing emails about how people internalise this sense of shame and guilt at not hitting the social norms, conventions and progressions by which we mark ourselves in life, in society – career, family and all of those kinds of things. Also really perturbing is the way that this has come to infiltrate the culture of how staff are relating to each other – not just how casual staff are relating to each other but also how ongoing staff are relating to casual staff and to each other.

You can see this sense of shame sometimes, when people say they feel lucky to have a full-time job or that casual staff should feel lucky to be given the work that they're given. This just should not exist. We're here to build, hopefully, for a broad scale overhaul, where permanency is the norm and not the exception. ◆

Nick Robinson

Nick Robinson

I started teaching sessionally in 2016. At first, I loved teaching. I was being paid to share my passion for writing, and thinking and it felt like the greatest privilege.

That my students identified in me the possibility of the intellectual world, and the esteem of the institution I taught in, was incredibly gratifying and motivating.

I learned a lot in those first years from my long-time sessional colleagues, who took me under their wing. The majority of them were in their 40s–60s. They held doctorate degrees, they were accomplished poets, essayists and novelists in their own right. And, I knew many of them by reputation, and through their writing.

As the semester went on, I could see the fear building amongst my colleagues, who didn’t know whether they would get another contract next semester – whether they would be able to keep food on the table or pay their rent. As a PhD student I had an office I could use for consults, but my senior colleagues had to improvise space in campus cafes to perform unpaid student consultations. They prepared their classes in the library, alongside the students who would take them. Or, sometimes in their cars.

From the quality of the mentorship they offered me, I knew they commanded respect in their classrooms – but, outside of class, they moved through campus each day, with nowhere to put their bags, or eat their lunches – an unclaimed, uncounted workforce – often, teaching weeks at a time without a contract. In reality, casuals make up over 60% of the work done at the University of Melbourne. Yet, I was pretty sure, they had all done something wrong to still be teaching sessionally after so many years. To be in such a degrading position. I was certain that it would be different for me – that I was smarter, and more savvy.

I had received the only PhD scholarship that year. I had been awarded one of the highest marks anyone had ever received in the program for my minor thesis. I had work forthcoming in the countries’ best journals. And, I believed I was on an unofficial tenure track – that’s how people spoke to me. Yes, as a tutor, I was being paid on a piece rate system for marking, and teaching preparation. Yes, for every hour I was paid I was doing twice as much work, sometimes three times that amount. But, my superiors told me I would become more efficient with time, and in a few years I would make those hours back.

I am here giving evidence at this Senate Inquiry, because, after six years of teaching at Melbourne University I can tell you I never got any faster at marking, I only got better at it – that is, I learned to give more acute feedback, to meet the students at the register of their own thinking. I’m no faster at preparing for classes I’ve taught four, or five times – but my approach to teaching those classes has matured. Now, that I’m weeks away from submitting my PhD, with nothing resembling a believable path to secure employment, I see now that I fell prey to the collective dream of exceptionalism which runs rampant at the University of Melbourne. It is a dream that has allowed a multi-billion dollar institution to let an entire generation of academics blame themselves for its failure to provide dignified, permanent work.

Following changes to the Fair Work Act last year, the University of Melbourne emailed thousands of casual staff informing them they were not eligible for conversion into secure academic employment. Less than 1% of casuals qualified. How is it that people who work five days a week, for the same university for 20 years, do not qualify for the dignity and stability of ongoing employment?

Academic casuals are not interns, they are not gig workers. They write courses from scratch that they teach sometimes for years on end, supervise thesis degrees, conduct research. Many of us will mentor students from first year to the completion of their degrees, and into PhD programs. I teach alongside casuals who taught me over 10 years ago – and now I organise with them through the Union. We fought tooth and nail, as union members, to have the incredible extent of our underpayment remediated, and our commitment, and service acknowledged. The University will claim they have paid their debts, that they’re investing in new processes of payment and record keeping to correct a series of innocent administrative errors. That they’re making moves to decasualise.

What our campaign to end wage theft at the University of Melbourne exposed was that the exploitation of casual contracts has invisibilised the true cost of running Australia’s leading universities. But, rather than acknowledging these costs as necessary to funding quality education, we have seen further measures implemented to erode our conditions. We have seen our employer scrap the right to the PhD rate – an industry standard, which equals almost a $10 an hour pay cut for tutors with PhDs. How is it that a University which claims to be the best in the country, is no longer honouring the qualifications of its teachers?

Meanwhile, we are seeing the wholesale roll out of 2 year fixed term teaching-only contracts, billed as an improvement in job security. These so called conversions, repurpose the broken piece rate system we fought against as the basis of their workload model. A new lecture must be researched, and written in three hours. This is impossible.

My converted colleagues, by and large, tell me they have never been paid less or worked harder. The University of Melbourne has become dangerously reliant on the wholesale exploitation of casual labour. It’s an addiction it can’t kick. But, the future of higher education depends on a workforce that have the security to do the research and teaching and mentoring that will foster the growth of a vibrant sector. Yet, the institution as it presently exists, works against these goals, by entrenching a second-tier of teaching-only staff whose commitment to their students must come at great personal expense. A better university is one that not only readies students for professional life, but treats all its staff with respect, security and dignity. ◆

Dr Chloe Killen

Dr Chloe Killen

Working as a casual academic and a research assistant has been my professional and financial mainstay since I first started in a sessional capacity at the University of Newcastle in 2007. Fourteen years later, post PhD and extensive work experience, I am still precariously employed.

What this means for me is a constant feeling that I can never say no to any opportunity because I don't know what work I will or will not have in the future.

This constant stress and pressure affects every aspect of my life, from having to squirrel away money every year to cover the three months of unemployment I face from November to February, to continually having to advocate to be paid appropriately for the work that I do, to the never-ending fear and worry that I may not have work next month, next semester, next year.

It impacts my ability to plan for my family and my health, to buy a house and to plan for retirement, among other things. This year alone, I have had five research-related short-term contracts; taught for two semesters; written and presented my research in academic conferences and journals; applied for and been awarded several grants; worked as a freelance grant writer; and managed a unique co-retail store in the Newcastle CBD, as well as raising a rambunctious five-yearold. So I might be employed as a casual, but the duties that I carry out and the commitment that I have to this job are anything but casual.

There is an academic underclass and, although sessional staff provide a valuable resource through the maintenance of excellent teaching, research and industry connection, we're not often given much consideration beyond our hourly contracted work.

For instance, we cannot supervise HDR students who specifically request us; we do not get invited to meetings that impact our teaching and our ability to do our jobs; we are not included in training or professional development opportunities related to our teaching or research; we've been told we cannot participate in staff exhibitions of work; and we cannot apply for grants or funding as chief investigators or, in my case, as a named investigator on my own research projects.

This is career theft. We have not even been invited to the end-of-year staff parties, despite being integral team members for the entirety of the year and often for many years before that.

In this two-tiered workforce, casual academic staff are marginalised and structurally excluded, and there are significant internalised costs that we, and ultimately our students, are forced to bear. So something needs to change. ◆

Dr Sharon Cooper

Dr Sharon Cooper

I have a Bachelor, Masters and PhD in Education. I've been working and teaching at the University of Newcastle for 20 years as a research assistant, a casual academic, a full-time academic and now again as a casual academic.

I choose to work as a casual academic. I am not seeking conversion despite being employed almost continuously for 5½ years to do teaching and curriculum design. My experiences as a full-time academic were not at all positive.

Many of my casual colleagues would not talk up for fear of losing work. I want to give voice to casual academics without whom core university business would not get done, even as we know we're exploited. I don't just teach at university; I design and manage the delivery of the units as the unit coordinator.

But I'm unable to claim for all the time I spend doing this core business of a unit coordinator. I'm provided with an elevated teaching rate as compensation for the non-teaching administrative duties, but this is exactly the same rate I would get for just having a PhD, without those extra duties.

My professional identity is tied up in education as a discipline. I cannot bring myself to limit the quality of my work to fit in with the limitations of my contracts, and that is why I work more hours than I get paid. The reclassification of some tutorials as workshops is also something that has decreased my pay over the last three years.

This semester, for example, over 12 weeks alone, I lost almost $3,000 because of this reclassification. This has been going on for three years for me.

I would like to see a revision of unit-coordination pay-rate classification that recognises both expertise and workload. I would like to work at a university where students and their learning needs are valued enough to pay fairly for it.

And I'd like to work at a university where my expertise is recognised not by a thank you but through actual benefit to me. ◆