Just say No. An impossible task for a precariously employed woman

Ellyse Fenton, University of Queensland

Teaching is difficult and demanding work. Combining intellectual, administrative, and caring labour, it is gendered in complex ways. It is also undervalued, a problem affecting teachers everywhere but taking particularly pernicious form in higher education.

I have been teaching in universities, on and off, for thirteen years. All of my teaching has been casualised. I have had only limited control over what and how I teach, shifted from course to course as a more or less permanent resource to fill ‘temporary’ gaps in teaching schedules. My labour has been paid using highly exploitative piece rates that do not reflect the amount of time it takes to do the work, and access to professional development and administrative support is highly attenuated for precarious workers, some of whom do not even have access to a desk.

When COVID-19 hit, I was coordinating a compulsory first-year undergraduate course. The majority of my 230-student cohort were in their first semester at university and, understandably, needed considerable support to make the transition to online learning.

They needed help learning new technologies. They needed clear and regular communication about the changes happening in the course. They needed access to additional learning resources when internet connections proved too unstable to support reliance on video conferencing technology.

Perhaps more than anything else, they needed human contact – careful and caring responses to their queries and concerns, to be treated as people whose perspectives and experiences mattered to the institution to which they were paying such exorbitant fees.

Like precarious workers across the sector, I knew I would never be paid for the work I did to shepherd my students through this very challenging semester. Course design and development work is never considered required of casualised teachers, despite the fact that many courses are taught exclusively by precarious staff for years on end.

The labour of care is devalued at the best of times, considered the purview of the naively dedicated few who sacrifice research careers to toil in what philosopher Robin Zheng refers to as ‘academic housework’ 1 – the invisible supportive labour that keeps

students engaged, colleagues connected, and the whole institution running smoothly.

Discussing the additional work generated by the pandemic with a sympathetic male colleague, he said to me, ‘You just have to learn to say no.’ He was trying to help, but his comment assumes an agency that simply is not available to a worker like me – to ‘just say no’ as a precariously employed woman is a far riskier endeavour than to do so from a position of secure employment and masculine privilege, a position in which no one expects you to do the care work, anyway.

More than this, his comment makes exploitation an individual problem, a deficiency of workers themselves – of timidity, credulity, generosity – instead of seeing it for what it is: the structural inevitability of a forprofit educational system.

The pandemic has reinforced the extent to which universities rely on the devalued labour of casualised workers, a system in which gender and precarity intersect to sustain exploitation. The only way to challenge this system is to build the solidarity necessary for all of us, collectively, to say no.

Dr Ellyse Fenton has been a casual academic at the University of Queensland for thirteen years. She is the casual staff representative on the UQ Branch Committee, convenor of the UQ Casuals Caucus, and a member of the NTEU National Tertiary Casuals Committee.

1. Zheng, R. (2018). ‘Precarity is a Feminist Issue: Gender and Contingent Labor in the Academy’. Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy 33(2): 235-255. Image: STIL/Unsplash