Connect 13 02 by NTEU

THE MAGAZINE FOR AUSTRALIAN CASUAL & SESSIONAL TERTIARY EDUCATION STAFF

onnect volume 13 number 2

semester 2 sept 2020

WE’RE EXPOSING WAGE THEFT IN UNI’S see inside

Wage theft rampant in higher education COVID-19: The casual pandemic We are Zoomed! Parenting in lockdown

Building an inclusive post-Covid sector The struggle to save & remake public higher ed Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism

FREE ONLINE AT UNICASUAL.ORG.AU

In this issue 1

Precarity increases threat of wage theft Alison Barnes, NTEU National President

NTCC addresses crisis of casualisation Tricia Daly, NTCC Chair

3 Cover image: Piggy bank in jail. Lightwise/123rf

Secure research and teaching funding Romana-Rea Begicevic, CAPA President

Wage theft is running rampart in higher education Michael Evans, National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

6 7

NTEU surveys staff on wage theft Union win! $6m in casual wage theft uncovered at UniMelb Sarah Roberts, Assistant Secretary, Victorian Division

Union takes on RMIT over casual wage cuts Karen Douglas, RMIT University

As casuals, we are vulnerable to wage theft exploitation Dr Andrew Broertjes, University of Western Australia

Delegate profile: Siobhan Irving

10 COVID-19: The casual pandemic Tricia Daly, Macquarie University

13 We are Zoomed! A Parent, Any University

14 Celebrating casual activism in Qld universities Mike Oliver, Senior State Organiser, Queensland Division

16 Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism before it undermines us Victoria Fielding, University of South Australia & Kent Getsinger, University of Adelaide

18 Building an inclusive post-COVID higher education sector Dr Audrey Statham, Deakin University

21 Delegate profile: Izrin Ariff 22 Casual not so casual Claire Gaskin, Deakin University

25 The struggle to save & remake public higher education Laura Czerniewicz, University of Cape Town, South Africa

NATIONAL TERTIARY

CASUALS COMMITTEE

Read online at www.unicasual.org.au Editor: Alison Barnes Production: Paul Clifton Editorial Assistance: Anastasia Kotaidis

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

NTEU National Office PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 phone 03 9254 1910 email national@nteu.org.au The views expressed in this publication are those of the individual authors, and not necessarily the official views of NTEU. In accordance with NTEU policy to reduce our impact on the natural environment, this magazine is printed on 100% recycled paper: produced from 65% postconsumer waste and 35% pre-consumer waste.

Alison Barnes NTEU National President

Precarity increases threat of wage theft The crisis in higher education during the COVID-19 pandemic has helped bring two scandalous and intertwined aspects of our sector out into the open – the level of insecure employment and the widespread management practice of wage theft. As detailed on p. 4 of this issue of Connect, at least 10 Australian universities are either repaying millions of dollars to staff who have had their wages stolen, or are under investigation for wage theft breaches. NTEU has consistently stated that the sector’s chronic reliance on casual and fixed-term employment creates the ideal environment for exploitation. The power imbalance in the relationship between employer and employee lends itself to casual and fixed-term staff being squeezed by university management in order to reduce costs and maximise profits. The campaigning and organising by NTEU members against wage theft has involved pushing universities to undertake audits, lodging collective disputes, industrial enforcement, and surveying our casual members in August – see the results detailed on p. 6. The survey demonstrates that exploitation remains rife amongst casual staff, and widespread across the sector.

casual academic staff to ongoing positions even though a number of Enterprise Agreements contain these provisions. This lies solely at the feet of employers who fight tooth and nail to ensure that workers remain employed casually. Over 78% of casual academic staff who responded to the survey said that they are not paid for all the hours of marking assignments out of class time; nearly 40% of respondents said that their tutorials are described as something else so they can be paid less than the full rate. Most respondents said that there are a range of tasks and activities that their employer requires them to do, for which they don’t get paid. It is these and other injustices that we are campaigning to fix. As we all know, the level of insecure employment in higher education has a lot to do with the historical shortfalls in government funding and the reliance on

The survey demonstrates that exploitation remains rife amongst casual staff, and widespread across the sector.

Wage theft is common not only in universities. Our investigations into private higher education providers, where almost every employee is employed insecurely, demonstrates that like our universities, wage theft is the business model of choice for employers. Some of the worst practices evident in the survey include 44% of casually employed professional staff having been employed for more than three years, the majority of those for more than five years, and many of those employed for 10 to 15 years – as casual employees. If the work is ongoing and regular, then why haven’t these staff been converted to ongoing positions? Probably because 93% of respondents said that they either don’t have any rights to apply for conversion, or have never been advised by their employer, about any rights to apply for conversion to non-casual employment. Across the sector there have been limited conversions by

international student income to prop up the system. With the international student income ‘tap’ effectively turned off due to COVID-19, and the Federal Government ignoring the sector’s crisis by denying access to JobKeeper or any meaningful rescue package, we are now seeing significant job losses at many universities. The Federal Government has abandoned universities and incentivised university management to act against their workforce. University managements have for many years actively fought against efforts to decasualise their workforces, leaving workers across the sector facing chronic and harmful uncertainty. It is only by continuing to stand together, by building our delegate structures, growing our membership and our grassroots strength that we can make advances toward more secure jobs and use the opportunities presented to us to force management to change.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Tricia Daly Chair, National Tertiary Casuals Committee

NTCC addresses crisis of casualisation

NATIONAL TERTIARY

CASUALS COMMITTEE

As a collective, we include a diverse range of casual representatives, organisers, strategists, policy makers and activists. Our fundamental aim is to ensure casuals have a voice, are visible and actively participate within the NTEU. We draw on casual work experiences to inform National, Division and Branch campaigns. Our intention is to educate the public, influence the political sphere, and to change current policy on workplace casualisation.

Current NTCC actions

NTCC resourcing and funding

We are in the process of collecting empirical data on budgets, and casual staff numbers. This data will demonstrate to the Government the grave situation university casuals are currently experiencing.

Recently, the NTCC identified critical resource areas to empower casual members in higher education:

We are calling on Vice-Chancellors to speak out against the Morrison Government’s current dismantling of quality higher education in Australia.

SEE 2

We put forward concrete and realistic demands to challenge the priorities of university management. In a recent survey of casuals, the following demands ranked highest on the list of deeply and widely felt concerns: • Ongoing access to libraries to prepare course material and conduct research. • Advance notice of work. • Inclusion in departmental decision making. • Conversion to secure teaching positions.

• Increasing empirical data, stories and research on casuals. • Inclusion of casual surveys and a casual perspective in NTEU surveys. NTEU support in these areas will enable the NTCC to retain new casual members, train and organise casuals, and coordinate national casual campaigns and collective actions.

The NTCC moving forward The NTEU three-month suspension on fees for new casual members, along with the organising strength of the NTCC have seen a significant increase in new casual members.

To build power, the NTCC encourage casual members to reach out to non-member casuals to join the NTEU.

The NTCC provides a national voice to campaigns against casualisation in higher education. We are working alongside the NTEU to build knowledge, provide training and organise casuals for campaigns focusing on casual issues. To build power, the NTCC encourages casual members to reach out to nonmember casuals to join the NTEU. We educate and organise colleagues, family, friends and the wider public on the need to protect and defend quality education, and to highlight the exploitative working conditions of casuals.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

• Creating an NTCC webpage on the NTEU website for information sharing, journal articles, news media, online sites etc.

At the time of writing, over 2000 new casual members had joined the Union. Our future casual campaigns will continue to incorporate the following key areas: a strategy, a decision-making structure and a participatory division of labour. The NTCC’s core asset is our casual members’ commitment to more equitable and just working conditions, and the proper funding of the Australian higher education sector. Find out more about the NTCC at www.unicasual.org.au/ntcc

By Romana-Rea Begicevic CAPA President

Secure research and teaching funding Imagine being a smart graduate, only a few years out from completing a PhD, building a career as a research leader, testing hypotheses, developing new treatment models, taking on your own PhD students? Doing what the system demands, you would devote months to writing applications for funding, to pay for the research and your own salary. Only to have your application rejected time after time. Not for a lack of quality or innovation, but simply because there are not enough grants or fellowships available from the Government at this level. For the lucky few who are successful, government fellowships only cover around 60% of the salary costs. Research institutes and universities are expected to plug this funding hole. Except, due to government funding cuts, universities have become reliant on highly volatile sources of funding such as philanthropy, fundraising, or returns from investments and commercial revenue. All of which have fallen in recent months and will not recover for a while to come, when the true economic impact of the pandemic takes hold. The economic downturn from COVID-19 has only made an already precarious situation for researchers much worse and we have managed, until now.

The negative impacts of these reduced sources of revenue will disproportionately harm the next generation of research leaders, particularly recent graduates and women.

Revenue from international students makes up a large proportion of enrolments and their fees made up over 26% of university income last year. While COVID-19 is slowing across Australia, its impact on tertiary education is intensifying. There will be a need to find different ways of operating with a loss of income stream on this scale. With overseas travel restrictions lasting months even into next year – how will universities be adequately funded? The sector and nation will be permanently transformed. But it is all the more painful because universities have been relying on the surplus from international students’ higher fees to subsidise vital research. The negative impacts of these reduced sources of revenue will disproportionately harm the next generation of research leaders, particularly recent graduates and women. We cannot afford to allow this economic downturn to damage our research sector, to the point of no return. It is no wonder that the morale among our best and brightest has never been lower. What message are we sending out to aspiring researchers such as Masters students, undergraduates and high-school students of today? This pandemic has placed a spotlight on how the Australian university funding system is broken and we now have a golden opportunity to rebuild it into one that works.

Current levels of Federal Government funding are insufficient to support the teaching and research conducted in Australian universities. This results in universities increasing their reliance on alternative sources of funding which compromise their purpose as fostering knowledge and promoting education for public good. The purpose of publicly funded research is to develop new knowledge, innovation and technology to benefit national interests. CAPA welcomes the recent establishment by the Minister for Education, Dan Tehan, of the two working groups for Research Sustainability and the National Priorities and Linkage Fund, to revamp the way in which research is funded. However, the Government reduced research funding by $328.5 million over the course of three years, as announced in the December 2018 MidYear Economic and Fiscal Outlook (MYEFO). In addition to that, Minister Tehan recently announced that student contributions for Humanities, Commerce and Law degrees would increase – further reducing government contributions to universities. We truly hope that a more favourable model for teaching and research funding will come out of this chaos, and therefore strongly recommend that university teaching and research be properly funded, so these important pillars of our community are not compromised but thrive instead. Moreover, this does not come at a long-term cost to the Australian taxpayer. Research conducted by Australian universities provides demonstrable economic benefits. For every $1 invested in higher education research, $5 is returned to Australia’s GDP. The majority of research in Australia is conducted at our world-class universities. We therefore argue that a decline in public investment in research puts the Australian economy at risk. Importantly, CAPA strongly warns that should universities become funded properly, the unacceptable practice of ‘wage theft’ and over casualisation of the academic workforce must not be allowed to continue.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Wage theft

is running rampart in higher education

Image: Lightwise/123rf

As if the COVID-19 crisis isn’t causing enough grief for insecure employees, investigations by the ABC and NTEU have revealed at least ten Australian universities are in the spotlight for various forms of wage theft involving casual and fixed-term staff.

Michael Evans National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

®®® Wage theft is running rampart in higher education The University of Melbourne, Macquarie University and the University of Sydney are repaying millions of dollars to hundreds of employees after errors were identified involving the incorrect classification of types of work and unrealistic timeframes for marking students’ work. The University of NSW is conducting a wage theft audit after an NTEU survey of casual academic staff revealed concerns regarding the payment of wages. Disputes over underpayments are also occurring at the University of Queensland, UTS and Murdoch University, while RMIT University was recently taken to the Fair Work Commission (FWC) by NTEU over new reduced marking rates. UWA engaged external auditors after allegations of underpayments. NTEU National President Dr Alison Barnes said that ‘the key driver of wage theft is casual and insecure employment, which is absolutely rife at Australian universities, and creates a fertile environment for exploitation. ‘Wage theft has terrible consequences. It deprives modestly paid casual workers of the income to pay bills, plan for their future or take a basic holiday. We know of cases where members have lost up to half the income they are entitled to.

What is ‘wage theft’? ‘Wage theft’ occurs when employers either irregularly or systematically under pay staff. In higher education it happens in various ways – failure to pay for the work required, underpaying the required rate for the work done, under-classifying work arbitrarily, and in the private providers, using sham contracting – classifying workers as contractors responsible for their own leave, superannuation, and workers compensation, rather than as genuine employees, and paying them at ‘contract’ rates. Almost everyone affected by wage theft is insecurely employed. Casual or fixed-term employment are almost pre-conditions for wage theft. NTEU investigations of some private higher education providers indicated that wage theft was practically a business model to suppress wage costs and drive up profits.

Wage theft has terrible consequences... We know of cases where members have lost up to half the income they are entitled to.

‘This is widespread in our sector. We need tougher penalties for those who steal from their workers, including criminal penalties. ‘Unions need far better access to records including for former employees and nonmembers. And we need the right to inspect those records quickly, without having to wait 24 hours. ‘Australian universities should also be compelled to report accurate figures on casual and limited contract employment. This would provide a much clearer picture of which university employees are likely to be exploited.’ These revelations in public universities follow the NTEU uncovering millions of dollars’ worth of wage theft from employees at private higher education providers over the last two years.

Senate inquiry Following widespread instances of wage theft in many sectors of the economy, a Senate inquiry called for submissions in March and held hearings in April. The committee was originally to report back to the Senate by the last sitting day in June 2020, but because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this has been extended to June 2021. The NTEU submission’s recommendations to the inquiry included two specific changes in higher education that would go some way towards identifying and dealing with wage theft. These are: • Requiring universities to accurately report the actual numbers of casual staff they employ, and the actual functions performed. Only Victorian universities are currently required by State legislation to

include this information in their annual reports. • That all higher education providers who receive funding from the Federal Government (including FEE-HELP income) can demonstrate historical and ongoing compliance with core labour standards including the correct rates of pay. NTEU is following up with individual and groups of members who may have a claim for compensation which the Union will take up with the relevant universities. Dr Barnes said that NTEU has already recovered millions in lost wages for members and is now preparing fresh legal campaigns. ‘We do not believe wage theft is confined to the ten universities that have admitted to it. If a quarter of the sector now admits to underpayment you can be sure the problem goes a lot further. ‘We would’ve liked to have seen the vice chancellors appear before the Senate inquiry and explain their employment practices,’ Dr Barnes said. ‘But more importantly we are pushing to flip the proportion of insecure employment in universities on its head. Currently, aroundseven in ten university employees are insecurely employed. This is scandalously high. Insecure employment should be fleeting and rare. Unfortunately the opposite is true.’ NTEU submission to the Senate inquiry: www.nteu.org.au/wagetheft

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

NTEU surveys staff on wage theft

Michael Evans National Organiser (Media & Engagement)

As part of the ongoing campaign for wage justice, NTEU surveyed casually employed members in August. The results, while unsurprising, indicate huge problems still with casual employment in the sector. Over 2,000 people responded to the survey, and while the majority of those are academic staff (81.9%), over 400 professional staff employed casually answered the survey.

Responses from casual academic staff are consistent with the issues currently being confronted at the ten plus universities where wage theft investigations have occurred.

The key points of the responses from both professional and academic staff are outlined below.

Professional Staff

44%

Have been employed on a casual basis for more than 3 years

93%

Have never been advised by their employer about any rights to convert to non-casual employment

Don’t know whether the classification level at which being paid is correct

48.5%

The majority of these were employed on a casual basis for more than 5 years, and there are significant numbers of people employed casually for more than 10 years.

Receive 3 hr pay each time work less than 3 hr

Work on weekends or public holidays and receive a higher rate of pay for this work

7.6%

11.9%

34.5%

Only get paid for the actual time worked if work less than 3 hr

30.8%

Work on weekends or public holidays and do not receive a higher rate of pay

Many casual professional staff are entitled to a minimum 3 hours pay if the shift is less than 3 hours.

Academic Staff

78.4%

Were not paid for all hours of marking outside of class time

70.3%

Those not paid for marking outside of class time who are paid according to a formula*

*Such as a certain number of words per hour, but this underestimates how long the marking actually takes.

Tasks required to do for which you don’t get paid:

52.8%

Administration

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39.1%

Tutorials are described as other things‡ so that they are paid less than the full rate

‡ Such as ‘information sessions’, ‘seminars’, ‘practice classes’, ‘workshops’.

41.4% Planning,

curriculum, school meetings

21.4%

Course coordination

Union win!

$6m in casual wage theft uncovered at UniMelb

Sarah Roberts Assistant Secretary, Victorian Division

In late 2018, NTEU became aware of instances of underpayment of casual academic staff in the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Melbourne. The Faculty had promoted information on its website failing to disclose that all casual marking was required to be paid separately, and had been required to pay for it separately since 2013. The Union commenced a formal dispute with the University around this, claiming that casual academics were accordingly underpaid thousands as they had not been paid for much of the marking they had performed – going back years. At that time, the University resisted the Union’s claim, which led the Union to become further concerned about instances of casual wage theft more broadly across the University. Organising staff and activists built a casuals network of members across the University, meeting regularly at School and University level to uncover and discuss further instances of wage theft.

Ultimately the Union’s activity became so annoying that the University called the NTEU into dispute Through this process wage theft in the Faculties of Arts, Mathematics and Statistics, and Fine Arts and Music were uncovered. In Arts, casuals were being paid a ‘piece rate’ for their marking, whereby instead of being paid by the hour as required by the Collective Agreement, they were being paid an hour’s pay for each 4000 words marked, which casuals agreed was a significant underquote of the time actually taken to mark assignments. In Maths and Stats, tutorials had been renamed as ‘practice classes’, thereby avoiding paying the casual academics teaching those classes 3 hours’ pay, as required for a tutorial. This was in breach of the UniMelb Agreement provision which described tutorials as a secondary form of educational delivery – which the ‘practice classes’ certainly were. Due to this practice casuals were being underpaid by one hour’s pay for each tutorial delivered – going back to 2009. Then, in early 2019, the Faculty of Arts announced it would no longer pay casual academic staff for attendance at lectures for the subjects they were delivering tutorials – but yet announced that attendance was

‘voluntary’ (i.e. deliberately unpaid). This outraged casual staff. In the words of one casual staff member, ‘the University wants tutorials to be taught by staff who know less about the material taught in the lecture than the students.’ Angry members conducted a rally and occupied the Dean of Arts’ office, presenting him with a petition calling for payment for lecture attendance. The Union continued to act like an annoying buzzy mosquito, contacting Deans in each of the Faculties where wage theft had been uncovered, and calling for responses from management. Ultimately the Union’s activity became so annoying that the University called the NTEU into dispute – previously unheard of at the University of Melbourne. Two disputes meetings with management ensured. At the first meeting, 25 casual academic staff attended and told their stories to management about their experiences of wage theft. Many management misconceptions as to how work and non-payment was actually structured were corrected, and casuals were empowered by the process. At the second meeting, 22 casuals attended and again told their stories – leading to an immediate reversal of tutorial reclassification as ‘practice classes’ in Maths and Stats. This disputes process led to the acceptance on management’s part that illegal practices had been going on, and the establishment of a union-management working group to deal with all instances of casual underpayment. That working group had control over all communications sent to staff affected. So far over $99,000 has been paid to casual academics in Engineering. Other payments are being processed, and our estimation is that the total amount owed will be close to $6m. The Fair Work Ombudsman is also now investigating. The UniMelb experience is a great example of how we can win by organising and acting collectively to enforce our rights. In circumstances where members often feel intimidated by coming forward with their issues, for fear of losing their (insecure) work, collective action and power in numbers has been the antidote. Now on to the next win!

Karen Douglas NTEU Delegate, RMIT

Union takes on RMIT over casual wage cuts In February, casual teaching staff at the RMIT School of Management were advised our marking rates had been slashed by up to 50%. Via a cut to time allocations RMIT determined that 30 minutes was sufficient to read 2,500 words of students’ work, access turn-it-in, complete rubrics and provide written feedback. And then there is the preparation and follow up work and staff meetings that go unpaid. Seeking to discuss the issue, casual staff were told by management that we were valued but – for operational reasons, and because we’re casuals – management can make whatever decisions they like about our engagement or our involvement. This substantive cut to wages has wreaked havoc on low paid, vulnerable, insecure workers. Rather than diminish education experiences for students’ casuals have continued to provide high quality teaching but based in an exploitative employment model relied on by RMIT. But time’s up. We’re not prepared to tolerate such contemptuous behaviour by management and the matter has now progressed to the FWC.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

As casuals, we are vulnerable to wage theft exploitation

Dr Andrew Broertjes University of Western Australia

Image: Tobias Tullius/Unsplash

Since the submission of my thesis in late 2006, I have been working as a casual lecturer and tutor in history at the University of Western Australia (UWA). Despite high student evaluations and a number of teaching awards, I have not been provided with a permanent position. Friends who work in non-tertiary institutions often ask me why this is the case, as surely after a decade of consistent work and exemplary feedback, any work place would make me permanent? Something surely must be deeply wrong? I simply reply that for the tertiary sector in the 21st century my casual role is a feature, not a bug. I became an NTEU activist around 2015, when the Faculty of Arts began cutting major sequences such as Medieval and Early Modern Studies, European Studies, and Gender Studies. My involvement deepened the following year as senior management embarked on the Orwellian named ‘Renewal Project’, stripping over 350 staff of their jobs, and restructuring the nine pre-existing faculties into four ‘superfaculties’, against the strong objections of staff and students. I finally became a formal member of the UWA NTEU Branch Committee in 2018 as the Casual representative. The major campaign I’ve been involved with this past year has been around wage theft. The campaign at UWA began in 2013, then gained momentum last year as we discovered that casual underpayment was not only rife in certain parts of the University, but that administrative and human resources staff had been directed to underpay casuals. Senior management agreed to bring in an outside auditor to review all casual payments going back to 2013. The process has been slowed considerably by COVID-19, but will hopefully pick up again as these cases enter mainstream news outlets. Around 70% of teaching work at Australian universities is done by casual staff members. Like casuals in other industries, we are vulnerable to exploitation. The precariousness of our positions, a precariousness that lasts years, has a devastating toll mentally and socially. Many of us struggle to start families, buy homes, and take out loans because of our positions. To add stolen wages on top of our already vulnerable position is both a legal and a moral failing on the part of our universities.

Finally getting senior management to admit that there was a problem with wage theft/underpayment of casuals has been an important breakthrough. Trying to create a broader awareness among the campus community in general (particularly students) was a genuine challenge, and one that will be ongoing. Most students are under the belief that the lecturer standing in front of them has tenure and job security for life. Creating

...we discovered that casual underpayment was not only rife in certain parts of the University, but that administrative and human resources staff had been directed to underpay casuals. awareness that this image is a myth, whilst at the same time not undermining the authority of those teaching staff, is particularly difficult. Engaging with the wider UWA community beyond my discipline group/school has brought me greater insight into the challenges we face as a cohort, as well forming working relationships I would not have otherwise made.

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History is made by those who show up. Genuine change is made by those who show up. We are facing the twin threats of a once-in-a-century pandemic, and a government that is not only content to subject the tertiary sector to ‘benign neglect’, but is actively seeking to undermine it. These challenges require everyone to be in the arena, not merely sitting on the sidelines.

Delegate profile:

Siobhan Irving I’ve taught sociology and anthropology at Macquarie University on a casual basis for 6 years and my experiences entering academia shaped my expectations of work once I got here. My path was bumpy. Poverty and precarity has cast long shadows over much of my life and it is a small miracle that I managed to finish a PhD. My father didn’t finish high school, so even being admitted to the PhD felt like I had already achieved something great. Graduating last year felt like a dream. I have always felt privileged to be able to convene my own courses at university level and tutor in the courses of others. Teaching is a labour of love for me. After a few years, however, I started to critically reflect on my working conditions and this is why I joined the NTEU and quickly became both a delegate and an organiser of my fellow casual staff. Feeling fulfilled and fortunate is wonderful but sadly it does not pay the bills. When I began teaching, I wanted to model how I had been taught. I completed my undergraduate degree at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Small tutorial sizes meant that I had tutors who had time to mentor as well as teach. Reading their thoughtful comments on my work convinced me that I had something to say that was worth reading. After becoming a scholar myself, I wanted to do the same for others and ‘pay it forward’, and I did and still do. The only thing that has changed over the years is that now I have realised that my casual colleagues and I deserve to be paid in full for this labour as my mentors were. We have large class sizes and giving everyone the amount of attention they deserve requires far more hours of our time than we are paid for. Teaching is an honour, but it is still work.

This realisation, together with some conversations with fellow casual NTEU members, gave rise to the MQ Casual Collective, which is a network of both professional and academic casual staff at Macquarie University. Many casual staff are not NTEU members and some are quite critical of the NTEU for various reasons. The network, which at the moment operates primarily through a Facebook page and a mailing list, provides a COVID-19-friendly way to reach out to casual colleagues and understand more about their working conditions, their feelings about the NTEU and also to encourage them to join our union. A union is entirely defined by its members and the only way to improve casual representation within the NTEU is for casual staff to join. Casual staff are not a minority. If we stand together and invest in our union, we will shape not only the Union but also the universities we belong to. If we stand together, we can bring about change that will improve our working conditions and our students’ learning conditions. This isn’t a dream. It’s a reality in progress.

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Get more information about becoming an NTEU Delegate at delegates.nteu.org.au

Delegates are a vital part of the NTEU, maintaining visibility, supporting recruitment & building the strength of the Union. If you’re interested in becoming a Delegate in your work area, contact your Branch today.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

COVID-19

The casual pandemic

Image: skeeze/Pixabay

The global COVID-19 pandemic underscores the extent to which neoliberalism builds on the back of precarious labour. Australian universities and the Morrison Government continue to impose a neoliberal mode of domination based on the exploitation of casual labourers. This mode of domination results in overemployment, underemployment and unemployment for casual staff.

Tricia Daly Macquarie University

Connect ÂŽ Volume 13, no. 2 ÂŽ Semester 2, 2020

®®® COVID-19: The casual pandemic In the Australian higher education context, prior to COVID-19 ‘around 70 per cent of undergraduate teaching was done by insecure labour’. The percentage of precarious workers increases to 72.9% at Melbourne University and 72.9% at Monash University. NTEU National President Alison Barnes stresses that precarious work results in workers vulnerability to wage theft.

UWA’s Lara McKenzie has highlighted how precarity is a gendered phenomenon in Australian universities. Older women with grown children and single women are further disadvantaged in comparison to women with partners and small children. In other words, older women and young single women do more of the precarious labour.

Wage theft is ‘the unlawful underpayment of employee remuneration by employers’ and is ‘one of the most pressing public policy issues in Australia’. Wage theft includes underpayment for course co-ordination, writing courses, producing course content, tutorial preparation, marking, moderation, research, knowledge production, supporting students, and more recently the transition from face-toface to online teaching. Casual academics find it difficult to escape low-paid precarious work, have little chance of career progression with the ongoing expectation to voluntarily contribute to knowledge production within universities.

Australian universities use neoliberal policy as a mode of domination based on precarious work, resulting in hierarchical and dependent social relations. This form of domination produces two fundamentally unequal classes: the precariat and the permanent.

Image: Tim Gouw/Unsplash

Many casuals are forced to straddle Casuals working in more than one job multiple institutions and occupations just to survive are then taxed at a higher rate for to buy food, to pay rent having a second or third job. At the same or a mortgage and to cover other day-totime, many Vice-Chancellors are now paid day living or medical more than $1 million per year – significantly expenses. Casuals working in more than more than the Prime Minister. one job to survive are then taxed at a higher rate for having a second COVID-19 exacerbates and intensifies the or third job. At the same time, many Vicecasual experience of high levels of wage Chancellors are now paid more than $1 theft. A recent study of casuals at the million per year – significantly more than the University of Sydney found casuals are Prime Minister. systematically overworked and underpaid. Recent ABC investigations reveal wage theft at major universities: Melbourne, UNSW, Macquarie, UWA, Sydney, UQ, UTS, Murdoch, RMIT and Monash. Elysse Fenton, a former UQ course coordinator was quoted as saying: universities are ‘run on exploited labour’.

These two classes are also gendered with women historically more disadvantaged within contemporary universities. Casual experiences of these social relations are ignored, misunderstood, or invisible. This leaves casual women unable to speak about the daily realities of their employment experience. In the domestic sphere, ABC journalist Annabel Crabb claims women are also continuing to pick up more of the unpaid work. During COVID-19, women are experiencing increasing levels of domestic violence, and according to the Workplace Gender Equality Agency are doing more of the emotional labour, caring for children, the sick, and the elderly.

This study found, at least 46% of casuals are experiencing a ‘significant increase’ in unpaid work during COVID-19.

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, unmarried women and students, and those within LGBTQIA communities are also more vulnerable to bullying, sexual harassment, and sexual assault. A national report on sexual assault and sexual harassment at Australian universities found more than half of all students were sexually harassed, with 6.9% sexually assaulted. Overwhelmingly, men were the perpetrators of these forms of harm.

Women in comparison to their male counterparts are experiencing increasing levels of unpaid labour. In the media, this phenomenon is dubbed as the pink-collar recession.

Neoliberal casualisation enables wage theft and normalises a system of domination, bullying, sexual harassment and sexual assault by weakening labour laws and decreasing union power. continued overpage...

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®®® COVID-19: The casual pandemic

COVID-19: challenges for casuals COVID-19 creates additional challenges for casual workers. NTEU National Assistant Secretary, Gabe Gooding outlines how casual staff are increasingly vulnerable to work, health and safety issues: • Mental health: stress, anxiety, depression, insomnia, trauma. • Physical health: acute and chronic illness from long-term and extreme levels of stress. • Intergenerational health: lack of quality time with children/grandchildren and potential epigenetic changes. • Psychosocial hazards: bullying, work intensification, and poorly managed change. • Employment: job cuts and precarious work. • Theft: lower superannuation, knowledge and wage theft. • Gender issues: sexual harassment, sexual assault, systemic institutional silencing and lack of trauma-informed practice. • Increasing workloads. • Working or not working without notice • Lack of work clarity. • An inadequate workplace.

Government response The Australian Government is currently attempting to further burden students – the next generation of precarious workers – with their past failures to adequately fund the Australian education sector. Minister for Education, Dan Tehan’s proposal to legislate funding changes projects this failing model into the future, while further dismantling the quality of the higher education sector. These proposed policy changes shift the blame onto university students. If a student fails too many subjects, they are excluded from university and cannot receive HECS support from the Government.

Casuals in dark times During COVID-19 and post-COVID, the NTEU is the key protector and defender of quality higher education. The Morrison Government economically punishes university staff and students, and with the support of the commercial media circulate narratives of

The Government must adequately fund the higher education sector, so that universities are not relying on casualisation and workload intensification.

During COVID-19, casuals are voicing concerns over the higher levels of stress and physical exhaustion from the everincreasing accumulation of unpaid labour across multiple institutional settings. University casuals verbally report receiving little medical guidance or health training for working in a confined space with large numbers of people during a pandemic. Health Safety Representatives (HSRs) have a powerful role in the workplace. If you feel your health or the health of your colleagues or students are at risk, contact your HSR.

fear and threat. If we are to avoid repression, regression or a retreat into the dark ages, we need to challenge and provide alternatives to these narratives. The Government must adequately fund the higher education sector, so that universities are not relying on casualisation and workload intensification. Casualisation and workload intensification results in the further erosion of quality public education. In these dark times, we are all potentially precarious workers. COVID-19 is an opportunity to open the way for progressive policy changes to solve the funding crisis in the Australian higher education sector. Raewyn Connell’s The good university: What universities are actually doing and why it’s time for radical change draws attention to Australian university workers low pay and low security, output pressure, rising stress and anxiety and the way unions represent and speak to these issues. In the words of Connell, the future remains undecided.

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We are Zoomed! As I dash down the hallway holding my laptop out of reach of sticky little fingers, I think how I used to spend the ten minutes between 1pm and the tutorial start time of 1:10pm casually chatting to students about their weekends and answering assessment questions. This ‘normal’ tutorial life feels like a distant memory. Three weeks into a pandemic lockdown, and tutorials now resemble a Brady Bunch collage. That’s if I can convince them to please turn their videos on. Otherwise I’m teaching rows and columns of broken TV monitors, a muted brick wall of grey non-responses. We’re not doomed, we’re Zoomed. I shut my spare bedroom door behind me, grateful my toddlers can’t reach the handle. My heart aches for childcare, blissful childcare. As I plug my laptop into the charger and position my webcam, I realise my headphones are missing. I have three minutes before the tutorial begins. I see my email ping to let me know there are students waiting in the Zoom room. Do I have time to look for my headphones or should I just start without them? I take the risk and go back out into the chaos of the living room, sneaking past children who are watching their fifteenth episode of Paw Patrol since lunchtime. I scramble through my handbag looking for my headphones. ‘Mummy! I want another rice cracker!’ I spot a half-chewed rice cracker sitting on a pile of Lego. I lob it in the child’s direction. ‘Not that one! That one’s slobbered on! Mummy! Can you put Bluey on instead!?’

Image: Charles Deluvio/Unsplash

‘Mummy has a class! They’re waiting for me right now! You know where the rice crackers are!’ I fumble with the remote trying to find Bluey on the ABC iView app. ‘Not that episode! The one where they go to the dump! The other one! The other one!’ My younger child starts swiping at the TV, wailing because I’ve turned off Paw Patrol. I can sense a meltdown about to begin. Mine, not hers. I take a deep breath. There are people far worse off than me. There are people sick, or with health conditions who are scared to get sick. There are people dying. I still have a job. Many aren’t as lucky as me. I can work from home. Sort of. I take a deep breath. ‘There, Bluey is on. Now, Mummy has a class starting. I am going to shut the door and I don’t want any interruptions. If you’re good for the next 1 hour and 50 minutes, Daddy will bring you home a Kinder egg from the supermarket’.

A Parent Any University

The children weigh up the bribe and shrug in acceptance, eyes glued to the TV. I bolt back into my semi-soundproof sanctuary and notice the bed is unmade. I spend the last 10 seconds I have hurriedly tidying it while kicking some toys out of view of the camera. I untangle my headphones while plugging them into my laptop and opening the Zoom app. My tired, anxious reflection stares back at me, giving me half a second to run my fingers through my unbrushed hair before my students see me entering the Zoom classroom. I paste a smile on my face which feels more like a grimace. One of my students has children wandering around in the background. She starts talking but I can’t hear her. ‘Turn your microphone on!’ I laugh. She facepalms and apologises that her kids are distracting. I tell her not to worry. We all know what each other is going through. ‘The show must go on’, I say. And the show does go on.

Daddy works for an essential business so lucky Daddy has to go to work. Grandma can’t help as we can’t risk her getting sick.

My younger child starts swiping at the TV, wailing because I’ve turned off Paw Patrol. I can sense a meltdown about to begin. Mine, not hers.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Celebrating casual activism in Qld universities

Mike Oliver Senior State Organiser, Queensland Division

This year the NTEU Queensland Division is proud to announce the birth of a new Casuals’ Network at Griffith University and the further maturation and expansion of the University of Queensland (UQ) Casuals’ Caucus. Casual academics deliver more than half of all undergraduate courses in Australia. The backbone of Australian university teaching, casual academic staff have no paid holidays, no paid sick leave, no job security, significant breaks in income, and are deliberately excluded from university life by management. The working relationship of most casual academics with their employer is, simply put, exploitative.’ Casual union members and activists across Australia are saying ‘no more’ to the lack of respect, the lack of value, and the lack of engagement shown to them by university managements and are measuring, revealing, and pursuing underpayments for the millions in wage theft across the sector.

UQ Casuals Caucus Casual Representative on the UQ Branch Committee, Dr Ellyse Fenton is one of tens-of-thousands of casual academics who recently lost work. After 13 years of work at UQ, she is now facing a semester unemployed. This was after a hellish Semester One in which Ellyse (and every university worker) went over-and-above to move studies online and keep Australia’s universities running in a COVID-19 world. Since late 2017, Ellyse has been working in her Branch’s Casuals Caucus, organising with fellow casual academics to challenge exploitation and fight for better conditions. With a group of colleagues, Ellyse has logged her work hours for the past two years, comparing the time it takes to do her job well with the amount she is paid. Unsurprisingly, the result is thousands of dollars in unpaid wages. Casual academics are paid according to formulae that routinely undervalue the work involved in teaching. These rates underestimate the time needed to mark assignments, prepare lectures and tutorials, and support students. In some institutions, essential work like course and subject coordination and attending lectures is not paid at all.

‘Some teaching staff have been instructed to do a poor job, I suppose, because there is widespread acknowledgment that these rates are inaccurate,’ said Ellyse. When workers are forced to cut corners, it diminishes the product, the experience, and the value of their labour. In the end, it is students and casuals who bear the burden. ‘The first couple of meetings at UQ (late 2017) were about catharsis I think,’ said Ellyse. ‘Members would come to meetings and just share their stories with each other. Get it out. We started to hear all the horror stories and knew none of us was alone.’ In 2018, the UQ Casuals Caucus launched the UQ Charter of Rights for Casual Academic Staff that laid out how casuals wanted to be treated by their employer. ‘The Charter made a range of claims. We Ellyse Fenton, UQ demanded what seem in retrospect small things – our own desks and workspaces, participation Members would come to meetings and in institutional just share their stories with each other. Get it decision-making fora, to be treated as out. We started to hear all the horror stories employees. But we and knew none of us was alone. also demanded fair pay and job security, which cannot be ‘I had heard about the successful wage achieved without systemic transformation. theft campaign run by casual staff at the The Caucus held stalls and events where we University of Melbourne and thought there publicised the Charter and talked about the must be a way for us to do something working conditions of casual staff. similar. It was the perfect time to start acting At the end of 2019, we delivered 626 signed on systemic underpayment and exploitation postcards of support for the Charter to the of casualised workers. We had all worked Vice-Chancellor’s office. Every one of those around the clock to support our students postcards represents a conversation about through the transition to online learning, in casualisation and a step on the path to most cases without any additional payment building a broad coalition of support for deor support. We just felt enough is enough, casualising higher education.’ you know?’

After the Charter campaign wrapped up, The UQ Caucus gave thought to what came next. With a long list of problems to address it was hard to know where to begin.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Find out more about the UQ Casual Caucus Wage Theft Campaign: www.nteu.org.au/uq/casuals

Above: Delivering 626 signed postcards of support for the Charter to the UQ Vice-Chancellor’s office

Casual member testimonial

Griffith Casuals Network While UQ’s Casual Caucus keeps growing in strength and numbers, Griffith NTEU Branch has just launched its own Casuals Network. Clare Poppi is the Casual Representative on the Griffith NTEU Branch Committee and a founding member of the Griffith Casuals’ Network. Clare started work as a casual technician/academic at Griffith University’s Queensland College of Art in 2011. She is a jeweller/artist.

‘In the College of Art, we don’t teach in Trimester 3 (Summer), so that does give me some time to pursue other interests. Like all casual academics, this isn’t the only place I teach. I also teach at another community art college, and of course, I am an artist, so I need time for commissions and art pieces.’ Clare Poppi, Griffith

‘I wasn’t very involved in the Union until a few years ago,’ said Clare, ‘but the position of Casual Representative on the Griffith Clare is not sure what shape the Griffith Branch Committee came up and my Network will take. It is still in its early, cathartic colleague Liz Shaw phase where casual workers are sharing their convinced me to stories and building bonds. run.’

Since coming onto the Branch Committee, Clare has learned a lot; about the broader problems faced by casual and non-casual workers across the University, and what it means to be union. ‘Pre-COVID (2019) I went and had a chat with Ellyse Fenton from the UQ Casuals Caucus, to find out how they do it there. When COVID really hit, a few times members asked if there was a casuals’ network at Griffith. So, I went and talked to Stewart (Organiser) and Garry (Branch President), and they said, ‘Go for it!’. So, I did.’ Clare is not sure what shape the Griffith Network will take. It is still in its early, cathartic phase where casual workers are

sharing their stories and building bonds. Clare holds high hopes for the Network’s future. ‘Will we take the same path as UQ – which has done very well – or do our own thing? Not sure. But whatever we do will be democratically decided.’ ‘I am daunted. I haven’t done any organising or activism in my life. But, I am getting so much support, and I am very excited.’ For more information about the Griffith University Casuals Network, call Griffith NTEU Organiser Stewart de Lacy-Leacey at gu@nteu.org.au.

I have been a regular casual English language teacher and examiner at a regional university for the past 12 years. Due to COVID-19, the sharp drop in international student numbers has meant a great reduction in my work hours. I was unexpectedly informed by the NTEU that I could claim for accumulated long service leave entitlement. This entitlement may be taken after 10 years of casual employment, and can be accessed pro rata if you have not been employed full-time. HR deemed that I was due 13 days long service leave and this was then paid for the period I nominated. My thanks to the NTEU for alerting me to this entitlement. I am sure there are many current and former casual university employees across Australia unaware until now of their rights to long service leave.

Encourage your casual colleagues to join NTEU today!

nteu.org.au/join

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism before it undermines us As part of Friday Sessions, the NTEU’s online national training program, we recently ran a seminar entitled ‘Neoliberalism: how it infiltrates universities, how it affects us, and how can we resist it?’ We hope to open and maintain a conversation about how the neoliberalism of the university sector affects us as workers and unionists. We want to reframe the narrative and bring about the university sector we deserve. The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health crisis. That real crisis adds to the manufactured crisis of decades of neoliberal ideology and managerialism that has decimated the university sector. To quote one t whom we largely owe this widespread decimation to: ‘only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change’ and that the actions taken ‘depend on the ideas that are lying around’.1 Thanks to Milton Friedman and also the Mont Pelerin Society, the fringe idea lying around of neoliberalism took root immediately following the 1970s crises of stagflation and oil embargo.2 Whether ‘real’ or ‘perceived’, neoliberal ideology blamed these crises on the failure of the socially-democratic Keynesian state, framing state intervention as ‘unnatural’ and claiming it causes societal breakdown. This near-mythic ethos enforces extreme individual responsibility where collectivism and social welfare are an affront to the ‘natural’ order.1,2,3

Victoria Fielding University of South Australia

Kent Getsinger University of Adelaide

Neoliberalism-proper entered in the 1980s with the Reagan and Thatcher Governments. We have them to thank for some of the cruellest austerity ever enacted, second only to the ‘shock treatment’ imposed on the Global South. In particular, Chile first suffered neoliberalism’s dictatorship implementation for what would be revealed to be anything but freeing individuals from the ‘tyranny’ of the state.2 Contrary to claims of enabling the ‘free market’, neoliberalism was (is) in fact a radical state reconfiguration of accumulation of wealth and power to the very top. What resulted is many institutions enforcing cruel

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

‘trade liberalisation, deregulation, wage rollbacks, union attacks, privatisation and fiscal retrenchment’.2 This reconfiguration that erodes our collectivism and conditions is also happening in the university sector. Since the Dawkins reforms of the late 1980s, universities have seen fee deregulation, mass precarious work, withering of academic collegiately, erosion of the public institution and a shift in power to managers. The neoliberal ideological rhetoric of the ‘free market’ is then used to justify high manager salaries, aggressive and cruel restructures, job insecurity and abhorrent workplace practices.4 When we speak to our colleagues about the insidious neoliberalism of the university sector, they see this culture as the cause of anxiety, shame and resentment in their working lives. They want change, but they don’t know what change looks like. We argue that to reframe our work in a neoliberal age, we need to show our colleagues how neoliberalism positions both our university work and our union activity as illegitimate. Only then can we collectively see that this is just one story, and that there are other stories which fight back against the shame of living in a neoliberal frame. Through a neoliberal frame, university work is perceived to be the same as the public sector: as a cost taxpayers have to bear, rather than an investment in the health of the economy and society. Universities are a microcosm of our larger society that has resulted in power and wealth concentration to the top. This contradictory

®®® Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism before it undermines us neoliberal ideology has taken root in the language, paradigm and milieu of the current university system. It fills the halls, classrooms and the space between our social relations. As university workers, in our academic and administrative labour, we live its effects. Neoliberalism treats higher education teaching as valuable only when a profit can be placed on its delivery. Research is viewed through this lens as pie in the sky and useless, unless research invents something the private sector can immediately profit from. University workers are constantly pressured to reduce funding, encouraged to downsize, and to compete against private providers; to let the market decide. Union activity is also framed as illegitimate because neoliberals view collective action as a harmful intervention in the natural authority of university management. Through this lens, workers have no place in institutional decision-making, should not seek to improve their working conditions, and should never assume they have a place at the negotiating table or the right to consult over how they do their work. Management’s prerogative rules, and anything that undermines this prerogative is framed as adverse for the organisation.

research outcomes, and as a result, our institutions better off. We believe in our work and value each other’s contribution. Telling these counter stories is not easy. Resisting the dominance of neoliberalism is, by definition, difficult work. Neoliberalism frames our language, delegitimises our union narrative and constrains all our relations. Neoliberalism turns much academic work into casual – disposable – work. Neoliberalism creates an environment of toxic shame, competition, inferiority, precariousness, stigma and debilitating anxiety in academia.5,6 We can be confined to ‘neoliberal horizons’, where ‘disimagination’ perpetuates to a pervasive insecure narcissism and reduces us to continual lifeless measurement.7 We can lose personal connection, to others and self, and narrowly view social attachment solely for marketable worth.

Neoliberalism automatically places management on a pedestal, in the hero frame. Management are taken for granted as naturally acting in the best interest of their institutions. Funding cuts are When we recognise that neoliberalism good, downsizing is desirable, efficiency is in the air that we breathe, in the dividends apparently make us all structures of our workplaces, in better off. Unionists, on the other the attitudes towards unions, hand, are automatically in in the culture and ideology the neoliberal villain frame of the country we live because we challenge in, it is obvious why the unilateral power resisting these ideas of our employers to Neoliberalism treats is emotionally and dictate every aspect intellectually difficult. higher education of our working lives. By having knowledge We also challenge teaching as valuable of this difficulty, and the wisdom of the by confronting it, we only when a profit can managerial prerogative, can defeat the force be placed on its often defending student of these ideas. Naming educational outcomes as delivery. them is powerful. Listening much as we fight for our own to people’s experiences benefit. of them is powerful. Telling our own stories that undermine As university workers and as unionists, neoliberalism is powerful action which we do our best to counter neoliberal makes a real difference to our collective framing which tells us we are illegitimate. power. We tell a different story demonstrating the value of the work we do. We believe in a Neoliberal ideology need not dominate democratic, cooperative, collectivist and our lives and universities. With awareness supportive public university sector. We of the theoretical basis to connect the know that we each contribute to quality dots and see more clearly, we can realise teaching and research, and that without that our troubles are not the fault of our dedicated academic and professional staff, shortcomings, but those of cruel shortuniversities would be nothing more than sightedness. With that awareness, we can buildings. We act in solidarity with each reframe the narrative and legitimately other, recognising that only as a collective demand what we believe in for our sector. can we ensure problems are solved in our workplaces that make us, our students, our

Image: Moritz Mentges/Unsplash

References 1. Bregman, R. (2020). ‘The Neoliberal Era is ending, what comes next?’ The Correspondent. 2. Mitchell, M. & Fazi, T. (2017). Reclaiming the State: A Progressive Vision of Sovereignty for a PostNeoliberal World, Pluto Press, London. 3. Sitaraman, G. (2019). ‘The Collapse of Neoliberalism’, The New Republic. 4. Connell, R. (2019). The Good University: What universities actually do and why it’s time for radical change, Monash University Printing, Clayton, Australia. 5. Gill, R. (2009). ‘Breaking the silence: The hidden injuries of the neoliberal university’ in Secrecy and Silence in the Research Process: Feminist Reflections, Routledge, New York. 6. Sims, M. (2019). ‘Neoliberalism and new public management in an Australian university: The invisibility of our take-over’, Australian Universities’ Review 61 01. 7. Wilson, J. (2017). ‘The Moods of Enterprise: Neoliberal affect and the care of self’ in Neoliberalism, Taylor & Francis Group, London.

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Building an inclusive post-COVID higher education sector

Image: Pxhere

Deakin University Vice-Chancellor Professor Iain Martin’s announcement on 25 May of 400 job losses launched the Major Workplace Change (MWC) consultation process now underway at the universitywide level at Deakin. However, this figure did not enumerate the casualised, sessional and fixed term staff – numbering around 2,500 according to Deakin staffing data – whose jobs were cut in Trimester 1 or those casualised and fixed term employees who have significantly less work or have not been engaged at all in Trimester 2 at Deakin. Dr Audrey Statham Deakin University

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

®®® Building an inclusive post-COVID higher education sector The Vice-Chancellor’s omission conveyed the message to staff that the mass job losses sustained by Deakin insecure workers weren’t considered by University leadership to be worth even mentioning.

Deakin workforce with around 6000 casual and fixed term staff employed by the University, 66% of whom are women. During the COVID-19 epidemic, the sectorwide shift from face-to-face to online teaching and student support would not have been possible without the work (often involving many hours of additional unpaid work) of casual, sessional and fixed term staff who helped to facilitate the transition.

That such an omission is not limited to just one university but is, rather, right now a sector-wide phenomenon was highlighted recently by an article in Times Higher Education, ‘Some staff are more equal than others’ (July 20). The article observed, ‘Somehow, the loss of casual and fixed term staff doesn’t elicit the same degree of pain – or precision’ on the part of Australian university managements as is evoked when announcing job losses among permanent staff. The stark difference between the treatment of ongoing staff and insecure workers by managements as part of the Australian higher education sector’s response to COVID-19, is well illustrated by the article’s grim but apt analogy: ‘permanent staff are dispatched with full military honours while their casual and fixed term comrades wind up in mass unmarked

Image: Pxhere

...the work of insecure university workers... does matter: it mattered in the past, it matters now, and it will most likely matter even more next year and into the future when we begin to navigate a post-COVID environment. graves.’ Of university managements’ attitude towards insecure workers, one NTEU Branch President interviewed in the article observed: ‘[they’re] just not seen as real workers.’

Insecure university workers: essential not ‘not real’ The sense that casualised and sessional staff job cuts don’t count or aren’t real is now being reinforced at Deakin by a MWC process that excludes casual employees from its terms and frame of reference, further compounding our feeling of being unseen, undervalued and disposable. Despite the University’s

arbitrary figure and the exclusionary MWC process, the reality is that the work of insecure university workers at Deakin – and the Australian higher education sector as a whole – does matter: it mattered in the past, it matters now, and it will most likely matter even more next year and into the future when we begin to navigate a post-COVID environment. The bulk of teaching, student support and research assistance at Australian universities, including Deakin, has long been carried out by sessional academics, casual professional, casual research and fixed term staff. Before COVID-19, insecure workers made up more than half of the

The increase of domestic student applications at Deakin was confirmed recently at the meeting of Academic Board on 5 August, which suggests that next year Deakin and other universities will most likely need to rely again on sessional, casualised and fixed term staff. However, Australian universities currently engaged in culling insecure workers should not be surprised if those casual, sessionals and fixed term staff whose jobs were cut this year, are no longer available to work in the higher education sector next year. In the current issue of Advocate, former Deakin fixed term staff member, Dash Jayasuriya, describes how her job at Deakin was cut during COVID and explains why she’s decided to leave the sector after 6 years. If the sector is to have any hope of effectively carrying out its vital role in rebuilding Australian society and the economy post-COVID through educating the new influx of domestic students, researching, and creating community connections, then there is an urgent need now – as university managements around the country launch Major Work Place Change processes which exclude casualised staff from their terms of reference – for our union to hold university managements to account for the brutal and short-sighted treatment they are currently meting out to insecure workers. To this end, the NTEU Deakin Casuals Action Network submitted feedback to Deakin’s MWC process calling on the University to implement transparent employment practices regarding the ceasing of employment of insecure workers and the re-engagement of precariously employed staff, starting at the faculty and school-level. continued overpage...

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

®®® Building an inclusive post-COVID higher education sector

What kind of post-COVID Australian higher education sector? In Vice-Chancellor Iain Martin’s 27 March email to staff in which he identified the ‘principles’ for Faculty Executives to use when determining whether to retain or cease the employment of casual professional and research staff as part of Deakin’s response to COVID-19, Prof Martin said: ‘Our University is going to look different next year as we meet this challenge. We must begin to act now to help this transition. Many of the things that we will be asking will not be easy, but I can assure you that none of the decisions will be taken lightly’. The kind of university that Deakin and other universities become over the next 12-18 months depends to a significant extent on the decisions now being made in relation to the employment of insecure workers, which will greatly shape the kind of higher education sector that will emerge post-COVID. A ‘better’ kind of Australian university system must necessarily be one in which insecure workers are seen as ‘real workers’ by management and are securely employed. One way our union can begin to act now to help such a transition towards a better, inclusive higher education system, and defend against the emergence of one that is much worse, is by calling on university managements to implement transparent practices for employment of insecure staff such as the following steps identified by the NTEU Deakin Casuals Action Network in our feedback to the Deakin MWC. NTEU Deakin Casuals Action Network calls on the University to undertake the following steps: 1. Keep a record and generate monthly reports of all casual staff who lost work in Trimester 1, and those casual employees who had a reasonable expectation of work (i.e. have been employed on a regular basis across Trimesters 1 and 2 for more than one year) but have no work at all in Trimester 2. 2. Direct the relevant members of Faculty Executives to make an explicit commitment to re-employ recently employed casuals rather than make new external appointments. This is in line with the indication given by the ViceChancellor in a meeting with the NTEU Deakin Branch Executive and the Deakin Branch Casual-identified committee member on 28 April, that the University can give preference to any non-ongoing staff who were cut during the COVID-19 pandemic, when engaging staff for these roles in the future when the work is required to be done and the casual employee had a reasonable expectation of work (as defined in Step 1).

3. Direct the relevant members of Faculty Executives to make an explicit commitment to identify and action measures for keeping casual staff in employment, for example by re-directing affected staff to other work that is required to be done within and across Faculties. This other work should include duties in which the

A ‘better’ kind of Australian university system must necessarily be one in which insecure workers are seen as ‘real workers’ by management and are securely employed. casual employee has competence to complete, not restricted to duties they have experience in specifically. 4. Direct the relevant members of Faculty Executives to send – where it is not possible to keep casual staff in work – an official communication expressing appreciation for the casual employees’ important contribution and outlining the possibility of future re-engagement in a timely manner from HR and/or Deans and Heads of Schools and Faculties. 5. Direct the relevant members of Faculty Executives to make an explicit commitment – where it is not possible to keep casual staff in employment – to keep affected staff connected to the Deakin systems and community through ongoing provision of access to emails, Cloud, Deakin Library and ongoing affiliation as Visiting Scholars. This will enable continuity of contact between teams and continuity of employment when campuses are re-opened by ensuring casualised and sessional staff retain their inboxes, contact list, and other connections to their colleagues and the University. 6. Direct the relevant members of Faculty Executives to make an explicit commitment in Faculty and/or School policy to consult casual staff and include them on a regular, ongoing basis in discussions around planning and delivery in the online environment in Trimesters 2 and 3. This should involve email newsletters, other forms of direct communication specifically targeted at and for casual staff, regularly scheduled online meetings, and casuals and sessionals should be paid for their time.

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Delegate profile:

Izrin Ariff I am a casual academic in the School of Communications and Arts at the University of Queensland, and have been lucky to be amongst great active members willing to roll up their sleeves. As long as I remember I supported the union movement, but, like lots of people, I decided to become an activist in the NTEU as I became politicised by the lack of action on the big issues facing us all. Climate change, historic inequality and now, the COVID-19 crisis. These problems are so massive at times it seems like there is little hope for progress, but when we look to our history, we see it’s when organised workers stand together that we make change happen. It was the unions’ strength that won the weekend and the 40 hour work week. Ended child labour and the Vietnam War. But, to take on the big questions we need to build from the little ones. Every campaign is an opportunity to not only improve pay and conditions, but reach non-members and have workers take an active role in building the Union. Often, they are also a chance to connect the struggles of workers to those of other groups. One the earliest NTEU campaigns I was involved with against the Ramsay Centre, showed the value of organising this way. With union support, UQ students organised the first student general meeting since 1971, which voted to oppose establishing a centre. A union is its members, so the best measure of a union is how active its rank and file members are. Organising networks like our casuals caucus and UQ Fightback, the rank and file was able to spearhead campaigns against cuts and concessions in all forms, the casuals caucus unanimously passing a motion against the Jobs Protection Framework, as well as a combined campaign that built upon our work with the students against the Tehan reforms.

Since 1958, the Australian Universities’ Review has been encouraging debate and discussion about issues in higher education and its contribution to Australian public life.

And we don’t only have to look to the past. Taking inspiration from the work of dedicated members in Melbourne, which have recently pushed back against systemic wage theft, we have begun our own wage theft campaign. Our organising has us well placed to borrow from the Melbourne model. Members have already started work logging and we hope this can become a nationwide challenge to unfair conditions. It has never been more important for rank and file workers to be organised and fighting for a better world. No one is untouched by the pandemic, we all know someone affected, either personally or through lost work. Even those universities that accepted early concessions continue to see cuts and losses. Although social distancing makes the meetings and leafleting that are the backbone of campaigning difficult, we have to throw ourselves into reaching as many people as possible because we will all need the Union to be as strong as possible to ensure workers are able to defend themselves from crises of the bosses making, whether it be in the name of ‘saving jobs’ or making ‘reforms’. Get more information about becoming an NTEU Delegate at delegates.nteu.org.au

AUR is published twice a year by the NTEU. NTEU members are entitled to receive a free subscription on an opt-in basis . If you are an NTEU member and would like to receive AUR, please email aur@nteu.org.au

www.aur.org.au Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

Casual not so casual

Image: Christin Hume/Unsplash

As a writer I know the power of words. Using the word casual to describe a worker who is essential to the institution they are working for is problematic. It enables institutions to treat people casually, as if they are dispensable. I have been working as a casual teacher across a number of institutions for over thirty years. I was a casual tutor for one university for eight consecutive years, consistently getting good reports from students and giving popular lectures. I currently supervise at Deakin University and teach at the Council for Adult Education and at a community centre where my courses are often booked out and there are often waiting lists. I have been teaching since 1988. I have been publishing in literary journals since 1985. I am a committed professional, and I am very good at what I do. Before I taught at universities I taught in the TAFE system as a casual. I was employed over the times of the funding cuts. I watched vocational teachers lose their jobs and their health. I watched good people in management try to treat their staff well, but in the end casuals, as we know, are the first to go. The public perception that if you work hard as a casual, are committed and reliable and are good at what you do you will get a secure job is no longer the case, if it ever was.

Claire Gaskin Deakin University

Connect ÂŽ Volume 13, no. 2 ÂŽ Semester 2, 2020

®®® Casual not so casual work. I risk being considered not community minded, or unsociable at best. A lot of networking and opportunity to better your position goes on socially, as we know.

Pay as you go I usually teach two or three tutorials a week when teaching at a university. A tutorial is usually from one to two and a half hours long. So, I am paid for up to seven and a half hours a week for teaching and one hour per student per semester for marking and five hours per semester for going to meetings. The pay is not enough to support a family or run a household. So at any one given time, I have had up to five different employers. I have been known to get in the car and start to drive to the wrong location before checking myself. Every one of those different employers has their own requirements. Traditionally an employer could expect a full-time employee to do some unpaid administrative tasks off the clock. However, I feel that employers’ expectations have not changed since the casualisation of large sections of the workforce. I can be employed by an institution for seven hours a week but be expected to be available for seven days a week.

When you talk to friends who have more permanent positions at universities, you often hear horror stories of enormous workloads and constant pressure. They commiserate with the plight of the casual, looking you in the eye and saying they worked for ten years as a casual before they got their position. That is a very long apprenticeship and they are not saying it is a guarantee that you will get a position. But the culture has been to keep your head down and not complain in the hope that you may get one of those jobs one day.

Casual compensation

Image: Oladimeji Ajegbile/Pexels

If I was employed fulltime I could afford to be If I was employed full-time I could available full time. If I had afford to be available full time. If I had an an income that meant I could pay my bills, I would income that meant I could pay my bills, I not mind doing a little would not mind doing a little extra here extra here and there out of good will. Like most and there out of good will. people nowadays I answer work emails outside of slow with getting paperwork done. It can work hours, including take a whole morning to deal with a contract weekends. But when you have five different for $199 to deliver a lecture that then takes a employers expecting you to do the added week to write. At one university a course has administrative requirements that go along been offered on how to get paid your wage, with a job, it is untenable, unsustainable. it takes time and considerable effort to work I have been reprimanded for saying I cannot out and get onto a university’s pay system. make a meeting at one institution because As a casual you cannot complain or bargain. I am teaching at another at that time. I If you complain, you do not get sacked, you have employers say to me that they have just do not get re-employed. You can be been emailing and trying to ring me all replaced by someone who has the means day, when I have been teaching during the to be available for unpaid work. It got worse time they were trying to contact me. I have every year. There is the turn of the screw, I different institutions that all have different was asked to do more for less every year. systems chasing me for paperwork. They look at me and roll their eyes and say, ‘She’s I feel like a hired gun. I go I teach I leave. I creative’. It is not because I am a creative, cannot get involved with social events at or disorganised or do not care that I can be

Casual staff get a higher hourly rate for their work and some people argue that this compensates for not getting sick pay, holiday pay and job security. It does not. Nor does it compensate for not getting the superannuation that reflects the work you have done and the years you have worked. The higher hourly rate does not compensate for the absence of sick pay. Like most casual tutors, when I am sick I usually go to work because I cannot afford not to and because I know I am not easily replaceable and I do not like to let my students or the subject coordinators down. It is very stressful not being able to take sick leave. I spent all of first semester one year worrying that I might have to have two weeks off at some point to have an operation. I felt like I could not apply for second semester work and negotiate having any time off. I felt I would be passed over for the work. The higher hourly rate does not compensate for the fact that you are only paid for the hours you teach. If you travel to do a two-hour job or an eight-hour job, the expenses associated with the job are the same: travel costs, public transport or car parking, and you may get caught having to eat out. A two-hour job can take up your whole day in time and effort and take away from your ability to do other work or find other work. Sometimes I might have a gap between tutorials where I am continued overpage...

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

®®® Casual not so casual teaching one class first thing in the morning and one in the afternoon. I am not paid for the hours in between. I try to spend those hours productively but without an office it is difficult. I do not have a suitable place to meet students. I meet the students I supervise in cafes. The hours between tutorials are spent in cafes or libraries, trying not to spend too much money or get too exhausted carrying the books I carry around because I do not have a suitable place to store them. I have been known to sit in my car with a thermos and a cold bag of food between tutorials. When you are paid for two or three tutorials over a twelve-week semester, the higher hourly rate does not make up for not getting holiday pay. I apply for first semester work in December and do not hear whether I have it till February, often after the students know when their tutorials are. If you do not get the work, it is too late to get work elsewhere. For the last eight years I have gotten work first semester, but I had to eat Christmas dinner with my daughters not knowing if I would have work the following year. If I had known earlier that I would have that work, my stress levels could have been managed better and I could have planned better.

Speedmarking I have consistently been paid one hour per student per semester for marking. I have added up my hours to be up to at least three times this amount. In some subjects there are three sets of assignments each with several components. You may work out that you are paid 20 minutes per assignment per student. So, let me run you through how marking can go. First cup of coffee, you check everyone has handed in. You follow up on who has not. You put your classes into groups if you did the course on how to do that, along with the course on how to get paid. You think of the fruit picking you did to buy books when you were studying. It’s about efficiency and speed. As a casual tutor you have a PhD or you are doing a PhD to do piece work. I have a thirty-year publishing history to do piece work. You open the first assignment. You are teaching creative writing, and you have told your students the Hemingway thing: to write what they know, what they care about. Or you ask them to write about what they do not know and are grappling with. The first student has done what you asked; it is a beautiful piece on bereavement that demands some care in marking. There are pieces on students’ experience of sexual assault, and on racism experienced in

class and on campus. There are great pieces, these young people are our leaders, they teach me. With time and experience you can be efficient as well as thoughtful, but still their faces come into view as you read their pieces, and you know you owe it to yourself and to them to give each piece the time it deserves, as much as you can without ruining your health or not meeting your other work commitments. Anything done repetitively is hard to keep meaningful and can make you question the meaning of life. But even when an experienced teacher is working efficiently, the twenty minutes does not work. No one works like that, it shouldn’t be paid like that.

Unpaid work is wage theft

Doing unpaid work takes away from your ability to make ends meet, from time you need to be looking for or be doing paid work. It is theft.

If I was earning enough money to cover my bills it would be bad enough doing copious amounts of unpaid work, but when I am employed for say seven hours and I am doing so much extra unpaid, where does that time come from? You cannot ask for this level of unpaid work from casuals who often end up doing more hours than someone employed full time, and for quarter of the income. Doing unpaid work takes away from your ability to make ends meet, from time you need to be looking for or be doing paid work. It is theft. We are often told we cannot expect the work, we shouldn’t rely on it. It has even been said that we should not see it as work. We are told that the work needs to be shared around and that those of us who have been employed for a few years cannot keep expecting it. It is as if we are meant to feel as though we are greedy for wanting secure work. Instead of rewarding hard work, commitment and reliability, we are made to feel as though fair work conditions are a privilege not a right. I have thought about ringing my landlord and saying that he should not see my rent as rent, not expect it all the time, he should not rely on it but rather he should feel privileged that I live in the house. I have thought about saying these things to him, but somehow I do not think it would go down too well. The reality is that up to 80 per cent of the teaching done at universities is done by so-called casuals. Universities are reliant on their casual staff for their teaching. The quality of a student’s learning experience at any given university depends on the quality of its teaching staff. In my experience universities get the best and brightest to teach, young tutors with PhDs fresh with

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

new ideas and older people with decades of publishing backgrounds and current industry and teaching experience. You do not get re-employed as a casual tutor at a university unless you get good reports from students and are constantly upgrading your qualifications and advancing your career through publication. I do not know any casuals who are casual about their careers or their teaching. All the casual tutors I know are passionate practitioners and passionate about imparting that to their students. Students get good teachers, but teachers do not get good conditions. The word casual simply implies and enables universities to treat tutors as if we are not really part of the organisation. Casual tutors are not transitory; we have a long-term commitment to our fields. We are indispensable in terms of our dedication and levels of achievement. We do copious amounts of unpaid work and we face all the consequences of instability and insecure work. I would like to get paid for all the hours I work. I would like a superannuation that reflects the hours I have worked. I would like sick pay, holiday pay and job security. Like other casual staff in universities, I am a highly qualified and experienced professional, and I deserve to be treated as such. Clare Gaskin is currently undertaking a PhD and supervising in Writing and Literature at Deakin University. She was previously a lecturer and tutor at the University of Melbourne.

The struggle to

save & remake

public higher education

Public higher education is at serious risk. Universities premised on knowledge creation and dissemination for the public good are on shakier terrain than before. The higher education sector globally was already in a fragile condition – some would say a crisis – before the COVID-19 pandemic and its associated campus shutdowns began.

Higher education across and within countries as well as within institutions has been characterised by profound inequalities which have been shaped and exacerbated by the austerity and marketisation that has deeply troubled the sector. These are now a threat that has the potential to undermine the entire endeavour. At the same time there have been strikes and protests by those employed or enrolled in higher education in many countries to protest numerous failings in the system, including exclusion (practical, cultural, epistemological), increasingly onerous conditions of service and the rapid casualisation of academic labour. These strikes have been overshadowed by the pandemic – indeed, notwithstanding some exceptions in the United States and the ...numerous failings United Kingdom, they in the system, including themselves have been locked down. exclusion (practical,

Since the lockdowns, cultural, epistemological), I have been observing increasingly onerous the trends in higher conditions of service and education: unsurprisingly the most prevalent the rapid casualisation is the ‘pivot online’ to of academic remote learning with all its manifestations and associated labour. concerns especially regarding access and vulnerability. This is closely followed by increasingly dominant narratives of austerity and marketisation – it is these on which I will focus here.

Laura Czerniewicz University of Cape Town, South Africa

I am using the term ‘austerity’ as an umbrella word for underfunding and financial cuts which drive up the risks of sectoral fragmentation and breakdown. Also an umbrella term, ‘marketisation’ speaks to the increasingly unfettered infiltration of big corporate forces substantially reshaping higher education.

Along with others (which include the increase in metrics and datafication of the sector), these factors increasingly drive the practices of individual institutions which have themselves become more corporate in character. My observations are drawn from various sources: panels in which I have recently participated including at the World Bank and Africa-based; the Twitterverse where the power of loose ties in my professional networks shows the emergent trends and on-the-ground anxieties. This has been augmented by ongoing virtual conversations with colleagues, funders and others and, of course, reports and talks, as well as rapid research publications.

Austerity There is an avalanche of activity and concern being expressed both formally and informally about the financial implications of the COVID-19 shutdown and the projected impacts of the associated economic downturn for institutions, for educators and for students. Internationally these are to be seen in the following ways: • There have been cuts to university budgets, some with immediate effect. • Students are indicating that they are not planning to start the next university year. • Universities are losing money from current budgets – for example, some are returning fees to current students. And students are demanding fee rebates for studies taken online instead of face to face. • Universities are offering students free tuition for the forthcoming term. • Contract and casual staff are losing jobs in several locations so far. • Job conditions are changing for all staff, often in the form of unpaid furloughs. continued overpage...

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

®®® The struggle to save and remake public higher education • Financial scenarios are being calculated for the sector for the medium term. In both England and Australia where these have been made available, the outlook is bleak. Funders have warned that the economic downturn will reduce the size of their endowments and therefore their grants. Some have prioritised their local communities when providing immediate relief. Anxiety is realistically high: this response, from personal communication with a teaching and learning director, is typical: ‘I am very, very worried. My college has been around for well over a hundred years and I honestly think we have a good chance of closing in the next 3-5 years. Very scary and sad.’ Governments are generally failing to bail out universities and where they do offer support, the sector is having to explain why these funds will not be enough. In South Africa, higher education scholars are warning that COVID-19 poses a serious threat to higher education. Universities South Africa has been working with universities to develop financial scenarios for the medium term. These have not yet been shared with the sector at large; and many universities’ executives have voluntarily taken salary cuts. While there is little yet articulated regarding austerity in the South African context, aside from murmurings, it is assumed that global economic echoes will resonate here and that our deep national economic crisis will exacerbate the financial challenges facing universities.

Marketisation Digitally mediated forms of teaching and learning provision have been on the agenda for a while now and the private sector has recognised this as an opportunity. Recent years have seen the rise of Online Programme Managers (OPMs), private companies whose business model offers ‘partnerships’ to move university programmes online, usually taking half the profits. Public universities have been coming to grips with the complexities of these very new relationships. But suddenly, private education firms say they have been ‘inundated with requests from universities to help them deliver online education next year’. This sector is now worth an estimated US$7 billion, growing apace, and it is projected that COVID-19 will substantially ‘accelerate this trend’. These relationships are described as ones where ‘the private party bears risk and management responsibility, and where remuneration is linked to performance’.

Clearly, private company interests are in relationships that will assure them of profits. Higher education is also seeing a growing relationship between private education companies and governments. Coursera currently has formal relationships with 16 governments around the world (Australia, Brunei, Columbia, Egypt, France, India, Kazakhstan, Malaysia, Mexico, Pakistan , Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, UAE, USA, Uruguay). Since the outbreak of the pandemic I am told that Amazon has contacted heads of government worldwide to offer educational assistance.

offering free access to educational materials and resources as a temporary offering during institutional closures.

A new ecosystem shaped by big corporates

This is a bleak description of the state of public higher education and its mission of developing and sharing knowledge for the public good. And it is made more bleak given that the South African economy is in a formal recession. With the Government prioritising direct redistributive financial measures as a result of the lockdown, it seems unlikely that South African universities will be bailed out by the state.

Overall, what is being consolidated during this period is a new ecosystem where the templates for the contractual relationships, governance and delivery frameworks are increasingly being provided and shaped by big corporates. Coursera, for example, now has partnerships with Amazon, Alibaba and Facebook, with universities contributing the content and the brand. The message from the World Bank has been clear: these companies are regarded as the ones who can ‘deliver to scale’.

As the University of Cape Town’s SARChI Research Chair in Intellectual Property, Professor Caroline Ncube, points out in a recent podcast, these are offerings of goodwill which do not address the regulatory frameworks of intellectual property for the public interest. These offerings are loss-leaders which risk locking students into using resources which they will then have to pay for on the date that the temporary offerings cease.

On high alert

Coursera is an excellent case exemplifying the enactment of both alternate forms of accreditation as well as pathways into the formal systems of accreditation which universities use. These alternative forms of accreditation are likely to gain increased legitimacy through this pandemic.

The point, though, is not to be alarmist or apocalyptic. The point is that all who care about the premise Governments are of education for the generally failing to bail good of society as a out universities and where whole need to be on high alert. There is no they do offer support, the hiding from reality; it is sector is having to explain essential to recognise and acknowledge the why these funds will size of the crisis as well as the threat. not be enough.

Coursera has seen enrolments up by 644% since last year and enrolments from Africa are up by 51%. (This is the second highest increase: India is up 60%). The latter is an enormous escalation and will also mean that cash-strapped students in an economically difficult environment are likely to find these alternative online options more viable and affordable than continued traditional university enrolment. A last point (for now) about marketisation. Numerous private companies have been

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

What is needed right now is unity of purpose in order to make decisions that will save public higher education and enable it to be reshaped for the unknown future. Higher education scholars often comment how hard it is to change higher education. For decades nothing changes in higher education and now in a few weeks everything is changing. As many, including Yuval Noah Harari have observed, the decisions being made now will shape the future: ‘This is the most important thing people need to realise ... that we have a lot of choices. And very important decisions are going to be taken in the next month or two. It’s a short window of opportunity when history is moving into ... fast forward. It’s accelerating. Governments are willing to experiment to try ideas which previously would have sounded crazy. And once this is over, the order will solidify again.’ continued next page...

Image: Ian Barbour/Flickr

Universities, academics, students and the state right now need to work together to make decisions in the short term that will serve the greater goals of the future of higher education and will reassert the key principles of public higher education for the public good. The alternatives – the collapse of the sector, or one designed to serve unregulated profiteering interests of global elites – are far worse. While recent history in South Africa has understandably focused on state capture, there is a less visible global threat to higher education in the form of corporate capture. This is a time to set aside differences of opinion within higher education communities. This is not the moment to argue about which form of open education is the most appropriate nor which strategy to achieve social equity is the most ideal. It is the time for unity of purpose. This is a time to develop a more nuanced understanding of the actors in the private sector. There is a big difference between barely regulated big corporations creating systems that monetise student data, and an ecosystem that includes regulated private sector providers where the terms of the relationships are determined by public universities, and where regulatory frameworks are premised on the public interest. It is extremely important not to conflate the affordances of the technology with the business models which are currently dominant. It is more necessary than ever to distinguish between what the technology makes possible and the purposes for which they are presently being used. The affordances of current technology are astonishing: in the pandemic they can save lives; in higher education they can support at-risk students and they can save educators from much drudgery allowing them to focus on what humans are really good at – teaching. Just because most current business models are exploiting these technologies by profiting from student experiences and violating their privacy does not mean that there aren’t ethical options. These exist, and with time, investment and commitment, many more are possible.

No one has the luxury of the real deal There is an understandable aversion right now to technology being used as the primary medium for teaching and learning in the crisis. The way it is being used is uneven and partial – of that there is no question. Levels of preparation and readiness for the pivot online vary hugely.

The current use of technology for teaching and learning is not the real deal; it is an emergency response to enable teaching in a crisis. No one has the luxury of the real deal right now. That involves careful planning and considered expertise, and the development of an infrastructure which few universities have had the foresight to put in place. As one of the participants from an African university argued in a recent webinar, remote teaching right now is the lesser of two evils. The prime evil would be the complete collapse of the public higher education system and all that it stands for, followed by its replacement with a profitdriven system that serves only those who can pay. Across the education landscape there are huge numbers of examples of outstanding teaching, premised on critical pedagogy, shaped by equity goals, and many of these are already digitally mediated. Academics and students are presently showing extraordinary resilience and imagination to develop adaptable, creative and varied solutions to meet changing teaching and learning needs. Through structured collaboration it is possible for these to be aggregated, gain traction and be shared on an ongoing basis. There is much to be done, including ensuring that hurried contracts being

signed between universities and online education providers at present contain clear processes for future review, that internal online capacity is strengthened, that digital regulatory frameworks that are currently out of sync with the public interest are revisited and that open education opportunities are leveraged. Active collaboration will expand this agenda. The pandemic has forced a terrible disruption. In order to save the principles on which public higher education is founded, COVID-19 can and must be an opportunity for an additional pivot – one that helps to consolidate coalitions, which, working closely with the state, will enable us first to salvage and then reshape public higher education for a more equitable future. Professor Laura Czerniewicz is the director of the Centre for Innovation in Learning and Teaching at the University of Cape Town, South Africa. She has worked in education in a number of roles with a continuous focus on digital inequality. She has recently been the South African lead on an ESRC-NRF (Economic and Social Research CouncilNational Research Foundation) funded project on the ‘Unbundled University’, researching emerging models of teaching and learning provision.

This article was originally published by University World News, Africe Edition, 30 April 2020. Subscribe to UWN at www.universityworldnews.com

Connect ® Volume 13, no. 2 ® Semester 2, 2020

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Connect 13 02

Articles inside

The struggle to save & remake public higher education

Casual not so casual

Building an inclusive post-COVID higher education sector

Delegate profile: Izrin Ariff

Undermining the dominance of neoliberalism before it undermines us

Celebrating casual activism in Qld universities

We are Zoomed

COVID-19: The casual pandemic

Delegate profile: Siobhan Irving

Union win! $6m in casual wage theft uncovered at UniMelb

Wage theft is running rampart in higher education

Secure research and teaching funding

As casuals, we are vulnerable to wage theft exploitation

Precarity increases threat of wage theft

NTCC addresses crisis of casualisation