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.

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