COVID-19: The casual pandemic

Tricia Daly, Macquarie University

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.

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.

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.

Many casuals are forced to straddle multiple institutions and occupations just to buy food, to pay rent or a mortgage and to cover other day-today living or medical expenses. Casuals working in more than one job to survive are then taxed at a higher rate for having a second or third job. At the same time, many Vice- Chancellors are now paid more than $1 million per year – significantly more than the Prime Minister.

Tim Gouw/Unsplash

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’.

COVID-19 exacerbates and intensifies the casual experience of high levels of wage theft. A recent study of casuals at the University of Sydney found casuals are systematically overworked and underpaid. This study found, at least 46% of casuals are experiencing a ‘significant increase’ in unpaid work during COVID-19.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.