Casual not so casual

Claire Gaskin, Deakin University

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.

Deakin University 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.

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.

Image: Oladimeji Ajegbile/Pexels

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.

If I was employed fulltime I could afford to be available full time. If I had an income that meant I could pay my bills, I would not mind doing a little extra here and there out of good will. Like most people nowadays I answer work emails outside of work hours, including weekends. But when you have five employers expecting you to do the added administrative requirements that go along with a job, it is untenable, unsustainable.

I have been reprimanded for saying I cannot make a meeting at one institution because I am teaching at another at that time. I have employers say to me that they have been emailing and trying to ring me all day, when I have been teaching during the time they were trying to contact me. I have different institutions that all have different systems chasing me for paperwork. They look at me and roll their eyes and say, ‘She’s creative’. It is not because I am a creative, or disorganised or do not care that I can be slow with getting paperwork done. It can take a whole morning to deal with a contract for $199 to deliver a lecture that then takes a week to write. At one university a course has been offered on how to get paid your wage, it takes time and considerable effort to work out and get onto a university’s pay system.

As a casual you cannot complain or bargain. If you complain, you do not get sacked, you just do not get re-employed. You can be replaced by someone who has the means to be available for unpaid work. It got worse every year. There is the turn of the screw, I was asked to do more for less every year.

I feel like a hired gun. I go I teach I leave. I cannot get involved with social events at 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.

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

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 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

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 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.