COVID, casuals & workplace safety
The La Trobe University Casuals Network have been collecting evidence for weeks of the inconsistent, incomplete and often disturbing information being distributed to teaching staff in the lead up to the resumption of face to face teaching.
We had to collect this material through our comrades in permanent and fixed-term positions. As at many universities, casual teaching staff at La Trobe often are unsure about whether they will be required for teaching until the last minute, and, at the point of writing, some of our comrades who have been teaching for the past two weeks have been doing so without any formal contract.
Informal sharing of information Unsurprisingly, therefore, casual teaching staff were completely out of the loop about COVID provisions and only found out through the solidarity of more secure workers who shared the information through informal channels. What we did manage to learn was extremely concerning. Protocols were extremely inconsistent between schools and work areas – itself a cause for concern – but we found evidence of the following: • Staff being tasked with policing students’ compliance to wearing face masks in class and managing social distancing in the classroom – up to and including calling security guards on non-compliant students. This is damaging to the pedagogical relationship all teaching staff strive to build in their classrooms. Requiring students to disclose medical information pertaining to mask wearing – presumably in the classroom and in front of their peers – is an invasion of privacy. Many staff also felt that this responsibility opened them to the potential for harassment or abuse at work. To police students in an already pressured and abnormal environment would only increase stress and tension – no support or training was offered to us in enacting this new responsibility.
Anastasia Kanjere La Trobe University
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• Staff being required to clean classrooms after teaching. Teaching staff have no training in this standard of cleaning, nor were any instructions provided on how to
Connect ® Volume 14, no. 1 ® Semester 1, March 2021
check and ensure safety standards are met. The ‘sanitation kit’ (see image) – one of which was made available per staff member per semester – gives a sense of how underequipped teaching staff were to perform these tasks. Furthermore, given that workers for Cirka (the La Trobe cleaning contractor) are currently un- or under-employed, we are concerned about their employment prospects being reduced through a reliance on our unpaid labour. • Staff being expected to instruct students in COVID-19 cleaning of their workspaces – including offering a disposal of waste service for used antibacterial wipes. Some students were told that they should clean their workstations before and after classes – disposing their iso-wipes ‘in the plastic bag provided by your teacher’. This appears to imply that teaching staff were responsible for disposing of waste products. A waste bag is not included in the Sanitation Kit (pictured), nor do we think it is safe or appropriate to ask teaching staff to dispose of potentially contagious materials. • Staff being instructed to examine classrooms for adequate ventilation for COVID-19 safety before classes resume. The managers who made this recommendation were clearly motivated by concern for staff and students – recognising that the University’s haphazard protocols meant that staff might have to take their safety into their own hands. Indeed, several members of the Casuals Network did find themselves assigned to rooms with insufficient space, insufficient seating or both for the size of their tutorials. Notwithstanding the best intentions behind these communications, however, they place an onerous responsibility on already overburdened staff. Needless to say, casual teaching staff have not received training in assessing ventilation or air-flow. Furthermore, given that few casual staff had
