Early WGEA data reveals COVID impact

Terri MacDonald, Director, Policy & Research

When giving evidence at the Senate Committee hearing into the Job-Ready Graduates package last year, and this year at the Senate Select Committee into Secure Jobs, the NTEU warned that the mass redundancies in higher education will almost certainly see insecure employment increase even further.

With Universities Australia announcing the loss of more than 17,300 jobs in 2020 alone, and further losses in the thousands so far in 2021, the NTEU has been gathering evidence on not only where these losses have occurred, but looking at their impact on the remaining workforce.

The job losses come at same time as the regressive changes bought in by the Federal Government via the Job-Ready Graduates package last year mean that universities must now teach more students with less funding per student, on average.

Indeed, the 2021 Federal Budget saw a cut to the Commonwealth’s Grants Scheme funding by almost 10% in real terms over forward estimates.

What this means is that while jobs have disappeared, the work has not. In fact it has intensified, with the ‘Costello baby boom’ generation reaching university entrance age (and set to continue to increase, until peaking in 2024-25).

What we are looking at is a ‘perfect storm’ scenario for insecure work to become the predominant form of employment in higher education. Yet, at the same time, casual and short term contract positions are the first to be affected as university managements ‘throw the lever’ on employment numbers as a mechanism to deal with immediate budget shortfalls – as COVID proved to be the case, on a national scale.

In the first part of 2020, we saw thousands of short term contract, casual and sessional staff miss out on work, as the first wave of lockdowns hit the country and courses moved online.

Then, as the impact of border closures and billions in lost university revenue came into play, universities commenced their redundancy rounds (often in excess of what their actual loss of income was, meaning that some university managements viewed COVID as less a crisis than an opportunity).

Regardless of intentions, last year the NTEU forewarned policy makers that, while tertiary education was already one of the most casualised sectors in the Australian economy (with only retail and hospitality at a higher levels), once the waves of job losses are through the system we would almost certainly see an acceleration of precarious employment in higher education.

Unfortunately, the early evidence is showing that the Union’s warnings to policy makers are justified.

Employers reports from the Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA) for this year are starting to show some interesting contrast between 2020 and 2021. Usually undertaken in April, these employer reports are a snapshot in time of an organisation’s workforce and its gender equity policies.

Importantly, the WGEA reports provide information on staffing by headcount. While WGEA doesn’t break down staffing by academic/general staff cohorts, it is useful in that it gives an indication of headcount staffing numbers overall.

While this year’s employer reports have been delayed, a few universities have started to forward their reports. As the NTEU is an organisation that represents staff of these employers, universities are legislatively obligated to forward a copy to the Union.

Due to the delay in reporting, only a few reports have so far come through. That said, we can already clearly see there are major declines in staffing data.

Figures 1 and 2 show the results from two Group of Eight universities – the Australian National University and the University of Adelaide. These two universities are worth noting as research intensive institutions that have been reliant on international student fee income to subsidise their research (and teaching), and as such both have been impacted by the border closures.

At ANU, the bulk of job losses can be seen in the permanent areas – with 216 full time staff and 82 part time staff gone in the 12 months between reports. While there are also significant job losses for casual staff,

with 326 casual staff lost, interestingly the percentage of insecure staff as a proportion of all non-management staff does not really change between 2019/2020 and 2020/2021.

However, at ANU, it’s worth looking at the difference in management staffing numbers between the two reports. In 2019 –2020, ANU Management totalled 484 staff, out of an all staff number of 6,300. As a percentage, this meant management categories were 7.6% of all staff.

In the 2020-2021 reports, ANU Management total 435 staff members, out of a figure of 5,521 all staff. As a percentage, this meant there was a small increase in the proportion of management staff, at 7.8%. Looking at this, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, while there are job losses for both management and non-management staff, the brunt of the redundancy pain is not being felt by the managers of the institution.

The WGEA report for University of Adelaide also presents an interesting picture of that institution during COVID, albeit in a slightly different way to ANU.

What is immediately noticeable is the dramatic increase in casual numbers – of some 345 staff members. According to the WGEA report, this is due to a major increase in clerical and administrative staff (in fact, there was a drop in ‘professional’ casual staff, from 357 to 240) going from 161 reported in 2019/2020 report to 623 in the 2020/2021 report.

But what about management numbers? In 2019-2020, there were 504 management staff at University of Adelaide reported to WGEA, out of a total of 4,392 staff. The meant that management staff comprised some 11.47% of all staff. In 2020-2021, there were 474 management staff members reported to WGEA, out of a total of 4,492 staff. This comprised 10.5% of all staff – a fall of around 1% from the previous year.

So, while there was a slight decrease in management numbers, there was a real spike in the casual staffing – what does this mean? Well, while there was also a slight increase in the number of full-time permanent staff (up by 39), part time permanent and both full time and part time contract staff all fell significantly.

It must be pointed out that there are a number of caveats with these numbers – firstly, WGEA’s reporting deadline extension may mean that the census date was different in the two reports, and there can be considerable seasonal variations around casual employment. Secondly, our experience tells us that universities tend to move their staff in and out of different categories on an ad hoc basis, which can muddy the waters between academic and professional staff in particular, (and potentially may be a factor in the changes in casual numbers for ‘clerical and administration’ and ‘professional’ at the University of Adelaide).

However, the data in the WGEA reports is still worth paying attention to, particularly when it gives an indication of how university managements have directed staff redundancies at their institution. At ANU, while there is pain all round, the losses are definitely greater for non-management staff. At the University of Adelaide, we can see losses for part time and contract staff, with their work most likely being doing by more casuals.

We need to wait to see more employer reports before we have a fuller understanding of what the overall response by the sector has been, and it is important to note that these reports, as snapshots at a point in time, don’t give us the entire picture. However, given there are usually twelve month (or more) delays in the publishing of national staffing data (via the Department of Education) and casual staffing numbers are reported by the Government as full time equivalent (rather than as head counts), we do need to pay attention to what we see in these figures, particularly when it backs up what we hear from members who are at the coalface of these changes.

A further consideration is that with many universities about to commence (or have already started) bargaining, the information we see in these reports is becoming even more relevant. Clearly, we can assume that the reduction in staffing will have implications for debates around workload models, leave processes, and areas such as change management processes.

Each institution is responding in slightly different ways, but the overall pattern is clear – jobs are being lost, and that even with the initial loss of casual work that we saw last year, permanent roles are being replace with insecure positions.

As a Union we will ensure our campaigning and political lobbying takes into account these developments, but with a Government more interested in pork barrelling car parks than safeguarding quality education, the long term future of the university sector is looking far less certain.