Women in casual work in academia: Disempowerment disguised as freedom

Anonymous NTEU Member

The first offer of work at the university feels like a great honour, a major achievement. How could you say no? How could you consider what working long term in this casual role would mean for your future? How could it possibly have any negative implications for your future, such a prestigious opportunity?

Casual work at the university is presented as an opportunity to build your experience and knowledge towards a long term career in academia. Perhaps no one says it out loud (or maybe they do but most certainly not in writing), but it is implied that there will be some payoff for your hard (and sometimes unpaid) work in terms of an academic position. And this subtle implication makes it seem like a good choice for the future.

Working causally is a bonus for you; it is a great advantage. You can choose your work hours. You will have fewer responsibilities. You will have freedom. You will get paid more to do less. Less will be expected of you. That is the promise of casual work. The reality, however, looks very different.

The casual reality

Casual positions are not given to staff to see how well they work, with the intention of them converting to a permanent contract in the future. There is no legal obligation for the university to allow or encourage long term casual employees to convert to any other basis of employment. Yet teaching at the university is not ‘casual’ in any sense of the word. There are many responsibilities connected to academic teaching. The work does not end at the end of the tutorial, nor does it end at the end of the semester. A long term casual employee is, by consequence of their ongoing involvement in teaching, also involved in course and assessment development, which generally occurs after the completion of the course. This work is often completed on an unofficial ‘voluntary’ basis, with the knowledge that the time invested will make the course run more smoothly in future semesters, where the casual employee will teach the course again in the future, though of course they can never be sure. There are, in fact, six months of the year in which casual employees are completely unpaid, so it is no surprise that this is such a popular solution for the university. Casual employees face the challenge of being without work or pay for half of the year, and also require any additional work they do find to fit within the rigid university teaching schedule. Thus, rather than having additional freedom, long term casual employees spend their (unpaid) ‘holidays’ considering how they might make ends meet.

Starting a family

In addition to the not so casual nature of the ‘casual’ roles at the university, being employed casually means losing the freedom to make certain important lifestyle decisions. For example, starting a family on a casual wage is hugely problematic. Concerns associated with creating a secure environment for your family, such as getting a home loan, become extremely difficult, if not impossible. Banks do not want to give loans to casual workers, least of all when their hours fluctuate or their employers cannot guarantee their future employment, and certainly not when in each casual contract stands a clause which states that every casual employee can be fired with one hour’s notice.

Further, there is no payment for maternity leave, even after years of continuous employment. Casuals can take maternity leave without pay, but there is no real assurance of re-employment after having the child because there was no real job security in the first place. No matter how long a casual employee carries out their role and no matter how well they do it, casual staff are always replaceable. There is no legislation that truly stops casuals from being replaced, if they choose to take time off work to carry out parental (or any other) duties.

Flexibility?

Casual work promises to be flexible, promises that the employee could change their shifts just as easily as the employer is able to change them. In reality, casual employees cannot chose their hours at all. Casual workers have the choice of taking the hours that are given to them or their hours are at risk of being given to someone else.

Additionally, casual employees do not even have the possibility of taking sick leave. In a work environment dominated by casual employees, there is a strong implication that if someone is sick they still need to come to work. Rarely, almost never, is anyone asked to do relief work. And this is understandable of course, because as a casual, you will not be paid if you call in sick. This in and of itself is problematic, but in the time of COVID, such a workplace culture is even more concerning. There is no financial or career related freedom associated with casual work, instead there is pure uncertainty, fear and insecurity.

Unhealthy power structures

Though it often goes unrecognised, there is a direct link between casual work and the pre-existing power structures in the university, which favour men over women. A simple stroll through the university, a look at the names on office doors, a review of the photos of the heads of department over the years, hung celebratorily in the office corridors, will tell the story of a university dominated by male power, although the feminist narrative put forward by the university might try to suggest otherwise. Men are more often able to work overtime, are often not the ones expected to pick up their children from school and bring them to their extracurricular activities. Casual roles are given to women because ‘women require flexibility’ since they are the ones who continue to be expected to carry out carer roles for their families.

Permanent roles are not offered to women because they are not always able to work the same hours as men, yet women year in and year out show up to their jobs and carry out their work, but instead of giving women part time contracts, women are simply given a casual contract. Women are kept in positions of powerlessness within the university system because of being forced into casual roles with the ‘freedom’ they offer. In the simple act of granting a man a secure position and giving the woman a ‘flexible’ casual role, the power has been taken away from the female worker and given to the male worker, to decide when, how, and how often the woman is allowed to work.

Female workers become answerable to the male workers through the perpetuation of such structures in the workplace. This leads to significant differences in men’s and women’s salaries, necessarily as women employed casually are paid only for half of the year. This also results in women frequently being placed in positions of powerlessness in the workplace, which has a flow on effect in the rest of their lives.

The value of our work

People outside of the university system, as well as the students within it, may assume that the people delivering this highly important, valuable, not to mention costly, education at the university are employed on a fair, equal basis. Women are delivering high quality education and research at the university, but not under the same conditions as men.

Just because a woman works in the morning and leaves earlier to collect her children from school does not mean that the work she is doing is less significant, academic, ongoing or important than the work completed by male staff. For a young woman, making decisions about which workplaces to aim to be a part of, working at the university appears to promise much more than it turns out to offer in reality. The term casual is an ill fitting description for any form of academic engagement. Academic teaching is complex and it does not simply come to a halt when classes end. Universities need to be held accountable for the fact that their ongoing employment of long term employees as ‘casual’ staff members is significantly contributing to the broader social issue of sexism and unfair treatment of women in the workplace and within society. The author of this article is an NTEU member at an Australian university who wishes to remain anonymous.

"The term casual is an ill fitting description for any form of academic engagement. Academic teaching is complex and it does not simply come to a halt when classes end.