On the treadmill of precarious labour

Bill Skinner, University of Adelaide

I’m an anthropologist and early career researcher at the University of Adelaide. I’ve just begun work on a three year, half-time research contract, on an ARC-funded project studying social and cultural aspects of water management and water risks in South Australian agriculture.

The focus is on near-urban farming regions including McLaren Vale just south of Adelaide, and Langhorne Creek, which sits on a floodplain near Lake Alexandrina right at the very end of the Murray-Darling system. The project is led by colleagues in Anthropology and Geography, and we’re looking at relationships between practice, policy, local cultures and histories of water management.

I find the ways practice is informed by social and cultural factors fascinating (and timely, when it comes to water and environmental matters), and I’m lucky to be working with great people on this project. It’s been a lot of fun getting back into fieldwork, which I haven’t done much of since finishing my PhD five years ago.

Most of my time since PhD completion, however, has been spent on the treadmill of precarious casual labour which would be very familiar to a lot of NTEU members – semester-long tutoring and lecturing contracts, picking up bits and pieces of research work here and there. I love teaching, and have had the opportunity to deliver courses in really interesting areas and with some engaged and enthusiastic students: anthropologies of eating, drinking, and consumption. But all the while, I’ve been watching opportunities for more permanent work dry up.

There are now only about half the number of academic staff in my department than there were when I began my PhD a decade ago. As staff leave, they are simply not being replaced. I can see the weight that this is placing on overworked faculty members: teaching and admin loads are going up, and they are struggling to maintain teaching and research quality (or just to keep their heads above water!).

Tied to this has been the place of casual work. Universities around Australia have increasingly used casual labour to plug the gaps created by downsizing the salaried workforce. A casualised workforce is a ‘flexible’ one. Of course, this means that whenever savings need to be made, it’s casuals who bear much of the brunt. In the past year underpayment of casual workers – wage theft – has been a widely-publicised problem across Australian universities, and one that the NTEU has fought against.

The COVID-19 pandemic has wrought great changes across the tertiary education sector. We’ve seen massive disruption to international students’ ability to study in Australia, and moves toward online modes of learning and teaching. Universities have used the pandemic as justification for further cost-cutting – in particular, slashing casual teaching contracts.

While messages from management stress that staff are ‘all in it together’, emphasising minimal disruption to permanent employees, casuals have been left out of this equation. Disposability is built into our working conditions. This is the case among casually-engaged workers everywhere, but for educators working on semester-by-semester, non-overlapping contracts (who can therefore rarely demonstrate ongoing employment), transition to more permanent work is very difficult.

While permanent university staff are, understandably, worried about their own working conditions in the face of the pay cuts, enforced leave, and promotion freezes introduced in response to COVID, their concerns are very different to those of casuals.

We have a large proportion of university workers without any job security, and without a clear pathway for achieving transition to more stable forms of employment. Higher education was locked out of the Federal Government’s JobKeeper scheme.

All of this has been to say that a union is only as strong as its members. A strong NTEU is one with high levels of representation from all parts of the industry, including (especially!) its most precarious workers.

I’m now in the happy position of having secure research employment. Though I will augment it with other teaching work, it is a big step up in terms of job security from a casual-only arrangement. A sector built on precarious workers that can be cut loose on a whim is not a pleasant place for anyone. We can only achieve a more equitable university system by fighting together for it.