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The Concern over Rising Academic Casualisation: An Interview with Joe McCarthy By Kristine Giam & Giselle Laszok Recently, Woroni interviewed Joe McCarthy, a convenor and tutor with over a decade of tutoring experience at ANU, about the concern over rising academic casualisation at the University. In the interview, McCarthy highlighted the sheer growth of expected working hours of casual academics, the damaging impact growing casualisation has on casual tutors, convenors, and students alike, and the inadequate response by ANU. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Joe McCarthy: “Because students’ degrees are usually three to four years and they just don’t really pay attention to the ANU annual reports, go look at the annual education data the Australian government has, you just don’t know how much things have changed. And things have changed a lot. If you have a look at the data for ANU, there’s been an increase from about 80 Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs)* in 2009 to 410 FTE in 2019. [One FTE] adds up to about 1725 hours. This is what the government requires them - to just state what the FTE numbers are - but they don’t give us headcount figures [of the number of casual workers] at all. A
way to think about the magnitudes is that you are seeing it increase five fold in the space of ten years. You just do a simple multiplication and go 80 x 1725 and 410 x 1725 and you can see how many hours in teaching that has increased, and it’s gone up to like 707,922 hours. That just shows the magnitude of the increase, and it’s really quite problematic.” *Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) is a unit of measurement used in a way to make work-loads comparable between different contexts. Woroni: How does the casualisation of academic staff impact casual tutors and convenors? JM: “This move to academic casualisation could be problematic in a few ways. It’s problematic because it means that they’re cheaper because you’re not having to have long service leave requirements, sick leave, and so forth. But sometimes that can be balanced out with the twenty five per cent loading. Personally, I don’t think that is the big issue with regards to casualisation.
