AUSTRALIA: Majority of academics are casual

Casualisation of the Australian academic workforce has long been of concern to education unions but until now no-one knew the full extent. So revelations that casual academics far outnumber those with permanent or ongoing employment have shocked the entire community.

A study by a PhD research student at Griffith University in Brisbane found that 67,000 academics were working as casuals in the nation's universities. This means 60% of the academic workforce has no guarantee of employment and most have no holiday or sick leave entitlements.

Worse still, no matter how many years casual academics are employed as lecturers or tutors, they remain on the same hourly rate because this is the same for all casuals and experience counts for nothing.

"This should be a wake-up call for universities," said Jeannie Rea, President of the National Tertiary Education Union. "As much as 50% if not more of teaching conducted at universities is done by casual academic staff. This is not sustainable."

Rea said the scale of casualisation was a systemic issue: "The data tell us that Australian universities are running on expendable labour. This is not only counter-productive in terms of the professional development of staff. It fails to encourage loyalty to the profession, and if unchecked will deepen the oncoming academic workforce crisis."

She said that faced with the prospect of an endless cycle of insecure casual employment, engaged on a semester by semester basis, many early career academics and researchers would leave the sector for more secure and career structured employment.

"We will have another lost generation on our hands. These 67,000 casuals are performing highly skilled work at a cut-price rate. NTEU has been arguing long and hard to achieve a more secure and rewarding working life for long-term casual and early career academic staff.

"Unless the sector takes this issue seriously and provides real career opportunities for the next generation of Australian academics, it will be facing a workforce crisis in the very near future. The sector will have only itself to blame."

The study was undertaken by Robyn May who analysed membership records of the national university staff superannuation fund, UniSuper for her doctoral research. May found more than half of all casual academics were women although for the 25-45 age group the ratio was two in every three.

A report published last month by the LH Martin Institute in Melbourne says universities employ academics on sessional contracts or as casuals for a range of reasons.

These include the fact they provide a lower industrial risk to institutions, while employing and dismissing sessional staff can be much easier and involve fewer administrative hurdles.

The report says that despite the significant role casual academics play, "strikingly little information" is available about them. Obviously, the writers were unaware of the research undertaken by Robyn May.

Pointing to the serious demographic challenges facing Australian universities as a result of their ageing academic workforce, the report says demography is not the only challenge to supply: nearly half of all people obtaining Australian PhDs prefer to work outside the tertiary sector.

The uncertainty that comes with casual employment is no doubt a key factor in that decision.

geoff.maslen@uw-news.com