Casuals in Higher Education: The Research Workforce Campaign
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Opportunities to work as a tutor, research assistant or lecturer while undertaking a postgraduate degree can be exciting, challenging and rewarding. Unfortunately, for too many postgrads, these opportunities can become an endless spiral of countless hours of underpaid or unpaid labour, which becomes a significant barrier to research students' capacity to work on the ever-present thesis. Scholarships that provide an income of just below the poverty line, and the significant numbers of students undertaking degrees without scholarships, ensure that most postgrads will seek part- or full-time work at some point during their candidature, if not throughout their studies. Many of Australia's campus postgraduate associations have campaigned for fair conditions and remuneration for casuals for years, whilst CAPA and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) have also long fought against the increasing casualisation of higher education. This year CAPA is driving the Research Workforce Campaign to advocate for major sectoral reform, while the Government has formed its Research Workforce Strategy Reference Group (of which the CAPA National President is a member). Join the Casuals Group via the link below, join your local postgrad association on campus, and become a member of the NTEU, and play a part in major sectoral reform to end exploitation of casual labour on campuses. It's time the 'silent academic underclass' that provides half the sector's teaching found its voice.
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The following excerpt is from the RED Report - Recognition, Enhancement, Development: The contribution of sessional teachers to higher education
Professor Rob Castle
Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic and International)
University of Wollongong
Sessional teachers are the hidden part of the massification that has taken place in higher education in Australia over the last 30 years. One of the greatest achievements of the Australian higher education system has been the growth of student access to university study, and this could not have been achieved without the massive contribution of sessional staff.
Between 40 and 50 per cent of teaching in Australian higher education is currently done by sessional staff. This has been largely unacknowledged, and while areas such as standardisation of pay rates have been addressed over time, there are a whole range of other issues which have not been adequately dealt with, and which as a university system we can no longer ignore.
To maintain for permanent staff the ideal of being teaching and research academics, we have had to rely on sessional staff. The analogy I’ve always made with sessional staff is to describe them as the proletariat of the academic profession, but that Victorian description of an industrial working class just doesn’t fit as well as that other part of Victorian life, the domestic servant. In many ways the lifestyle of the traditional teaching research academic is totally dependent on the contribution of sessional staff, in the way that Victorian middle class lifestyles were dependent on the domestic servant. They slept in the attic, ate in the kitchen and you grumbled constantly that what they did was actually not quite what you wanted. But nonetheless, they were absolutely essential to your being and to your lifestyle. I think this applies equally to many sessional staff today.
Today, we need to think about not just the specifics pertaining to sessional teaching staff, but to ask ourselves ‘who is to do the teaching and what sort of teaching are we to do?’ We must organise teaching in a way that provides a meaningful experience for our students and all our staff, including permanent staff that have come under increasing pressure during this last 30 years.
Contradictory positions such as ‘I deplore casualisation – but of course I’ve got my research grant and I need teaching relief for it so therefore I have to be bought out of teaching’ are simply no longer valid. Our times require us to think smarter; to work out, with teaching modes such as blended learning and e-teaching available, which combinations will optimise the contribution of all staff.
Teaching in a university, in my view, has to be made more professional. Whether it is coming from sessional staff or permanent staff, we can no longer afford a 19th century attitude of amateurism to operate in terms of tertiary teaching. Working out where sessional staff fit into that and ensuring they are not exploited is a real challenge. These things have obvious budget implications and university budgets are not a magic pudding. The amount of resourcing that is going to go into universities is not going to increase dramatically in the next few years. But if we are to provide a quality education for our students, we are compelled to look at all of the people who teach in universities, not just the permanent teaching and research elite.