Casual staff make up 40% of the total academic staff in Australian universities. According to statistics given to the Australian Government by Monash in 2011, there are over 5,000 ‘full time equivalent’ staff members and anywhere between 8,000 and 13,000 Monash staff (depending on who you ask and when). A ‘full time equivalent’ staff position can be made up by multiple people, working to make up the hours of a full time staff member. As casual employees, they lose many of the benefits that full time staff are entitled to; they are not paid if they can’t come to work due to illness or when their tutorial or lecture is not run because of a public holiday. These conditions are much like those of hospitality and retail jobs which many students are forced to tolerate, but expect to change once they graduate. In addition, casual teaching staff are not paid during university holidays and therefore have to find other work at these times.
Casual staff tend to work on ‘rolling contracts’, regardless of performance. This means that they are employed on a year to year basis. This insecure employment allows the University complete discretion whether or not a staff person has a job next term. Often, academics are assigned their new course for the semester with minimal time to prepare, as during the summer break they were unemployed and unsure if they would have work come first semester. This means they must do the course preparation in their own time, unpaid, to ensure they are fully prepared for their subjects and able to provide the best quality education for students.
More than 50% of undergraduate teaching in Australia is done by academic staff with no job security, according to the Monash branch of the NTEU (National Tertiary Education Union). This forces many of the casually employed lecturers and tutors to work at multiple universities, undertaking various subjects. Consequently they are not always on campus for students to enquire after. While they can be reached via email, the time they take to respond is usually unpaid. Casually employed teaching staff are paid on an hourly rate which is only three hours pay (one hour of delivery, two hours of preparation) for a basic lecture or tutorial. This is according to unicasual.com, a website set up by the NTEU and CAPA (Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations) to assist increasing amounts of casual staff in knowing their rights and to share experiences. In reality, face-to-face assistance should be an option for all students as it is usually more effective than email correspondence.
The NTEU national president Jeannie Rea has commented that “Casual academics spend limited time on campus and can’t often be available for students seeking advice or feedback. Many do not have an office or a phone; they don’t get paid to spend time giving students support”.
This not only affects us students in that we do not get enough time with our tutors and lecturers, but if we want to pursue an academic career, we are likely to be employed under these precarious and unfair conditions. A further discouraging factor is the fact that at many universities, after finishing postgraduate study, tutors will continue to be casually employed. This lacking of younger people joining the academic workforce is a concern as the average age of full time staff is increasing. This could lead to an increasing age gap between students and staff, a whole generation missing in the university teaching and research sector.
The university is trying to replace face-to-face teaching with online tutorials and forums, which can be helpful in addition to face-to-face teaching, but cannot replace it completely. If students wanted to study out of the classroom they would choose to study though an online course. However, it is evident that students who choose on-campus learning, prefer to be on campus with their teachers and fellow students.
With the Monash University Council’s cooperation with the state government’s legislation to remove elected students and staff from University Council and the recent federal tertiary education cuts, we can expect this situation to get much worse. , University Management has reduced their accountability to the Monash community ,making business decisions without being accountable to the students, or rather, “customers”. They understand that having the complete authority to dismiss staff is in their best financial interests. We are paying high tuition fees for quality education, not to subsidise poorly planned short-term business initiatives.
The NTEU at Monash have been in negotiations with the university management since August 2012 for a new industrial agreement, including secure jobs and reasonable workloads. The union says that without an agreement they will be forced to take industrial action. This action may have an impact on our classes; however the working rights of our teaching and administrative staff need to be supported, especially by us students.
