Australian universities promise students a world-class education, but increasingly rely on underpaid and overworked staff to deliver it. What is the human and cultural cost of a sector built on wage theft and burnout?
An academic acquaintance once commented that university staffing resembles a class system, with professors as the aristocrats and casuals in the lowest class. She, a tenured full-time senior lecturer, was in the middle class. I was reaching the end of a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Sydney and like many Australian writers, whose earnings are well below the poverty line, was looking to casual lecturing to supplement my income as an author.
In the two years of teaching that followed, at a medium sized university, I was reminded often of her comment. Casual staff completed hours of unpaid labour, just as they do at larger universities such as the University of Melbourne, the University of Sydney, UNSW and Macquarie—all of whom have admitted to underpaying casual workers by millions of dollars. The problem is ongoing, with the La Trobe University Casuals Network, for instance, making a submission to the upcoming senate inquiry into job security. Other major universities are undertaking audits or are in dispute with casual staff. The underpayment situation at my university was no better.
Equally corrosive was the way casual and fixed-term staff were treated as irrelevant, invisible, worthless and disposable. There is a human as well as financial cost to the massive casualisation at universities Australia-wide. Alongside wage theft is profound erosion of workers’ wellbeing and sense of professional standing. A Twitter campaign against redundancies at the University of Sydney names the ‘chronic uncertainty and lack of career progression’ experienced by precarious staff. ‘I have spent years in these jobs,’ a colleague and former tutor from the University of Melbourne told me, ‘working hard in the hope of something better. Universities exploit casuals as a political and economic choice. There is nothing accidental about it.’
There is a human as well as financial cost to massive casualisation: Alongside wage theft is profound erosion of workers’ wellbeing and sense of professional standing.
A psychologist from the counselling service at another prominent university said that anxiety is a common issue for precarious workers. Uncertainty about whether contracts will be renewed creates a ‘cascade of unknowns’ that flows through other aspects of people’s lives—relationships, planning where to live, inability to apply for a mortgage. ‘In the COVID-19 pandemic, anxiety has become more heightened,’ he said, ‘because of isolation and threats of redundancy. As work becomes scarcer, people work at ever higher levels to “bump out” competitors for that single contract left on offer.’
University casual workers have been described as the first ‘shock absorbers’ in the sector of the pandemic, with ‘reports that thousands of professional and academic positions have already been abolished’. The number of actual employees (or ‘warm body numbers’ as University of Sydney’s former Vice Chancellor Michael Spence refers to them) who have lost their jobs is unknown—universities speak instead of Full Time Equivalents or FTEs. The scale of casualisation hidden behind FTEs was hinted at in a recent NSW Legislative Council committee hearing when UNSW’s Vice Chancellor Ian Jacobs disclosed that around 741 FTE positions are filled by 5,800 people. Spence revealed to the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) that 9,443 casual staff were employed at the University of Sydney in 2020, and that the casual staffing budget had been cut by 15 per cent—but did not provide numbers of people impacted.
Exploitative employment conditions don’t just affect workers: they also flow on to the quality of education students receive. As a casual unit coordinator I would have six hours per semester to design and prepare the entire unit content, oversee staff, and manage the unit for students; and two hours to prepare a weekly one-hour lecture. At around 5,000 words, a lecture takes days, not hours, to prepare. It requires reading, summarising and synthesising material, making the topic engaging for students, setting up slides with multimedia, and, in an ideal world, giving it a trial run. If I had dared to deliver a lecture that took only two hours of preparation, I would have appeared incompetent, barely able to fulfil my role and deliver what the university promises its students: a world class education that puts the student learning experience at the centre.
Exploitative employment conditions don’t just affect workers: they also flow on to the quality of education students receive.
I was told from the outset that a key concern for students was receiving written feedback on assessment items, not just stand-alone grades. And yet, like the larger universities involved in ‘wage theft’ cases, the University paid for marking on a flat rate or ‘piece work’ basis: forty-five minutes per student for three assessment items in total. In other words, fifteen minutes per assignment; and a single assignment could be up to 2,000 words. When marking, I would set a timer in a desperate attempt to stay within the fifteen minutes: five minutes to skim read, five for a light edit, five to write a comment. The fifteen minutes would expire, I’d reset the timer, often numerous times per student. This was so futile, in the end I turned it off completely. For some units I was marking over 100 students.
Casual staff were, therefore, placed in an intractable situation: instructed to deliver what students quite rightly wanted—tailored feedback—within impossible time limits.
To fail in this task is to also fail the evaluation surveys that students are encouraged to complete. As the NTEU points out, student surveys are being increasingly used for individual staff performance appraisals even though they are not designed for this purpose. One dean made clear that he would read surveys for all staff, including casuals, and that he would contact people if their results were unfavourable.
Casual staff know that to perform badly in these surveys is to risk losing more casual teaching in future. Unless we do hours of unpaid work preparing classes and marking we appear entirely unprofessional in students’ eyes.
Of course, students are not aware of these pressures. Universities are not transparent about how little they pay staff to deliver the core components of a university education. This needs to change if the promise of a world class education is to be anything more than a marketing strategy.
*
What surprises me most when looking back on this period of employment, which I left because the conditions were so demoralising, was the extent to which I internalised these structural inequities as my own deficiency. As one lecturer at UNSW, who has worked in both tenured and casual situations commented, ‘This is the permanent psychology of all workers in the academy, from casual to senior lecturer.’
Job insecurity drives casuals to meet impossible—unpaid—expectations not only because of competition for the next contract, but also the insidious hope that high performance will be rewarded with a more secure position, and what one senior lecturer at the University of Melbourne calls ‘a pervasive mantra that we’re so lucky to have a job connected to the humanities at all.’ With a 113 per cent rise in student fees for courses in the humanities and demeaning of the field in the public and political sphere, ‘the university itself makes you feel forever grateful for a job in the arts, and we internalise that as if it’s a privilege.’
What surprises me most when looking back on this period of employment was how much I internalised structural inequities as my own deficiency.
Staff work long days and weekends in part because of competition with colleagues. The ‘cult of productivity’, with 80-hour weeks wielded as a badge of honour, and attendant risk of burnout, exists in other fields too—from banking to global health (the latter exacerbated by the pandemic). ‘In academia,’ a friend at the University of Sydney told me, ‘you can never just be humming along doing the median, you have to always be punching above your weight. To get a promotion you need to be already exceeding expectations, and there is never enough time built in structurally to meet the university’s “expectation framework”.’ A former head of program at Monash recalled a staff meeting where the head of school listed tasks for all staff. ‘This is clearly not possible,’ he said, ‘and while I’ll try to get as much done as I can, what is our first priority?’ To which the head replied, ‘Everything we do is our first priority.’
*
I arrived at weekly lectures feeling unprepared even though I’d dedicated two-and-a-half days—not hours—of unpaid work to each lecture. It never seemed enough. One of my neighbours taught for years at Oxford and mentioned to me that it takes him a week to write a lecture. Somehow, though, I felt I was failing because I couldn’t write one in two hours.
‘Just use what you know,’ well-meaning tenured colleagues offered. ‘Don’t put too much work into it.’
When I spoke to a respected work associate and professor about the demeaning conditions of sessional work she said: ‘Focus on your own writing. Remember this is only your day job.’
The imagined ballast and compensation of a writing life (one which pays, in a good year, an average of $12,900, and in others barely a cent) is not enough when casual staff are bringing up families, paying mortgages or rent. People do not work lightly in this way, or without consequence. There is stigma attached to casual academic work and careers stall—do too much of it and you’re branded a ‘teaching workhorse, rather than a research star’.
The University of Melbourne, for instance, employs 72.9 per cent of staff as casuals or on short-term contracts. It is representative of the broader sector, with 68.74 per cent of staff employed on insecure terms across Victoria’s academic institutions, and an estimated 90,000 insecure positions across universities Australia-wide. These figures stymie any notion of a traditional academic career where you work your way upwards.
Instead of moving overseas to greener pastures, many of Australia’s best early- and mid-career academics are now lost to dead-end positions and burnout.
I know some who have been teaching casually for a decade or two, aged in their thirties, forties and fifties—a whole generation of highly qualified, accomplished, well-published individuals, many of whom have attracted competitive awards, grants, scholarships and prizes in their field, whose talent and dedication goes unrecognised.
This invisibility is one of the most potent symbols of the role of the casual academic in today’s university. The silencing and diminishment of their plight requires not only top-down systemic injustices or timesheet ‘errors’, as the University of Sydney calls them, but interpersonal complicity and interaction across all tiers and members of the ‘class’ system.
A 1998 strategic review of the humanities instigated by the Australian Research Council, called Knowing Ourselves and Others, warned that due to declining funding a whole generation of early career researchers was about to be either ‘lost to academic research altogether or [would] leave Australia to find academic positions overseas’. This prophecy has now been borne out—except that instead of moving overseas to greener pastures, many of Australia’s best early- and mid-career academics are now lost to burnout and dead-end positions inside universities powered by a workforce of casual staff.
