Vol. 7 No. 1 March 2014
THE MAGAZINE FOR AUSTRALIAN CASUAL AND SESSIONAL ACADEMIC STAFF
UTS Casual Survey results Who are casual academics and what do they want? Few winners in the casual approach to online teaching Why we’re members Freya Bundey & Gareth Bryant NTEU forces Swinburne to create 50 new jobs Global reach of insecure work The casual academic blogosphere and twitterscape How to reflect the reality of the modern academic workload Germany’s permanent precarious academics National Insecure Work Conference Coming in 2014
read online at www.unicasual.org.au ISSN 1836-8522 (Print)/ISSN 1836-8530 (Online)
-INSIDE1
Casual teachers carry the load
2
Our SOS to the Senate
3
NTEU forces Swinburne to create 50 new jobs
National Insecure Work Conference in 2014
4
A measure of job security
5
UTS casual survey
6
What’s smart about casual university teaching?
8
Ann Deslandes: Tales from the casual trenches
9
Why we’re members: Freya Bundey & Gareth Bryant
10 Few winners in casual approach to online teaching 12 Global reach of insecure work 14 The Casual Academic Unionist 16 How to reflect the realities of the modern academic workload 18 Germany’s permanent precarious academics
Connect is a publication of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA). All Rights Reserved © 2014. ISSN 1836-8522 (Print)/ISSN 1836-8530 (Online)
Editor: Jeannie Rea Production: Paul Clifton Editorial Assistance: Anastasia Kotaidis For information on Connect, please contact the NTEU National Office: Post: PO Box 1323, South Melbourne VIC 3205 Phone: 03 9254 1910 Fax: 03 9254 1915 Email: national@nteu.org.au Web: www.unicasual.org.au www.nteu.org.au www.capa.edu.au The views expressed in this publication are those of the individual authors, and not necessarily the official views of NTEU or CAPA.
In accordance with NTEU and CAPA policy to reduce our impact on the natural environment, this magazine is printed on 100% recycled paper: produced from 65% post-consumer waste and 35% pre-consumer waste.
Casual teachers carry the load
Academic casual activists and the NTEU have made the casualisation of university teaching and the plight of casual academics a public issue. Gone are the days when it was presumed that sessional tutors were mainly PhD students or professionals keen to try their hand at a bit of teaching. These days it is accepted by journalists, and even university managements and politicians, that half the teaching in Australian universities is done by casually employed staff. There is also consensus that the extent of casualised university teaching is not good for the students or the staff. There is some recognition by senior university spokespeople, particularly those with academic backgrounds, that the effects on the academic profession, on the quality of university education and research and on Australia’s international standing are cause for much concern. Politicians say that the universities need to fix the problem, and the universities say that they cannot within the current funding levels. As the NTEU repeatedly explains there is still not enough funding to support each Commonwealth Supported Place (CSP), despite two independent inquiries recommending immediate increases of at least ten per cent. This has been the key plank of our funding campaign and informed the NTEU’s election campaign last year. We used the hook that ‘class sizes have almost doubled in a generation’ to focus attention on the reality that increased access to university without adequate funding will ultimately result in a poorer university education and experience. University managements and students rely upon academic and general staff, including casual academics, working excessive unpaid and acknowledged hours. However, the universities cannot just blame the government. Deliberate decisions are made to casualise positions that were previously ongoing; new courses are established and budgeted on the presumption of casual teaching rates; and online delivery is often pushed for budgetary not pedagogical reasons. The US experience should be ringing alarm bells as US unions and academics increasingly frame their concerns about the switch to online delivery in terms of embedding class and race disadvantage. In the US it is becoming clear that the cheap no-frills online version with an extra fee for service for a tutorial or to meet with an academic is the option being offered to the poor. ‘Full service’ university education looks to being a privilege only for the better off. University leaders are advised by external consultants, and HR directors straight from private industry, to treat their workforce as readily replaceable and interchangeable. Flexibility is encouraged, meaning insecure work arrangements, which they also believe have the added benefit of making the workforce docile and frightened. Vice-chancellors let this happen even though they are well aware that good university education and research takes time and commitment, and that this is compromised when staff are fearful of being made redundant or not having their contracts renewed.
The university research effort has expanded in recent years yet specialist researchers (academic and general staff) are almost exclusively on limited term contracts to match funding grants. Much of the innovation in teaching is still done on soft money – meaning that people and projects come and go, again leading to enormous wastage as breakthroughs are unable to be embedded in the education programs. How can they be when the ongoing academics writing the courses have to forgo the new ideas in pedagogy and content as they are given a miserly budget and told to employ a casual tutor for ten hours teaching with a few marking and consultation hours. The course coordinators are guiltily too well aware that the casual tutors will put in much more time because of their commitment to the students – and because they want an academic career. In this enterprise bargaining round the NTEU is negotiating for new Scholarly Teaching Fellows (STFs), ongoing positions which will initially focus upon teaching, but with the opportunity to review in three years. The idea is to both turn a proportion of the teaching work that has been casualised into ongoing, and to create some ongoing job opportunities for casualised academic staff. So far 13 universities have signed up to new EBAs including STFs, with negotiations continuing at the rest (see report, p. 4). Some universities have invested further this round in Early Career Development Fellows (ECDFs), another NTEU initiative to get the next generation of academics started in their careers. Outside of NTEU initiatives in enterprise bargaining, universities are creating few new academic positions. They wring their hands, but do little. Reading between the lines of the submissions of some universities to the Demand Driven Model review and to media commentary, it seems that some have given up on calling for government to properly fund public higher education and instead want students to make up the funding gap by charging upfront domestic fees, increasing HECS and expanding the international student market. Meanwhile, thousands of casual academics have signed this semester’s contracts, many at the last minute, and are giving all to their students and their discipline, proud of their work, but frustrated that they are not recognised nor rewarded. Getting involved in your local NTEU Branch, joining a casual activists network or setting one up can make a difference to the loneliness and frustration of being a casual – and also improve your conditions. Many improvements in casual conditions are won locally and the capacity of the NTEU negotiators to succeed in enterprise bargaining is vastly improved with on the ground campaigning. Best wishes for the coming year. University teaching is a great job, but we have to make it secure! jrea@nteu.org.au
Jeannie Rea, NTEU National President
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
1
Our SOS to the Senate Welcome to the first issue of Connect for 2014, and welcome also to all our friends in the postgraduate and casual/sessional teaching community as you return to university for another year. For us at the Council of Australian Postgraduate Associations (CAPA), the year has gotten off to a busy start with the launch of our ‘SOS to the Senate’ campaign. We’re visiting campuses across the country, spreading the message that for a well-rounded university experience to continue to be possible, postgraduates must unite to ‘Save Our Student Experience, Save Our SSAF’. At the centre of this campaign is a national survey measuring the services that postgraduates utilise on campus and their thoughts around who should provide them. The results of this survey will be instrumental in appealing to the incoming Senate around the importance of the Student Services and Amenities Fee (SSAF) in the face of a hostile Government. We ask all postgraduates to complete the survey and to join us in spreading the word on campus. You can find the survey on the CAPA website, www.capa.edu.au. This year marks the 35th anniversary of the founding of CAPA, making us Australia’s longest continuously running national peak body for students. We will be rolling out a number of celebrations to commemorate this milestone throughout the year, including a gala dinner alongside our Annual Council Meeting in November, which we invite CAPA friends and alumni to attend. We will also be compiling a commemorative booklet to mark the occasion, and will be asking many of those involved in CAPA’s journey to contribute to this publication. Please contact me if you wish to be involved. I’ve recently returned from two weeks in India, where as part of a group organised by the Monash Postgraduate Association, I visited and volunteered at an ASHA project in Delhi’s slums. ASHA is an organisation that works to provide access to resources such as community-based healthcare, empowerment, financial inclusion, education and environmental improvement within slum communities in and around Delhi. In one slum home that we visited, a mother communicated without words her pride at her daughter’s achievements as the first in her family to go to university, enabled by a scholarship from ASHA. She showed us her daughter’s many trophies and certificates commemorating her academic achievements – even a framed letter of encouragement from the New Zealand Prime Minister! It was a reminder for me that being a part of the higher education system is a great privilege that so many strive for and which we must never take for granted. As participants in the sector and activists within the union movement, this means working to ensure that the Australian university experience is the best that it can be. This can often be very difficult, when we are so often faced with cuts to the sector that we love, and challenges to the quality of education we are trying to provide. Cervantes said in Don Quixote, ‘maddest of all, is to see life as it is and not as it should be’. I feel that this is a valuable lesson to keep in mind as CAPA enters the academic year, and for all of us as we work together for a better and more accessible university sector. I’m excited to be returning for another term as CAPA President and am looking forward to working with the CAPA Executive to achieve some really ambitious objectives in this, my final year at the helm. I hope that you will be a part of it, and wish you every success as another year of activism awaits. I look forward to seeing you on campus. Meghan B Hopper is the President of CAPA and a PhD student at Monash University. president@capa.edu.au @CAPAPresident If you would like resources to promote the SOS campaign on your campus, get in touch with Meghan directly at president@capa.edu.au. More information at: www.capa.edu.au/news/save-student-experience-save-ssaf Complete the student services survey at: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/WCJRZJN
Meghan Hopper CAPA President
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NTEU forces Swinburne to create
50 new jobs By Josh Cullinan Victorian Division Industrial Officer
After almost two years in dispute, numerous Fair Work Commission hearings and conferences, two jurisdictional decisions and a strong member campaign, Swinburne has acceded to creating 50 new special roles.
In a direct response to this outcome, senior management at Swinburne have pursued a new Agreement which strips the job protection limits. The same Agreement denies sessional staff the benefit of new provisions to support the victims of domestic violence. This is despite the Vice-Chancellor crowing to the media in July 2013 that the provisions would apply to all staff.
Sessional staff who have been with Swinburne since before 2010 will be able to apply for the roles and successful applicants with a doctorate will be offered an ongoing role (albeit with purchased leave.) Doctoral candidates and masters holders will be eligible for two year contracts.
In 2010, implementation of the commitments in the new Swinburne Enterprise Agreement started the day after the Agreement was approved. By the end of 2010, management had started filling Early Career Development Fellowships and members were getting involved in many different actions.
NTEU will assist members in their applications for these roles, implementation of the agreed resolution and ensuring every member who is entitled to the benefit of the outcome gets a fair opportunity.
In 2012, a new dedicated sessional staff campaign focused on job security. Strong member action over late pay and payment for all work merged into a major dispute over the mass casualisation of the academic workforce.
This successful outcome was achieved in the face of very stiff opposition from Swinburne Vice-Chancellor, Linda Kristjanson – the same Vice-Chancellor who refused to recognise sessional staff were being paid months late until we held a survival stall to collect hampers for members in 2012.
Despite disputes, casualisation blew out across 2012 and 2013 to 50% above the maximum levels agreed in 2010. These numbers continue to hide an even greater casualisation now only being exposed by the Federal Government reporting obligations. See report of bargaining outcomes at other universities, p. 4
National Insecure Work Conference in 2014 The NTEU is planning a national conference on insecure forms of employment in higher education.
The objective is to further develop the NTEU’s organising and industrial strategies and campaigns.
This conference will examine the professional and industrial impacts of insecure employment upon staff and the consequences for the ongoing quality of university teaching, research and engagement.
The focus will be upon three groups of staff caught in precarious employment arrangements:
The aim is to increase the understanding of the extent and impacts of precarious work in higher education within the sector and the broader community.
• Academic casuals. • Researchers (academic and general) on limited term contracts. • Academic and general staff funded through ‘soft money’. The conference will be organised through the NTEU National Executive. Interested members are invited to nominate to join a reference group to advise the conference organisers. For further details, please contact NTEU National President, Jeannie Rea, email jrea@nteu.org.au.
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
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A measure of job security By Susan Kenna National Industrial Officer
The battle to reduce long-term casual employment continues via the current round of bargaining with good outcomes at most universities so far. The NTEU’s Scholarly Teaching Fellow (STF) claim has a key goal of providing on-going jobs for work which was previously done by casual staff. Most of the seventeen Agreements made so far include this proviso. Only the University of Melbourne Enterprise Agreement does not set a numeric or percentage target in the Agreement, but the University and NTEU have agreed to a target of 60 new positions for the two forms of employment which will replace casual work, and to agree on the detail of how this will work. The STF targets approximate 20 per cent of the current casual employment within an enterprise. NTEU has so far achieved 402 STF positions for the sector. So what do these jobs look like? • Each of the STF clauses provide for continuing work. • Around half also provide for fixed term jobs, but most of these must fit into a current fixed term category. • The majority have a salary scale of Level A–B (with many starting at A6–B2). • Most provide for promotion. • Where fixed-term, most explicitly provide for the right to convert (after 3 years). • Maximum teaching loads to provide time for scholarship and research.
Curtin University At Curtin, the Agreement provides that 5 per cent of current casual full-time equivalent (FTE) staff be converted to continuing STF positions in each year of the Agreement. STFs will have 75 per cent of work hours for teaching and related duties, with a maximum of 550 hours of teaching delivery per annum. The Union is represented on selection panels and will have 2 nominees on a committee designated to review STFs, mid way through the Agreement.
Deakin University At Deakin, there is commitment to 40 Teaching Scholars. All positions will be continuing and appointees are required to have worked for at least 1 year in ‘noncontinuing employment within the University sector’. A maximum of 70 per cent of allocated duties will involve teaching duties. The salary range will be A3–B3.
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University of Sydney Sydney’s STF clause also prescribes a minimum of 12 months relevant experience (over the preceding 5 years), and prohibits STFs from performing the work of staff who were made redundant in the previous year. Allocated workload must include a minimum of 20 per cent for scholarship and research, and all positions are continuing. Eighty STF positions will be created.
Griffith University The Griffith Agreement also limits STFs to continuing positions. A minimum of 36 positions will be created. Appointments will be made at Level A6 or B1, with normal probation, promotion and annual review applying.
Australian Catholic University STFs at ACU will be continuing, with 12 positions to be created. These may be filled on a full, part-time or fractional basis. The University will call for expressions of interest in conversion to a teaching-focussed role, in one or more specific faculties per annum. The University has agreed to review this provision midway through the life of the Agreement.
Other universities In some universities, these provisions operate in conjunction with existing clauses aimed at reducing or capping casual employment. For example, the Swinburne University of Technology Academic and General Staff Agreement commits the University to not increasing ‘overall usage of casual staff’ above levels at a fixed date in 2009 (which were 21.5 per cent of FTE at the time), and to concurrently attempt to reduce the number of FTE casual positions as a proportion of total academic staff by 1 per cent over the life of the Agreement. The University of South Australia Enterprise Agreement commits the University to limiting casual employment to 25 per cent of its academic workforce. Many Agreements also include a conversion to on-going work clause and some provide facilities for casual staff – a provision we are seeking to extend throughout the sector. The NTEU encourages casual and noncasual members to assist in talking to sessional/casual staff within their workplaces, to sign them up and to spread the word on what the NTEU is doing to improve job security for workers in the sector.
UTS
Are you an NTEU member?
Casual survey By Sharon Bailey UTS Branch Organiser
Yes Yes
No 30%
70%
How many hours do you work on average per week? (including student time, marking, preparation etc.)
In 2013, NTEU University of Technology, Sydney (UTS) Branch conducted a survey of 1455 casual academics to give them an opportunity to put forward their views on their employment arrangements and what they would like to see changed in the new Agreement to meet their personal and professional needs. The survey was completed by 170 casuals, both NTEU members and non-members. This gave the Branch a better understanding of the length of service, qualifications and professional needs of casuals as well as using it as a way to introduce the role of the Union to casual employees at work. The survey provided casual employees with an opportunity to have a real say which is a rare experience, given most feel vulnerable in their work arrangements and management rarely bother. The Branch then conducted a series of forums to provide casuals with the overall survey response and how their views are being represented through the enterprise bargaining process. This also gave the NTEU bargaining team evidence to justify the claim for casual members with management. The next step is to continue the great work that NTEU casual members have started in building the Union for casuals so insecure work and career paths can be improved upon.
40.7 %
31.3 %
2–10
12.7
11–20
%
5.3
21–30
31–35
10.0 %
35+ hours
How many years have you been a casual at UTS?
1–3
4–7
8+
38%
44%
18%
What mix of teaching, research, scholarly teaching fellow ration would you prefer in your career?
Presented on this page are the results of the questionnaire. We are guessing that all casual academic readers will be able to relate to the overall responses.
61.2 %
18.7 %
Would you like to see an increase in permanent academic positions at UTS?
Yes Yes
No 95%
4.3
70% teaching 30% other
Research only
Would you like your Enterprise Agreement to have flexibility to allow you to move between ratios in the future?
No 83.5%
80% teaching 20% admin
%
5%
Would you like to have permanent work?
Yes
40% teaching 40% research 20% admin
15.8
Yes Yes 16.5%
No 94%
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
6%
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What’s smart about casual university teaching? By Rebecca Goodway
I have a long and complicated history with casual academic labour. I have worked as a casual tutor in the humanities for seven of the last ten years. I’m experienced across research, project work, and technical support roles and somehow also find the time to parent a four year old with my husband. My existence challenges the twin myths that all casual academics are on the PhD track and looking to become full-time academics, or are already established workers using sessional academia to supplement their income. I left my PhD long before my child was born and don’t have any immediate short term plans to return to it. My current circumstance is that I am balancing sessional and casual higher education work with my responsibilities as a parent with the understanding that, at least for the time being, casual teaching for me is the end goal. I blog under the pseudonym The Smart Casual, wherein I seek to unpack the myths and realities of being a casual employee within the higher education sector in Australia, based on my own experiences and those of my peers. Because of my position as a non-PhD track academic, my writing/thinking on academic casualisation is focused on acknowledging and improving the conditions of casuals as a short-term goal. The promise of full-time opportunities doesn’t hold the same allure for me. Even if full-time academic positions were somehow going to be created to accommodate more of the smart, talented PhD candidates that are emerging every year, it wouldn’t justify the lousy conditions that casual academics like me are currently facing. Long term casualisation has come to take its toll on me in a number of ways. Probably the most destructive by-product of my long-term casual employment has been the way that it has come to make me feel about myself. Short term hourly contracts make me feel dispensable. The lack of a permanent space for my teaching materials makes me feel undervalued. The ways that casuals are not integrated into the larger faculty culture makes me feel isolated. The way that much of my labour goes unrewarded and unacknowledged makes me feel worthless. For a long time I internalised these emotions and made them about me and my unique situation. Because I was the PhD dropout, I came to feel grateful that I was being included at all. I don’t like to speak on behalf of others, as that already happens far too often as a casual. However I feel that many of my PhD-track peers have also interiorised the system’s failings as their own. They haven’t published enough, or published the right things, or presented at the right conferences and if only they did it would somehow allwork-out and they could escape from the long term casual teaching trap. Also, the PhD is such a huge emotional and financial investment that many hold onto the hope that there will be a permanent place for them within the sector, despite all evidence to the contrary. As a result they experience these same disabling emotions of gratitude that I have. Except they hold out hope that if they accept the crumbs, perhaps one day
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they will be able to sit at the table. Despite the differences in our circumstances we have all borne the failings of an unjust system, which is what has allowed the exploitation of casual academic workers to continue for as long as it has done. However, it isn’t just for my colleagues and I that I am speaking out, it is also for my students. The system is failing them as much as it is failing us. It is impossible to be the educator I want to be, and that my students deserve, within the limitations of hourly casual contracts. It is the students who have kept me coming back to casual teaching year after year. I care deeply about their education and their eventual outcomes. Students are real people who are under-supported and perhaps under-prepared for the expectations of higher education. Session after session I volunteer my time and energy to help them, however, even that link is becoming tenuous. Our interactions are often limited to as little as an hour of face-to-face contact a week.
be a waste of my time and resources, with full-time academic employment being an unlikely outcome at the end of that slog. So perhaps it is time to think about creating an identity for myself outside of the academy instead. I am aware of many other casual academics within my area who are at the same crossroads. There is a very real risk that these talented and capable thinkers and educators are going to withdraw from the academy entirely and be absorbed into other sectors, largely because our current conditions have become so untenable. As of writing this I am preparing for another session of teaching. At this stage I am looking forward to what the session has to offer, but I am also turning a critical eye to my experiences in the hope that my colleagues and I can create improved conditions for ourselves in the immediate future. My hope is that we can open up the communication channels both with university administration and with our full-times academic allies.
Class sizes are such that there are often 22 people jammed into the classroom or lab space. I interact with them for such a brief amount of time that it takes a concerted effort on my part to learn their names. And I want to know their names! I don’t want them to be student numbers within a management package. It is important to me that the students learn how to advocate for themselves, and negotiate the complexities of a precarious workforce.
Most of all, I sincerely hope that we can improve the conditions of sessional academics in the immediate short term, so that this session’s teaching doesn’t end up being my last.
I don’t want to model subjugation for them, I want to model active positive change. I had my concerns about speaking out, but I have got to the point where there is no benefit to remaining silent anymore, either for my students or myself.
Rebecca can be found blogging at her own site The Smart Casual:
On a personal level it is time for me to let go of romanticised notions of what it means to be a long term casual academic, and think critically about what I want the outcome for me to be. I have entertained the idea for a long time that I could return to finish my PhD when my daughter entered primary school. However, I have been advised by people whose opinion I value that it would
Rebecca Goodway is a casual tutor and project officer, and has worked in higher education in some capacity for over a decade. Rebecca Goodway @rebeccagoodway thesmartcasual.wordpress.com Rebecca is also a contributor to CASA, the new online space for casual, adjunct, sessional staff and their allies in Australian higher education: actualcasuals.wordpress.com Photo: Denys Prokofyev
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
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Ann Deslandes: Tales from the casual trenches
Amidst the heat of the Sydney University picket line in August last year, Ann Deslandes, an academic who like many others found herself over the four years since completing her PhD moving between contracts as a casual tutor, lecturer and researcher, decided to pitch an article for the Sydney Morning Herald to highlight the plight of casual staff at Australian universities. Ann felt the public should hear about the experience of casual academics at the University of Sydney and why they might be on strike. Speaking with Connect, she said that ‘casual academics are credible witnesses to the needs of the sector and [their] voices should be heard front and centre, particularly given they perform the majority of teaching.’ Her article published in the Sydney Morning Herald outlined just what this entails. An estimated 50 per cent of all undergraduate teaching is performed by casual or sessional staff. This is laid out, for example, in 12-week contracts, which allow tenured staff to gain valuable research time. Casual staff might also find themselves preparing literature reviews on three-week contracts so that tenured staff can write their books. Like so many university graduates with PhDs, casual staff find themselves scrambling it all together in the hope of one day getting more stable work in a sector they aspire to be a part of. In writing the article, Ann had been emboldened by the Usyd Casuals Network, a group of mostly women who put on an action where they performed a yoga routine on the pickets to demonstrate the false flexibility that casualisation offered to staff and students. ‘We also had a Branch Organiser, Kate Barnsley, who was a casual academic herself and really got the issues, so I was feeling particularly confident!’ Ann’s opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald was well received by other casual academics: ‘I got quite a few emails!’ she begins, ‘One of my former employers, a senior lecturer, wrote to me and voiced their appreciation, and also acknowledged how they personally benefited from casual academic labour, as an academic who can individually contract out research, teaching and admin tasks whilst maintaining relative job security and status.’ She said that this was probably the most important response she received, ‘I think tenured academics really struggle to see themselves as managers who hire casual academics and have power over their contracts, wages, work tasks and future employability. Throughout the strike I was very glad to see many of these academics standing with casuals, such as raising funds for casuals to go on strike so they didn’t miss out on pay.’ Ann thought that being a part of the NTEU picket line was ‘very heartening, a lot of fun, educational, and exhausting’, all in one. ‘People were generally interested and there was a lot of warm feeling about. The best conversations I had were with people who had never heard of a picket line before and who didn’t have much knowledge about the Union and why we might be choosing to strike. I hope I was helpful!’ When asked about the picket line’s effectiveness, Ann said that ‘the NTEU had achieved its key objective: to secure a fairer Agreement for staff than the one originally proposed by university management.’ The NTEU was fighting for an Agreement based on a consensus of its members and the process had become heated. ‘Asking for a fairer distribution of profit is always contentious, and I think that’s where most public ‘anti-union’ feeling comes from,’ she said.
By Courtney Sloane NTEU Media & Communications Officer
As for what Ann is up to now, she has now established her own social research and policy consultancy, which means that she is hired as an independent contractor rather than a casual worker. ‘The rates and the respect are both much better!’ she says of it. Ann urges tenured staff to join with casuals and fight to keep more graduates in the sector. She believes that ‘public universities can make for better lives and better societies. That is, still, why people attend university and/or aspire for their children to attend. Why would you want the work of the university to be done by people who don’t know if they’ll have a job next week?’
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WHY WE’RE MEMBERS Freya Bundey & Gareth Bryant University of Sydney
N
TEU plays a critical role in protecting the rights and conditions of workers, particularly the growing numbers of us employed on casual and fixed-term contracts, and in campaigning for a decent, publicly funded university education system. Working conditions in Australian universities have travelled a nasty trajectory in recent years. As governments have decreased per capita student funding, corporate and managerial priorities have become pervasive. The consequences for staff include intensified workloads, chronic casualisation and a decline in intellectual freedom and the possibilities for selfgovernance. Over the past two years at Sydney University, management has attempted to cut hundreds of jobs, undermine critical working conditions (including intellectual freedom, anti-discrimination and provisions against casualisation), and impose a real pay cut. Each of these would have hurt casual staff the most given our lack of job security and reliable pay. It was only by joining with other Union members and students, first in the anti-job cuts campaign and then with this year’s strike action, that we have been able to stall management’s attempt to implement their corporate vision and win key improvements for all university staff. Casual academics now have pathways for moving towards secure and ongoing teaching and research jobs. The Casuals Network also gives casuals the opportunity to meet and organise with other casuals in an otherwise isolating work environment. As an activist network, we ensured that job security clauses were included in the NTEU’s log of claims. We’ve also taken ‘casuals specific’ stunts during the course of the industrial campaign, such as our yoga action, which highlights problems with the University’s one-sided understanding of ‘flexibility’. Being a member of the NTEU gives staff, and particularly casual staff, a collective capacity to take on Sydney Uni management’s warped priorities. It also offers us the opportunity to be part of a broader movement to demand an equitable education system from the Federal Government. The Abbott Government is promising to implement Labor’s billions of dollars in tertiary funding cuts, and pave the way for more increases in student fees. More than ever, we need a strong union across all universities to defend working conditions and the quality of education.
Freya Bundey and Gareth Bryant are academics at the University of Sydney and are NTEU members.
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
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Few winners in casual approach to online teaching By Jeannie Rea NTEU National President
In the US, higher education teaching is a very precarious occupation. The stories of older academics found homeless after decades of teaching are true. They had not earned enough nor had access to pension or medical insurance to retire with a roof over their heads. It is noticeable when American academics describe themselves they will name their employment status as it indicates very different careers. A tenured full-time academic has job security and enjoys the protection of the right to intellectual freedom in pursuing teaching and research. But the tenured are a minority. The Coalition on the Academic Workforce (CAW) reported that in 2009 75% of teaching staff were employed in contingent positions either as part-time or adjunct faculty members, full-time nontenure track faculty members or graduate teaching assistants. Because there is little data on their working conditions, especially since the US Department of Education stopped collecting this data in 2003, in 2010 CAW undertook a survey garnering 30,000 responses. The focus was substantially on part-time faculty members, not necessarily temporary in that people continually taught the same courses over a number of years. However, to the Australian observer this is particularly resonant of what we call ‘sessional’ in that the academics were employed on the basis of courses taught and were unlikely to receive any salary recognition for experience or qualifications. There was no promotion path and many did not earn enough to solely work as an academic teacher. Over three-quarters of respondents were seeking full-time tenure-track positions and nearly three-quarters said they would accept a full-time position at the institution where they were currently teaching. While the survey was not strictly representative and respondents selfselecting, the responses from so many still shed light on the experiences of staff in this position, particularly as between them they taught 19,615 courses (subjects). Why am I looking at the US, which has both a different labour history and has had a mass higher education system for many decades? Because what happens in US higher education has significant impact on the thinking of Australian higher education policy developers and decision makers at the university and political level. This can be seen in the fondness that corporate consultants have for recommending greater contingency in our academic labour arrangements citing US models. Over the
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past couple of years we have seen the eagerness of Australian universities to buy into partnerships with the US MOOCs providers. These schemes can also lead to increased class sizes and further casualisation as scarce teaching and learning funds are allocated to developing a couple of high quality MOOCs to promote the university’s international reputation with potential students, staff and investors. To be generous they are more than marketing exercises as the free courses are open to anyone, but the US trends are suggesting there is little increased equality of opportunity. As reported in the last edition of Connect (vol. 6, no. 2, June 2013), US MOOCs experiments have been rapidly absorbed into existing online profit and not-for-profit business models. Some MOOCs have been transformed into closed credit bearing courses, which universities can purchase rather than running their own courses. This immediately threatens academic jobs as a university decides it can get rid of tenured staff and replace them with adjunct faculty. This is happening in the degree and sub-degree markets. A major problem for students taking pre-entry courses is that they are often exactly the students that need a teacher alongside them. Concern for the students was a major issue identified by respondents to a Coalition of Contingent Academic Labour(COCAL)/United Association for Labor Education (UALE) online learning survey, writes Helena Worthen in the report on the findings of the 2012 detailed survey of working conditions. While there were only 132 respondents, what is particularly interesting is that they were across almost as many institutions, so again while self-selective it still tells a story of what is going on as adjunct teaching work increasingly moves out of the classroom and online. The careers of the adjunct academics quoted in the report are mired not only in job insecurity, but in the lack of control they have over their work and their lives.
Control of work The concerns could be summed up as being about the control of the work. The principle of intellectual freedom, as Worthen writes, ‘traditionally includes the fundamental right to teach what and how you believe to be right within the bounds of your discipline and your expertise, and to speak the truth as you know it without fear of retaliation.’ Worthen notes that in the context of online teaching this means whether an academic writes the class they teach, whether they are allowed to change it, or even if they wrote it being allowed to edit and change it once it is part of a traded learning package.
The unbundling of academic work is anathema to intellectual freedom and control over the work when course writing, evaluating, reviewing, production of materials, lecturing, tutoring, and grading are all being done by different staff. And I use ‘staff’ here rather than ‘academics’, as this taylorisation of academic work is stripping academics out of their work. This is also highly convenient in the Australian context as these former components of an academic’s job are being undertaken by staff not classified as academic and therefore ineligible for academic conditions such as promotion and study leave. Fortunately, under Australian legislation, intellectual freedom applies to all staff and students. The US survey respondents are generally supportive of online education because it can reach students unable to participate in face-to-face classes. They are though cynical about evaluation of the quality of courses and teachers. There is too much reliance upon the metrics of pass rates and not on what is going on within the virtual classrooms. They appreciate that online education can be more cheaply provided, but remain concerned about shortchanging the students. The education and business model could still be quite viable too without the gross exploitation of the staff. As we have noted in Australia, the issues of online learning and teaching are exacerbating the already exploitative working conditions of insecurely employed staff. However the meanness of the US employers in cutting pay and sacking those who complain is quite outrageous. The unions have defended members not re-hired and advocate for higher pay and better conditions and these are better at unionised workplaces. Support from tenure and tenure-track colleagues is important in winning better salaries and conditions. We are much better positioned in Australia as we have one industry union for academics and most general staff. This year the NTEU plans to survey casual and contract staff on the conditions of online teaching.
Reference Worthen, H. (2013). How the Working Conditions of Online Teaching Affect the Work Lives of Online Faculty. Report from the COCAL/UALE Working Group on Online Learning Survey, October-December 2012.
Acknowledgement I’d like to acknowledge Dr Catherine Howell from Flinders University who drew my attention to this report and who is undertaking research with a focus on the impact of mass online teaching on casual staff. Dr Howell gave a paper at the AARE conference in December 2013.
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
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Global reach of insecure work By Jen Tsen Kwok NTEU National Policy & Research Officer
If you had any remaining doubts, here’s a quick reminder of how pervasive insecure employment has become as a workforce challenge facing higher education around the world, and how international advocacy is building a greater profile for this issue and the potential for change. In the United States, online activism has spawned many campaigns around the employment conditions of college adjuncts, evident in the Twitter traffic on hashtags such as #adjunctchat, #notyouradjunctsidekick, #adjunct. In late January 2014, the US Democrats House Committee on Education and the Workforce released a report collating the results of a national e-forum on adjunct working conditions. Reflecting on its findings, Rep. George Miller stated, “The trend should be of concern to policymakers both because of what it means for the living standards and the work lives of those individuals we expect to educate the next generation of scientists, entrepreneurs, and other highly skilled workers, and what it may mean for the quality of higher education itself.” The upturn in online engagement is captured in a plethora of news sources, including Al Jazeera online, the Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Ed. In the UK, the University Colleges Union (UCU) continues to prosecute its Stamp Out Casuals Contracts campaign. A UCU study in September 2013 found that universities and colleges were twice as likely to use zero-hour contracts compared to other workplaces, and that the number of zero-hour teaching contracts in universities equated to 47 per cent of the total number of ‘teaching-only’ posts that institutions report annually to the national statistical agency. After the UCU revealed that the University of Edinburgh employed more people on zero-hour contracts than any other British university, the University announced an agreement with UCU members to wipe out the use of zero-hour contracts. Moreover, in February 2014 the British Government launched an online consultation into the general use of zero-hours contracts. There is a dedicated page covering the issue in The Guardian. The UCU is currently collating its own data on the prevalence of zero-hours contracts in higher education and hopes to release their findings in early August. In Canada, the Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT) railed against contract employment in October 2013 during Fair Employment Week. The plight of contract academic staff is slowly achieving national media interest, such as through a feature in an episode of CBC Radio’s The Current. Closer to home, the NZ Tertiary Education Union launched its Precarious Work campaign in March 2013 and mid-year produced a report of 1,900 survey respondents (in the survey 7 out of every 8 staff who were on casual, fixed-term or insecure employment agreements stated they wanted permanent work). In Australia, momentum continues to build through NTEU Branch campaigns and industrial actions, many of which have been reported in this magazine, as well as through the interest and passion of activists online. In fact, you could argue insecure employment is the most visible workforce issue for the NTEU, especially in the social media landscape.
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Academics, commentators & activists Alisa Percy
@AlisaPercy
Amani Bell
@AmaniBell
Ann Deslandes
Organisations, groups & news
Ariadne Vromen
Adjunct Nation
@AdjunctNation
CAUT
@CAUT_ACPPU
Chronicle Vitae
@chroniclevitae
EdumemeUK
@edumemeUK
Erica Cervini
@thirddegreeblog
The Guardian
@guardian
Murdoch University Postgraduate Association @MUPSAMurdoch New Faculty Majority
@NewFacMajority
NTEU Ohio Part Time Faculty Association Precarious Faculty
@NTEU @OhioPTFacAssn @PrecariousFac
SEIU
@SEIU
TEU
@nzteu
UCU Anti-Casualisation
@UCUAnti_Cas
UniCasual Upstate Adjuncts
@UniCasual @UpstateAdjuncts
Ben Kraal David Peetz Dorothy Kim DrH Evan Smith Gary Rhoades Glen Fuller Greg Thompson
@ariadne_syd @bjkraal @PeetzDavid @dorothyk98 @DustinHalse @Hatfulofhistory @garyrhoades @Eventmechanics @effectsofNAPLAN
Hazel Ferguson
@snarkyphd
Inger Mewburn
@thesiswhisperer
Jayne Persian Jennifer Polk Jessica Langer Karina Kate Bowles Katherine Barnsley Katrina Higgins Lisa Batten
@jypersian @FromPhDtoLife @DrJessicaLanger @Acahacker @KateMfD @bleak_tyrannies @uniacademic @BattLisa
Mahmoona Shah
@MahmoonaShah
Maria Maisto
@MariaMaistoNFM
Megan McPherson The Department’s new higher education data revealed that the level of estimated FTE casual employment grew by a massive 17.1 per cent between 2012 and 2013, and that of the new positions created, seven out of ten people were employed on a casual basis (3,400 FTE), sparking a flurry of social media discussion. This follows the fact that a media release from the NTEU General Secretary Grahame McCulloch about casualisation being the ‘dirty little secret of our sector’ was the sixth most read NTEU web article in 2013, and that one quarter of the top twenty NTEU web articles in 2013 related to insecure employment.
@AnnDeslandes
Melissa Lovell Nicky Schildkraut Policy Tickle
@MeganJMcPherson @melovell @nickysaeun @pollytext
Rebecca Goodway
@rebeccagoodway
Research Whisperer
@researchwhisper
Ruth Bridgstock Sessional Academic Stuart Palmer The Smart Casual Tseen Khoo VC Vaile Zenscara
@RuthBridgstock @SessionalAcadem @s_palm @rebeccagoodway @tseenster @VCVaile @zenscara
As summarised by Karina (@AcaHacker), the work conditions that have undermined casually employed Australian academics and teachers is leading to a more articulate, tangible and converging sense of solidarity. If more casuals and contract staff join the conversation, these international networks will deliver activists better comparative knowledge, better campaign strategies, as well as a stronger sense of community and personal empowerment. If you haven’t already joined the Twitter conversation, you can find us online with the Twitter handle @unicasual. We hope to continue building connections between members, and linking members with the global movements. The boxed aside contains a snapshot of some of the voices out there. jtkwok@nteu.org.au UniCasual @unicasual Image: Marina Scurupii
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
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The Casual Academic Unionist
I work as a casual academic at the University of Technology, Sydney (UTS). I’ve been at UTS for a long time now; I started my PhD in 2000 on a part time basis because I had young children to care for (and I didn’t really make much progress until my youngest started school). I started my PhD with the intention of pursuing an academic career, and I finally completed the PhD in 2007. I was pretty pleased with myself I have to say! I started casual tutoring that same year and have been working as a casual academic at UTS for the past six years. I give lectures, run tutorials, coordinate courses and write course content, too. I’m an active academic and publish my work. All research I engage in is completed in my own time. Like many casual academics, I am an expert in my field – it may be a small field, but I’m still an expert in it. As many of you are probably aware, casualisation of the academic workforce in Australia has increased by a significant amount over the last few years.
By Sarah Attfield University of Technology, Sydney
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Casualisation has been growing at a very fast pace and we are now at the point where casuals often outnumber fulltime staff and where casuals deliver the vast majority of the teaching. It isn’t good for the quality of education. Casual workers often do not have the resources to do their jobs properly and the constant uncertainty leads to low morale, stress and attrition of the workforce. Plus, we don’t get sick pay, so we come to work sick which isn’t good for anyone.
Casualisation of academic work comes at a cost to the individuals employed precariously. We experience uncertainty and anxiety that comes with never knowing what work we will get or how much of it from semester to semester. And generally we do not get teaching work over the winter or summer breaks, so we have four months each year without pay. Because of this, those of us who have completed our PhDs will take on as much teaching as possible during the semester and will work 7 days a week during teaching time. We usually work in more than one job, often at more than one institution and many of us also take on jobs outside of academia to make ends meet. Although our hourly rate includes a casual loading, we work many more hours than we are paid, and spend hours preparing classes, answering student emails, marking and doing admin. When the hourly rate is broken down it is pretty low and we are routinely expected to do unpaid work – the universities rely on our good will (because we love our jobs).
But, having said all that, there is hope! The NTEU has recognised the issues relating to the growing numbers of casual academics in the ranks, and in the last couple of years has worked with casuals to improve the situation.
Providing career paths and secure employment It is possible to change things, with the help of the Union. And organising has been happening at universities across the country. Our current aim is to show the impact of casualisation on students’ education and workers’ conditions. Universities across the country are currently negotiating new staff Agreements and issues relating to casuals are a big focus with claims that aim to reduce casualisation and provide career pathways and more secure employment which will help to ensure the future of quality education. To deal with these issues we need to start to work together and support each other. We need to set communication networks across the faculties and telephone trees so we can keep each other in the loop. We can do this through our union. There are many reasons to be a member of your union and I’m certainly proud to be part of a movement that is inclusive of all staff. Sarah Attfield teaches in the writing and cultural studies program at UTS, and is a member of the NTEU UTS Branch committee. Her research has focused on Australian working class poetry and more recently, the working class experience in popular music.
In 2011, the Union launched a handbook for casuals called Smart Casuals, which outlines the rights of casual academics and gives information on the current staff workplace Agreements in each university so that casuals can know exactly what they are entitled to and what to do when there are breaches. The NTEU NSW Division has provided training days for casual delegates and activists, and has offered advice and support to those of us who have been involved in campaigns on campus.
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
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How to reflect the realities of the modern academic workload By Katrina Higgins University of the Sunshine Coast & Central Queensland University
Universities are on the verge of profound change. A key driver to this change is the rise of digital technologies (Ernst & Young, 2012). These technologies transform how our programs are delivered as teaching increasingly incorporates online and blended learning capabilities. Technology has been gradually changing the way we teach, from the traditional lecture transmission to teaching online, known as ‘e-teaching’. Online learning, in addition to the rise of massive open online courses (MOOCs), is changing how universities do business. As the way academics teach slowly changes, consequently so too does the role of an academic. As such, there are significant implications for faculty workloads. However, workloads associated with online and blended teaching are not well defined nor well understood. To achieve a sustainable future for university teaching, faculty workloads require immediate attention. Recent research in the area of online teaching workloads (Tynan, Ryan, Hinton & Mills, 2012; Van de Vord & Progue, 2012) indicate mixed results on whether online teaching requires a larger time investment than face-to-face. Part of this ambiguity is due to inconsistencies in how online teaching is implemented across different school areas. Tynan, Ryan, Hinton & Mills (2012) and Van de Vord & Progue (2012) also suggest that differences in the amount of administrative support provided may also significantly affect online and blended teaching workloads. Both studies recommend the need for improved transparency in online workloads and an improved acknowledgment of such workloads by university management in terms of time and pay. Therefore, new workload models need to be considered that more accurately recognise the components of online and blended teaching My own PhD study confirmed these findings. The study explored the work experiences of casual online and distance learning academics within an Australian university. The qualitative, constructivist grounded theory study, used semi-structured interviews to explicate the lived experiences of twelve casual online and distance learning academics (CODLAs). One of the categories that emerged from the study concerned pay and workloads. This category explored those experiences that relate to remuneration and workloads in carrying out teaching roles at the university across online and distance learning contexts. The key dimensions of the category included the inadequacy of pay in terms of the workload expected, including recognition of the time required to execute online teaching duties, as well as pay rates and inclusions. In summary, the findings in terms of pay and workloads were that: • Participants felt that pay was inadequate in terms of workload, including marking (online marking was seen as far more time consuming than traditional hard copy marking). • Transparency is needed in workload and pay calculation in online and distance learning environments. • Workloads associated with actual student numbers need to be acknowledged in online and distance learning environments (for example, 56 online students cannot be considered a single tutorial in terms of workload). • The higher workloads associated with online and distance learning may have direct implications in terms of teaching quality. • The above elements may have a tendency to accumulate high levels of ‘invisible work’.
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It is this element of ‘invisible’ work that requires further consideration. Unless work is made visible it cannot be accurately acknowledged, measured and incorporated into a workload model that reflects the contemporary complexities of e-teaching. Star and Strauss (1999) are early authors of the concept of ‘invisible work’ within academia and argue that as academia increasingly uses digital technologies; students will come to rely on accessing anytime learning. However, the result of being able to learn at anytime is the added expectation of 24/7 on-call services such as web chats, email and/or mobile telephone (Star & Strauss, 1999). This is just one area where invisible work may be created. Certainly, from my own experience in university teaching, the time required to compose a simple email responding to a student query, which explains an element of an assessment task can take some time, especially in excess of what it may have taken to answer the query face-to-face. Include in this time not only the writing of the email itself, but the time to choose your words carefully (it is in writing after all) and of course the added time to proofread, to ensure there are no errors and that the meaning is clear. When a simple task such as this is multiplied by several students, across many assessments, in multiple courses – well you get the idea. However, it is not just the teaching time during course delivery that requires consideration for workload models. Course development and ongoing semester to semester monitoring and changes also require investigation and this is one area where current research could be extended. A set and forget mentality to online and blended learning may not be conducive to the constantly changing technological environment, and as such, the element of course design and development is as equally important to consider in online and blended teaching workloads as the teaching time itself.
In summary, the new workload model must acknowledge the more diverse range of tasks, visible and invisible, that are required for effective e-teaching. The current face-to-face model no longer adequately measures the time needed to adequately engage students in an online or blended learning environment and therefore the roles and duties of the university academic may also require redefinition. The current task at hand for NTEU is to further explore academic workloads to ensure that they continue to reflect the reality of the work. Katrina Higgins works in education research at the University of the Sunshine Coast and teaches postgraduate courses in research at Central Queensland University as a distance education casual academic. Katrina’s key research interests are in the fields of management and education. k.higgins@cqu.edu.au ResearcherPhD @uniacademic
References Ernst & Young (2012). University of the future: A thousand year old industry on the cusp of profound change. Australia: Ernst & Young. Retrieved from: http://www.ey.com/Publication/vwLUAssets/University_of_the_ future/%24FILE/University_of_the_future_2012.pdf Star, S. L. & Strauss, A. (1999). Layers of Silence, Arenas of Voice: The ecology of visible and invisible work. Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8, 9-30. Tynan, B., Ryan, Y, Hinton, L. & Lamont Mills, A. (2012). Out of Hours – Final Report of the project e-Teaching leadership: planning and implementing a benefits-orientated costs model for technology enhanced learning. DEEWR: Australian Learning and Teaching Council. Van de Vord, R. & Pogue, K. (2012). Teaching Time Investment: Does Online Really Take More Time than Face-to-Face?. The International Review of Research in Open and Distance Learning, 13(3), 132–146.
Photo: Suzanne Tucker
read online at www.unicasual.org.au
17
Germany’s permanent precarious academics By Janin Bredehoeft University of Sydney
Only 20 per cent of the academic workforce in German higher education institutions is in permanent employment while around 80 per cent work on temporary contracts. The professors are employed on permanent civil service contracts while their scientific assistants are employed on temporary contracts. Getting a permanent position in academia is like a lottery win – all or nothing. All - is to get a professorial position with all its benefits of lifelong financial security, civil service status, autonomous in research, decision-making power and high prestige. Nothing – the possibility of lifelong employment insecurity. The Education and Science Workers’ Union (Gewerkschaft Erziehung und Wissenschaft, GEW) recommends a career system for the academic employment market to end lifelong job insecurity for a rising workforce. A series of employment parcels and insecurity is what Dr Helga Sommer has experienced for the past 20 years. She is affiliated with a university but her income source is through research project funding. When I met her for the first time, she was waiting for the results of her grant application: ‘I have only 3 more years to work before my retirement, if I do not get this grant I might be unemployed’. Four weeks later she received the great news about her successful application, securing paid work until her retirement. While the experience of reoccurring insecurity seems rather unusual for her generation, this might be what the future holds for the increasing scientific workforce in Germany. Dr Frank Lange is one of the scientific assistants employed by a professor at the Humboldt University in Berlin. He describes his job as ‘fulfilling and rewarding’ but states ‘I am lucky, because the
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professor I work for is really considerate and supportive’. However, he explains: ‘I have worked three years in this job, I can extend by another three years unless I get a chair as a professor’. After approximately six years employed as scientific assistant by the university, the junior academic will have to either leave the sector or find employment funded through third-party research projects. There are no limits on consecutive non-permanent employment if funded through research projects. Like so many of the scientific assistants, Frank is applying for a permanent job as a professor and describes the path as ‘a tournament’. The traditional academic career path in Germany starts with a doctorate followed by a role as a professor’s scientific assistant. This second stage lasts for around 6 years but these positions are temporary, intermediate career positions on non-permanent contracts. While employed as a scientific assistant the junior academic has two main duties; to work on an autonomous second major postdoctoral publication (called Habilitation) and to undertake scientific service work under supervision of the professor. These assistant positions are an element of the traditional Humboldtian ‘academic disciplinary mode of apprenticeship training’ (Enders, 2005) and are part of a long educational and qualification process as apprentice of science. Traditionally only after publication is an academic considered to be an independent teacher, examiner, researcher and eligible to apply for the professoriate. This can take up to 10 years in temporary employment and hence the average age to obtain a lifelong job in academia is 42. Since 2004 it is legally possible and encouraged to advance into the professoriate at any stage after the completion of the doctoral thesis. However, as the major decision making power lies within the professoriate it is not surprising that the traditional model of apprenticeship training remains strong, especially in the social sciences.
In the current situation, 80 per cent of the academic workforce are classified as apprentices. The number has grown exceptionally – from 40,000 in 1990 to 160,000 in 2012 – while the number of professors increased from 30,000 to 40,000. Thus, the disparity between permanent and non-permanent jobs has increased dramatically, and by 2012 the ratio between professors and assistants has grown from 1:1 to 1:4. At the same time, the likelihood to advance into a secure job is in decline, as traditional employment structures remain strong. Historically, the academic labour market can only create new professorial secure positions through opening a sub-discipline, a new field or a new university. The principle of one-professor-perinstitute deeply marked the organisation of the academic labour market until the 70s. These rigid standardised organisational structures and norms are protecting the relatively small professorial elite while preventing the creation of secure research jobs and perpetuating the apprenticeship mode of training for a rising number of academics in research only positions. How can this rise in the number of academic assistants be explained? The academic labour market is adjusting to rising student numbers and increasing research demands. All scientific assistants have research and teaching duties due to the prevailing Humboldtian norm of unity between teaching and research. The German Research Council provides research project third party funding, which is applied for and won by merit. This funding instrument has seen a dynamic development: it rose from 10 per cent to almost 40 per cent of overall higher education budget share in 2010. Consequently, about 40 per cent of scientific assistants are funded through these research projects (Jongmanns, 2011). Therefore, the rise in temporary scientific service work is caused by the rise in research funding, being temporary and limited. These characteristics of insecurity are transferred to the individual through their employment contracts, which are between one and
three years. As most academics are employed for one year, they are living the lifelong job insecurity. When Max Weber famously spoke about science as a profession in 1919, it marked the beginning of the industrialisation and bureaucratisation of science. The development of the academic labour market in Germany can hardly be seen without the rise of scientific research, reflected in the increase of research funded scientific assistants. However, this development enables the sector to employ its academics in lifelong consecutive non-permanent employment with diminishing likelihood to advance into a permanent position. It is unreasonable to treat four-fifths of the workforce in the higher education sector as apprentice and in lifelong precarity. Thus GEW states ‘this highly educated workforce does conduct permanent valuable research work, which should be rewarded with permanent positions’ (GEW, 2013) and promotes a tenure-track system similar to the Australian model. Janin Bredehoeft is a sessional tutor and PhD student at Sydney University. Originally from Germany, she spent 4 months at the Social Science Research Centre Berlin in 2013
References Enders, J. (2005). Border crossings: Research training, knowledge dissemination and the transformation of academic work. Higher Education, 49/1-2, 119–133. Joongmanns, G. (2011). Evaluation des Wissenschaftszeitvertragsgesetz. HIS: Forum Hochschule 4/11. GEW (2014). Templiner Manifest. http://www.templiner-manifest.de. Weber, M. (1919). Wissenschaft als Beruf. Stuttgart: Reclam.
Photo: Philological Library, Free University of Berlin. © Svenwerk
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Pre-purchase your movie tickets
Members enjoy up to 20% off the
Pre-purchase gift cards from Member
through Member Advantage (via
price of a new vehicle with our
Advantage to save on everyday
phone or web) to enjoy big discounts
free car buying service (normally
expenses and big purchases. Gift
every time you go to the cinema.
costs $178) as part of your NTEU
cards available for Woolworths, Coles,
Tickets available for all major
benefits. Save time and money with
JB Hi-Fi, Harris Scarfe, The Good Guys,
cinemas, including Village, Hoyts,
quotes available on all car makes and
Ray’s Outdoors, Kmart, Supercheap
Greater Union, Event and more.
models Australia wide.
Auto, Rebel Sport and more.
For more information: 1300 853 352 | memberadvantage.com.au/nteu * Savings made by NTEU members using their Member Advantage benefits during March - September 2013. 1) Indicative only. Savings based on the purchase of 6 Adult and 6 Child tickets for Hoyts Cinema through Member Advantage website. Hoyts public ticket prices for Melbourne Central cinemas: $19.50 per adult, $14.50 per child current as of 30/01/2014 and subject to change. 2) Indicative only. Annual saving figure based on average household spend of $204 per week ($10,608 per year) on food and non-alcoholic beverages. Source: ABS Household expenditure survey 2009-2010.
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enquiry@unisuper.com.au
1800 331 685
Figures quoted are at 30 June 2013. Issued by UniSuper Management Pty Ltd (ABN 91 006 961 799, AFSL 235907) on behalf of UniSuper Limited, ABN 54 006 027 121 the trustee of UniSuper (ABN 91 385 943 850). Level 35, 385 Bourke Street, Melbourne VIC 3000.
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