NTEU and casuals What’s the problem with casual employment? While casual employment sometimes provides employees with important flexibility and can be seen as a “foot in the door” to more permanent academic employment, being a casual can also mean that staff experience a high level of job insecurity and financial uncertainty. NTEU’s research has shown that casual academic employment is sometimes like a treadmill: sessionals are often re-engaged to perform casual work year after year rather than appointed to entry-level fixed term or continuing academic positions. There can often be very little professional development offered to casuals and inadequate time for research due to high teaching loads. All of this can add to the difficulties in accessing a meaningful career path. Whilst casuals receive a 25% loading, this can often fail to fully compensate for the broader benefits of a range of other entitlements that other staff receive, such as sick leave, paid parental leave and above-guarantee superannuation (permanent academic staff in universities receive 17% superannuation, whereas casuals only receive 9%). Once account is taken of the amount of time needed for duties such as preparation, administration and student consultation, many academic casuals report underpayment for work performed. In addition, the high level of job insecurity that casual employment brings with it means that casual employees usually cannot get access to home loans or other finance.
What is NTEU doing for academic casual employees? Since the 1990s, higher education has gone through a period of turmoil due to cuts to Commonwealth funding, changes to industrial relations legislation and a range of other national and international pressures. One of these changes has been rapid growth in casual employment. A key priority of the Union is to improve the working conditions of casual employees, both by improving conditions directly and by ensuring universities provide opportunities for casuals to attain more secure jobs. In the last round of enterprise bargaining with management at your university, the Union won significant improvements in the conditions of casual staff, as detailed throughout this booklet. These improvements have only been won through the activity of casual NTEU members who campaigned to achieve these major gains.
www.unicasual.org.au
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