A ‘grand bargain’ could be a solution for wage underpayments

Monash University vice-chancellor Margaret Gardner.

The Australian Universities Accord review raised a broad question about workplace relations in its February discussion paper: “How can the Accord support higher education providers to adopt sector-leading employment practices?”

It is referring to two specific issues – insecure work and underpayment – both of which have been in the media spotlight and are at the centre of current university enterprise bargaining negotiations. It has been suggested that they are the intentional outcomes of the business model of universities. However, the causes are not so simple and need to be understood if an effective solution is to be achieved.

Two elements of context are important.

First, in many ways Australian universities are good employers, offering strong employment protections, support for diversity and inclusion, and many conditions that exceed community standards.

In particular, median academic salaries are in the top 20 per cent of salaries, superannuation of 17 per cent is well above the 11 per cent standard, and redundancy provisions for academic staff are very generous.

Second, insecure employment in Australian universities has risen with the growth in student numbers and research activity, and as the proportion of volatile and insecure funding has increased (that is, funding from international and domestic student fees, and competitive research grants or based on performance in competitive research grants).

So, faced with high costs and high protections of secure academic employment and volatile revenue streams, university managers are likelier to make temporary hiring decisions that give them the flexibility to respond to changes in funding.

As stated in the Accord discussion paper, in 2021 there were 129,178 full-time equivalent university staff, of which nearly 16 per cent were casual.

This compares with the national figure of 23 per cent.

However, most of the public concern is about academic employment, where insecure employment is higher than in the overall university workforce.

This includes fixed-term contracts as well as casual staff, and they have different employment experiences.

For example, academic staff on contracts of three years or more receive the same entitlements to superannuation as ongoing staff and, at Monash, have annual median salaries of about $144,000 compared with the $152,000 median of continuing academic staff.

Among casual academic staff there are also different groups. For example, at Monash:

• Around 40 per cent are industry experts, such as lawyers, doctors, and engineers, who have positions and careers outside the university and do not rely on the university for their livelihood.

• Around 30 per cent are PhD students gaining experience in teaching while they complete their doctorates.

The use of industry experts provides profession-relevant experience while the PhD students bring in their own research. This improves the student education experience and improves the PhD students’ future career prospects.

There are also genuinely temporary vacancies that arise from staff leave including for the purpose of research.

Making determinations or regulations based on the apparent scale of insecure employment without understanding the size of these groups may not address the area of real concern – rolling short-term contracts and casual employees who are not undertaking genuinely temporary work.

As part of current enterprise bargaining negotiations, some universities are agreeing to offer new secure positions to replace existing contract or casual positions.

This will reduce current insecure employment levels, but whether there is a long-term effect will depend in part on the balance of insecure and secure funding in the next decade.

Even then, the scale of academic casual employment still may be higher than the national rate because of the genuine categories of casual employment described above.

The final and most vexed issue is incorrect payments of casual staff, particularly underpayment. This has arisen from the many decades of hiring practices being decentralised across university schools and departments and the complex payment schedules that are embedded in EBAs.

Universities have responded by changing their decision-making and payroll systems, with some impact. However, this does not address the inherent ambiguity and complexity of the work allocation and payment schedules involved in casual appointments, which are the subject of drawn-out negotiations in each university’s EBA.

A solution: the university sector needs to be assisted into a “grand bargain”. First, unions and management must recognise that the complexity that has led to the underpayment is a result of the industrial agreement in which both sides are equally complicit.

Second, some key principles must be established to guide discussion about how to reduce this complexity.

Until these two steps are taken, the current system of payment of academic casuals will continue to be an unproductive source of contention, with even more ambiguities as educational practices change with new technologies.

Margaret Gardner is vice-chancellor of Monash University. This article is an edited extract of a longer paper addressing workplace relations and insecure employment in Australian Universities. The full paper is available at Monash Lens.