Casual staff will get sick leave at University of Sydney
Casual staff will be offered sick leave in a new enterprise agreement close to being finalised at one of the country’s top universities.
In an Australian first, casual university staff will be offered sick leave in a new enterprise agreement that is close to being finalised at the University of Sydney.
The agreement also takes a significant step towards reducing the high number of casuals in insecure work in the higher education sector, committing the university to a large reduction in its numbers of casual academics. Sydney will advertise 330 new continuing positions for academics, 110 of them earmarked for long-term casual and fixed-term staff currently at the university.
The nearly complete agreement that was negotiated with the National Tertiary Education Union offers casual employees five days of sick leave, termed special paid leave, each year.
“This is the first university where it’s been won. It’s a game changer,” NTEU general secretary Damien Cahill said.
The 330 new continuing academic positions are split between 110 teaching and research positions and 220 education-focused roles. The 110 positions to be offered to existing casual and fixed-term staff are split evenly between the two categories.
The Sydney deal follows four other university enterprise agreements completed in the current round of bargaining that will reduce casual positions and increase permanent ones.
The first was at Western Sydney University, which agreed last year to offer permanent jobs to a quarter of its casual staff. It is offering casuals first preference in applying for 150 jobs to be filled by the end of next year.
Two others followed. The University of Technology Sydney is offering 110 permanent jobs for its casual staff and the Australian Catholic University is offering 85 permanent positions for casuals.
Then, in a joint statement on Monday, Flinders University and the South Australian division of the NTEU said they had reached in-principle agreement for an enterprise agreement that would convert more casual staff to permanent positions.
This week the union is mounting an action campaign, culminating in a rally in Melbourne on Wednesday, to push to “decasualise” the workforce in other universities.
“We’ve established a beachhead and we’re building momentum, but it’s only a beginning. This campaign will continue until we’ve decasualised the sector,” NTEU national president Alison Barnes said.
She said the systematic use of casual and fixed-term employment in universities was “toxic”. People employed under those conditions were unable to access sick leave, plan holidays or pay mortgages, Dr Barnes said.
According to the union there are more than 150,000 people employed as casuals or on fixed-term contracts in Australian universities. The union is still negotiating enterprise agreements in the current round at 24 universities and intends to push for casual jobs to be made permanent at all of them.
The campaign to reduce casualisation in universities gained impetus from revelations across the past two years that many universities have had to pay casual workers millions of dollars to rectify past underpayment of wages.
The amount repaid now totals more than $80m at 18 universities and is likely to rise as more cases are settled. The University of Melbourne underpaid staff by more than $30m and the University of Sydney by more than $12m.
In its submission to the federal government’s review of higher education for its planned Universities Accord, the NTEU called for a target to be set to reduce the use of casual and fixed-term employment by half across the next five years which, it said, would put 77.5 per cent of university jobs on a permanent basis.
In a personal submission to the Accord review, Australian National University vice-chancellor Brian Schmidt criticised the growing level of casual employment in universities.
He said although universities needed to employ society’s most capable people, “the attractiveness of the (academic) profession has eroded considerably over the last two decades, with an emerging class of academics on rolling short-term or casualised contracts”. “Universities themselves will need to answer to their staff for employing a significant number of staff on casualised or very short-term contracts,” he said.
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