Insecurity reigns as universities embrace part-time and casual work

At least half university teaching is done by casually employed academics and the lines between jobs is blurring.

Full-time university staff are becoming fewer and far between.

Less than 1 per cent of new university positions since 2005 have been ongoing teaching and research jobs, with two-thirds of staff now in insecure employment, National Tertiary Education Union president Jeannie Rea says.

Dr Rea sketched a bleak picture of the workforce at a seminar for early career researchers staged last week in Melbourne by the Council for the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.

“It is better to know what the situation actually is because then you don’t think it’s about your inability to get your career cracking — because you keep going from a casual position to a contract to a casual position — and (it is better) to know that this is symptomatic of what’s happening in the sector,” she said.

Her data led to a lively Twitter debate with one historian, Ben Wilkie, saying “#1% of new uni jobs since 2005 are ongoing. You can’t look at a stat like that and tell academics on the job market to suck it up”.

Dr Rea said although higher education had been expanding, many of the jobs being created were precarious. At least half university teaching was done by casually employed academics, four out of five teaching-only staff were on casual contracts and four out of five research-only staff were on fixed-term contracts.

“Casualisation and short-term contracts in all parts of the workforce (academic as well as professional) are about trying to contain the cost,” Dr Rae said.

There were reports from a variety of universities that staff in professionally classified positions were doing work normally associated with academic jobs.

“So you’ll find people in a professional role but they’ll be doing teaching or they’ll be undertaking research, which used to be a research assistant role — so the lines are blurring.”

Dr Rea said the trend was only anecdotal at this stage and the practice would not necessarily save universities money.

“This is probably a pretty cynical point of view, but (this practice) does sort of break up people being able to build up a series of positions to then make a case for conversion to an ongoing professional or an ongoing academic position,” she said.

LH Martin Institute research fellow Peter Bentley, who studies the changing nature of the academic profession, said there was no clear data to test Dr Rea’s claim.

But Dr Bentley said there certainly were “incentives to hire people off the academic scale in order to inflate institutional research productivity — publications per academic”.

Dr Rea said when she talked to other professionals about what was happening in universities they expressed surprise that academics were not more concerned.

“I think it’s because we in academia see ourselves as our discipline area not as a professional group across the board, as accountants or lawyers do,” she said. “We see ourselves as a historian or as an economist.”

She said seminars such as the CHASS event enabled young researchers to be forewarned and forearmed. “What we really need to do is to engage in professional and industrial advocacy to try to improve the situation and improve the job security.”

In her new book How to Be an Academic, the Australian National University’s Inger Mewburn likens those on short-term contracts to seasonal fruit pickers with dry spells of no work.