Western Sydney Uni reduces casuals and offers ongoing jobs

Western Sydney University has reduced its number of casual academics and offered more permanent jobs.

Western Sydney University has reduced its number of casual academics and offered more permanent jobs.

Western Sydney University has boosted its numbers of permanently employed academics and reduced its reliance on casuals by making appointments to more than 60 early career positions.

The new jobs follow 30 appointments made last year, part of a plan to create 150 full-time equivalent roles and reduce casual employment for academic staff that the university negotiated with the National Tertiary Education Union.

The university’s senior deputy vice-chancellor, Clare Pollock, said the new jobs would help address the problem of insecure work in academe. Western’s move was praised by the university’s NTEU branch president, David Burchell, who said the decasualisation program was the “first of its kind” in the sector.

Palawa woman Lindsay McCabe, one of the new appointments who was hired this year as an associate lecturer in criminology, said that having an ongoing role at the university meant that she was able to plan for her and her son’s future.

“It’s a feeling of security, and takes away the stresses of not knowing if I’ll be employed next semester, which means I have more mental capacity to focus on my work and my family,” she said.

Shatha Aziz, hired as an associate lecturer in Western’s School of Computer, Data and Mathematical Sciences in the earlier cohort, said she now felt “a sense of belonging” as an ongoing member of the university staff.

The university said it would start recruitment soon for the last 60 permanent positions. The program aims to reduce Western’s use of casual academics for non-clinical teaching by at least 25 per cent.