A Two-tier System That Penalises Casuals

Neoliberal universities are two-tiered systems that separate permanent staff from precariously employed, fixed-term and casual staff. The erosion of job security across the board has contributed to a lack of solidarity, as permanent staff fear that their jobs will be in jeopardy if they do not keep up with the unrealistic demands for teaching, research, and service that are piled on them. Part of the relative job security of permanent staff is the reliance on casually employed teaching and research support staff, who take on the bulk of the ‘grunt’ work: marking, transcribing, interviewing, administration, data cleaning/ de-identifying etc. Tasks which are all vital to teaching and research, but are incredibly time consuming and undervalued – in that they are seemingly designated as a poor use of permanent staff’s time, and thus outsourced as poorly-paid, piecemeal roles taken up by students and recent graduates. This approach manufactures desperation by keeping a large number of staff vulnerable through short-term contracts on poverty wages. On top of this, our primary source of advocacy – the union – is ill-equipped/unwilling to deal with the *real* issues facing precarious staff, as many material protections for precarious staff would likely curtail some of the privileges enjoyed by their permanent members.

At present, I am employed as a casual research assistant on three different projects (in 3 different faculties). In all of these projects, I am contributing to the analysis of data and co-authoring academic publications with the primary researchers. I was specifically recruited because I have a PhD and expertise in the kinds of analysis the primary researchers were interested in doing. It’s worth noting that I am not the only ‘post-doc’ employed as an RA, many of us are employed this way to get around the extortionate overheads universities charge for research fellow positions.

Because I am employed as an RA on others’ projects, none of them are in my specific area of study. I agreed to these projects for a variety of reasons, one being that they maintained my institutional access so that I could continue to use the library to work on my own publications. They also included publications which are critical when applying for permanent academic work, they diversified my areas of expertise, too, which would make me a more flexible candidate in the event that a permanent job came up, and built connections with other – better funded – faculties that I could maybe migrate into long-term.

Note that ‘pay’ was not a factor here. In fact, the pay scales for each of these contracts is different despite being essentially the same job. For example, one pays $25.25 p/h and another pays minimum wage ($21.20 p/h). These rates are set in the collective agreements, negotiated by people who clearly do not have a sense of who is being hired for these roles and for what purpose. This is one of the ways in which the union is working against precarious staff.

Further to this point, I also have worked as a contract lecturer. I taught a large class (over 400 students), and had a team of TA’s I had to manage and mentor. My contract was valued at 10 hours a week with no indication as to how this figure was calculated. I did not feel I could turn it down or negotiate, as I had already begun working on it (uploading syllabi, designing assessment, ordering textbooks etc). I pursued a pay dispute over an increased workload, and the University employed delay tactics by not responding until 3 months after my contract had ended, meaning that I had no opportunity to alter my work, stop working, or negotiate. Although I was covered under the collective agreement, which entitled me to union representation, we discovered in this process that there was no clause for non-permanent staff. This meant that legally I was considered the equivalent of full-time salaried staff who were expected to accept variations in workload. I had no recourse, and was expected to simply ‘eat’ all of this unpaid work. I have never felt more disposable.

I come from a working class background. Universities have always felt a bit alien to me, but I hung around because I love teaching and I love research. But I’m leaving academia. I can’t handle the precarity long term, it’s bad for my health and wellbeing. The sad thing is that people of diverse backgrounds will continue to feel that Universities are alien to them, because no one who looks like them, who comes from their communities, will stick around in this environment. Like me, they’ll leave. They’re recruited into graduate programs on the lie that they’re welcome in these spaces but there is literally no infrastructure – few opportunities for gainful employment, a lack of policy and resourcing – to support them. That is a real shame and a complete missed opportunity.