The academic underclass
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 11: Getting Smart
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Inez Baranay
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Inez Baranay's biography and other articles by this writer
If you get a casual job as an academic at an Australian university, you think you are very lucky – a job working in your own discipline, a beginning to an academic career. You may be given casual teaching while you are a postgraduate student. You may expect that when you graduate you will get a real job, a staff job, a permanent position.
You eventually begin to notice that you are employed for only a few hours a week but it feels like you have a full-time job. Still, you're working in your chosen field and it's all leading to something.
You may have worked for your university for years, taught many courses, many students, but no one will find you on the staff register, no one can find your email address on your university's website.
You might one day realise you've been doing this for years and they're not creating jobs and you will always be a casual.
You've worked for so long that you remember when, as a casual, you were asked to the department's Christmas party – nice restaurant, menu, order a drink. Now you're asked to the special Christmas lunch for casuals, all crowded into the staff common room for finger food and cask wine, where you might catch up with your course convenor for the first time since the start of semester and maybe meet for the first time colleagues teaching the same subject.
THE OFFER OF CASUAL WORK, SAYS ONE OF THE ACADEMICS I spoke to, seems to be based on a system of "patronage. To be given casual work is seen as a gift," she says. Some people get offered more work, more hours than others. Various kinds of discrimination are perceived. Where several casuals want and need more hours of work there can be bitterness over the personal preferences of the staff who assign the contracts.
"Don't use that story," she said to me later about some standard tale of disappointments around casual work in her department, "they might identify who it is." I set out to speak to various academic casuals and found I had to offer repeated assurances that nothing I was told would be attributed, that I would not identify anyone. There is widespread anxiety, even paranoia, among casuals who rely on the work for their livelihood and still nurture a hope that they're working towards a permanent job.
"If you say you don't like it you don't get any more work," another said. "You feel more than vulnerable."
The number of hours a casual works a week varies and no one can expect consistency from one semester to the next. The increasing reliance on casual teaching staff is indisputable – more so in some disciplines, some departments, some universities. Often known as "sessionals" – with a contract for so many hours a week per course for a "session" or semester – casuals juggle their need for paying work with time for their own research.
In some departments, casuals may be restricted to no more than six hours a week. They might be told that they can't do more than that or they'll never get their research done, or they might be told any more hours brings the danger of the union stepping in to claim that it's actually a part-time job (forcing a budget-conscious department to pay accordingly).
Or, as a casual, you might be given as many hours as you want. You might notice that this means you teach more hours a week than any full-time member of staff but earn a fraction of a full-time salary.
The greatest difference among the stories I heard from a couple of dozen casual academics was their level of satisfaction with the guidance they received. The greatest consistency was in their claim that they worked far more hours than they were paid for.
Read, research, think, write lectures, find and choose readings, make photocopies – many hours are worked for each paid hour. Course convenors ask favours – photocopy this, look that up, come and discuss something. Casuals usually comply. "It's slave labour. But everyone's overworked so you do it. I'm always swinging between guilt and martyrdom."
The hourly rate doesn't seem so bad, though, compared with an hour working at Subway, so that's what you compare it with. But we haven't yet talked about marking and student consultations. Still, the work is not that far off from what you'd choose to be doing anyway: academic teachers and researchers typically work in a chosen field, one in which they invest personal interests, obsessions, passions. "I'm paid for four hours but really work between twelve and sixteen."
Casual academic teaching hourly rates are subject to a table of various rates (roughly a minimum of $45 for a repeat tutorial up to about $95 for a PhD-qualified first tutorial – universities vary). There are rates according to levels of experience and qualification, and according to whether the class is given for the first time or is a repeat. First-time rates are deemed to include an hour of preparation and an hour of assessment (so divide the hourly rate by three and it suddenly doesn't sound so great); repeat hours include an hour of assessment. Subway no longer looks so bad, and you don't need a doctorate to work there.
One casual who had recently been awarded her PhD was given a new contract at her old rate. She was told there wasn't enough money to pay her at her qualified rate. "I had to accept," she says, "I couldn't do anything about it."
"My rate of pay dropped when a new head of school decided that all my lectures would be paid at the repeat rate, on the grounds that I'd given lectures in that course before," says another. " ‘You don't have to prepare,' they said. And yet I have to do lots of research every year to update my knowledge – I teach in history, politics, popular culture. You have to keep up, whatever your discipline. I tried to point out that I still had a lot of preparation. But again, it was ‘take it or leave it'. I found out that a woman who'd begun teaching in the department – younger so even more powerless – was being paid at the repeat rate for her lectures on the grounds that the convenor of the course was giving lectures in the same subject at another campus!"
Take it or leave it, the world of WorkChoices.