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Let’s not keep it casual: the pain and perils of insecure university work
As the summer break burns on, many university casuals are breaking sweats – not just because of searing temperatures. Karina Luzia, co-founder of blog CASA: Casual, Adjunct, Sessional staff and Allies in Australian Higher Education, says the Christmas period is "particularly terrible" for university casuals as they aren't paid for three months.
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Don’t unions exacerbate that though? They’re always pushing for pay rises and more benefits (to justify their existence), and making it virtually impossible to sack or demote permanent staff. That makes the “permanent” workforce more expensive, and makes it harder for employers to run their business efficiently, which are strong incentives to hire non-permanent staff.
I spent five years on fixed-term contracts before becoming an independent IT contractor. I get no fringe benefits at all, I get paid if I work and not if I don’t.
I think we’d be better off as a nation if we did away with the notion of permanent employment (and the sometimes ridiculous perks that go with it, like leave loading) and switched to 1 to 5 year contracts. Not likely to be a popular suggestion with the permanent workforce or the unions though.
No, it wouldn’t be popular with unions, because in our experience casual and contract University staff are subject to appalling exploitation and vulnerable to bullying and intellectual property theft (I’m an NTEU rep). As for all those pay rises, yes, it’s called ‘keeping up with inflation’ and if the unions didn’t cause it to happen then wages would continue to fall relative to prices – you obviously haven’t been reading about Australian economists’ concerns recently about the flat-line in wages over the last few years and what it’s doing to the economy.
The reason you were on fixed term contracts for so long is because over the past 20 years unions have been deliberately weakened by legislation eg. losing the right to strike (go to the ILO website to see what it thinks of Australia’s industrial relations system). Weak unions means more insecure employment.
Just because you’ve been exploited is no reason to drag everyone down with you. And please stop talking about ‘the unions’ as though they’re some power located in an office somewhere. A union is a union of workers. As a University contract worker you benefited from enterprise bargaining negotiations by unions which were paid for by those workers – and which you probably didn’t contribute to – so try for a little gratitude to your former colleagues.