Attempts to tackle casualisation in Australia ‘have failed’

Australia’s attempt to tackle rampant casualisation in the workforce has failed, with academics among those most let down by an ineffective legislative intervention, a 14-month Senate inquiry has concluded.

The Select Committee on Job Security has found that last March’s amendment to the Fair Work Act, which required employers to grant ongoing employment to their long-term casuals, has “not had a positive impact on job security” and should be replaced.

Last October, the committee proposed a new casual conversion mechanism tailored specifically to higher education. The new recommendation, outlined in the committee’s final substantive report, goes further in calling for the whole conversion process to be overhauled.

The report cites conversion rates of less than 10 per cent in banks and 5 per cent in a major cleaning company. But at universities with thousands of casual staff, offers of conversion have barely reached double figures, while public training provider TAFE New South Wales made no offers at all to its 7,700 casuals.

The report says thousands of University of Newcastle casuals received an identical form letter telling them they would not receive an offer, suggesting that “no real assessment ever took place of their eligibility for conversion”.

Newcastle said it had undertaken “a thorough review” of its staff’s eligibility for conversion, while TAFE said it had applied the legislation “as it is written”. Mass conversion of casuals would have disrupted its operations, disadvantaged students and contravened its merit-based recruitment obligations, it said.

Critics say the legislation was never going to benefit tertiary teachers, because the eligibility criteria – such as having worked the same patterns of hours for at least half a year – were ill-suited to sessional labour.

The latest federal education department statistics suggest that coronavirus may have succeeded where the legislation failed. In 2020, the casually employed proportion of the university workforce fell below 15 per cent – on a full-time equivalent basis – for the first time in at least a decade.

But this was only because casuals were the easiest to discard, with universities reducing their numbers by about 18 per cent in the initial months of the crisis – undoing seven years of steady growth in casual staffing.

Melissa Slee, secretary of the National Tertiary Education Union’s Victorian division, said up to 80 per cent of undergraduate teaching was typically performed by casuals ranked as “level A” tutors. “An entire level of the academic profession – level A, the foundational level of academe – has been made casual,” she told the Senate inquiry’s last public hearing on 3 February.

Sector leaders conceded the need for change. University of Melbourne provost Nicola Phillips said the highly casualised employment model was “neither desirable nor sustainable” and her institution intended to do something about it. “We’re starting to pull together the possibilities and avenues that we wish to explore, in consultation with our staff and unions,” she told the hearing.

Professor Phillips said changes to academic calendars, with semesters giving way to trimesters and intensive courses, would help foster permanent employment. “With longer-term planning and an eye on the priority of reducing short-term and insecure employment, we will be able to think differently about the kinds of roles that we create.”

Other recommendations in the committee’s report include defining “job insecurity” as a “workplace hazard” in occupational health and safety laws and improving data collection on insecure employment among international students.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com