Melbourne vows to ‘dramatically’ reduce reliance on casual staff

Australia’s highest ranked university has vowed to reduce its reliance on casual staff, saying insecure employment is not in the institution’s interests.

University of Melbourne provost Nicola Phillips told the national broadcaster that her institution would overhaul its employment model and “dramatically” reduce its dependence on casual staff, in response to an underpayment scandal sweeping the higher education sector.

“We’re going to rethink this model, reduce our reliance on casual staff and make sure that we put in place something that is more sustainable for the future,” Professor Phillips told the ABC.

The pledge builds on Melbourne commitments to a Senate committee in early February. Professor Phillips told the Select Committee on Job Security that universities’ 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 committee. “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.”

Long a sore point in the sector, casualisation’s impacts have come to a head during the coronavirus crisis. An analysis last month found that casual staff had borne the brunt of an estimated 17,000 university job losses during the first year of the pandemic, with around three in 10 casuals jettisoned compared with three in 100 permanent and contracted staff. 

Meanwhile, casuals have been targeted by underpayment practices blamed by some on the complexity of antiquated pay arrangements and by others on a deliberate university strategy to slash teaching costs.

At least 14 universities have been probed by the Fair Work Ombudsman for underpaying their staff tens of millions of dollars. The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) says at least 21 public universities have been under external or internal investigation.

Last September, Melbourne said it had repaid more than 1,000 current and former casual academics across five faculties and was inviting others to lodge claims for work that had gone unpaid since 2014. The ABC reported that casual staff at the dance school in the university’s Victorian College of the Arts were the latest to pursue claims of historical underpayment.

While issues with casual employment are long-standing, they face renewed attention in Australia’s new political environment. If the Labor government faces opposition in the Senate, it will need the support of the Greens to have any hope of passing legislation.

The Greens have signalled their strong opposition to casualisation, with education spokeswoman Mehreen Faruqi backing a suggestion that government funding should be withheld from universities with insecure employment practices. “An entire generation of casual academics has been hung out to dry,” she said.

NTEU president Alison Barnes said the new government should “regulate so that the majority of employment at our universities is secure”.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com