‘Simpler systems’ needed to solve underpayments, says Monash v-c

Monash University vice-chancellor and incoming Victorian governor Margaret Gardner has proposed a “grand bargain” between institutions and unions to fix employment practices plagued by insecurity and underpayment.

In an essay for the Monash Lens news website, Professor Gardner blames underpayments for casual academics partly on complex pay rates and decentralised pay processes. These problems are unlikely to be solved “in the long drawn-out…negotiations that would attend any attempt by universities to simplify…casual payments”, she writes.

“The university sector needs to be assisted into a ‘grand bargain’,” Professor Gardner continues. “The first step is a recognition by unions and management that complexity of payment schedules is a feature…in which all are equally complicit. The second step is setting up some key principles…to reduce complexity.

“Until these two steps are taken, the current ‘system’ of payment…will continue to be an unproductive source of contestation.”

The essay acknowledges that casualisation “casts a shadow” over a sector that otherwise has “all the foundations of good employment relations”, including “comprehensive” enterprise bargaining, generous employment conditions, enviable superannuation and salaries well above Australian norms.

But Professor Gardner, an industrial relations scholar before she became Australia’s longest-serving vice-chancellor, says the surge in insecure employment at universities reflects their need to increase their workload while relying on increasingly insecure funding.

“Without attention to the underlying dynamics of Australian university funding, the pressure to mitigate uncertainty…will continue to direct hiring practices…towards flexible, insecure modes,” she writes.

Professor Gardner also highlights a need to be “clearer about the problems” in insecure employment. While acknowledging questions over whether some sessional work is “genuinely” temporary – and should instead go to people with continuing jobs – she says this applies to a minority of casuals.

At Monash, she says, around 40 per cent of sessional academics are “industry experts” with separate jobs. Another 30-odd per cent are current PhD students.

While the remaining 30 per cent “are likely to be seeking more secure employment”, many are filling in for colleagues on leave or subcontracting for academics who use research grants to “buy out” some of their teaching allocations.

She says university employment conditions are based on awards derived from “long-standing practice”, translated into workplace agreements through “years of negotiations” between universities and unions. This has produced “strong employment protections” for continuing staff but “complex” systems for casual academics.

Hiring, workload and payment decisions are “dispersed” across hundreds of supervisors and small organisational units, creating “systematic difficulties” in the interpretation of payment schedules. Dozens of sub-categories of academic activities, each with their own pay rates, are further complicated by disciplinary differences and questions over whether lectures or tutorials are “new” or “repeat”.

“A simpler set of payments for sessional academic work [would] reduce the chances of conflicting interpretations and incorrect payments [but requires] major variation to…current industrial instruments or agreements,” Professor Gardner says.

“If there was one change that would improve employment relations outcomes…it would be a ‘grand’ bargain…facilitated by the Fair Work Commission [FWC],” she writes.

The argument appears unlikely to sway the academic union, with Monash members ridiculing the essay on social media. It was published the same day that the FWC rejected Monash’s application to retrospectively change its 2019 workplace agreement to remove “ambiguity”.

Higher education researchers have linked casualisation and underpayments to unions’ reluctance to relinquish decades-old employment conditions that privilege permanent staff. But a recent Griffith University bid to “simplify” casual payments, to avoid future mistakes, was rejected by almost two thirds of voting academics.

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com