Uni staff starved of Chinese students due to the Chinese Virus are copping it from all sides.Report highlights super-exploited conditions of Australia’s casual university staffBy John Harris 15 August 2020
A report entitled “Over-worked and worked over: Casual Academics Bear the Costs of COVID-19,” released by the University of Sydney (USyd) Casuals Network last month, provides further evidence of the increasing exploitation of casual workers in Australia’s universities.The report was based on a survey of 159 casual workers in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences (FASS) at USyd. It focussed on employment and financial insecurity due to the coronavirus pandemic. The results point to the broader experiences of workers throughout tertiary education institutions across the country and internationally.
Over the past three decades, Australian universities have seen a dramatic expansion in the levels of casual employment—part of a wider corporate-government drive to decimate full-time permanent work. Approximately 70 percent of the university workers, both academic and professional, are now on insecure or casual contracts.
This is the result of the worsening under-funding of universities and their transformation into business entities serving the needs of the financial elite, facilitated by successive enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs) foisted on university staff by the main trade unions covering university staff, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU).
Casual workers have been increasingly denied any possibility of securing permanent work. Across the tertiary education sector, the report said approximately 62.9 percent of casuals had remained in a casual job between 3 to 10 years, with 12.6 percent in a casual position for over 10 years.
Casual staff often fill critical teaching positions, including course coordination (27 percent), tutoring (91.2 percent) and lecturing (40.9 percent), conduct research and provide professional support functions.
The report highlights growing underpayment. Before the pandemic, 40.5 percent of the FASS casual workers reported that they tended to work between “0-3 hours” of unpaid work per week. Another 35.6 percent workers indicated between “4-7 hours:” Some 11.1 percent worked between “7–10 hours;” 6.3 percent selected “11–14 hours;” 1.6 percent selected “15–18 hours” and 2.4 percent selected “22+ hours.”
In Semester 1 this year, unpaid work hours increased substantially. Of all the respondents, 18.3 percent selected “0–3 hours;” 31.3 percent selected “4–7 hours;” 24.5 percent selected “7–10 hours;” 10.7 percent selected “11–14 hours;” 6.1 percent selected “15–18 hours;” 4.6 percent selected “19–21 hours” and 4.6 percent selected “22+ hours.”
On average, FASS casuals were contracted for 12 hours per week, or 156 hours for a 13-week semester. The average number of unpaid hours for Semester 1 was 50.58, equivalent to nearly a third of the contracted hours. Some casuals worked over 280 unpaid hours during the semester.
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https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2020/08/15/unis-a15.html