Workplace relations and insecure employment in Australian universities

The Australian Universities Accord review of higher education raised one specific question in relation to workplace relations in its February 2023 discussion paper. Question 38 – “How can the Accord support higher education providers to adopt sector-leading employment practices?” – is a good question, if a very broad one.

The discussion paper notes that in 2021, there were 129,178 full-time-equivalent (FTE) staff employed in universities, including some 20,305 casual staff. In other words, close to 16% of the total Australian university workforce (FTE) is in casual employment.

The paper remarks on the “many stakeholders [who] raised concerns about insecure work and underpayment in the higher education sector...”.

While support for “sector-leading” employment practices is important, the key concerns raised are specific, and reflect the current focus of much debate about what has been termed “wage theft” and insecurity of employment in universities.

The debate about casualisation casts a shadow over the total quality of employment relations and conditions of staff in Australian universities. Insecurity of employment has grown with increasing “insecurity” in funding, and is also, in part, a response to the features of secure academic employment.

The answer to the question involves unpacking the nature of insecure employment and casual payments in Australian universities in order to advance effective solutions.

Inaccuracy of casual payments, particularly for academics, is built on decades of practice, translated through the higher education award into enterprise bargaining agreement clauses and schedules of significant complexity.

A “grand bargain” between the relevant union(s) and employer(s) facilitated by the Fair Work Commission is worth pursuing to reduce the complexity of interpretation and payments for there to be an effective solution to incorrect payments.

Funding context

The growth of casualisation is recognised to have followed growth in international student numbers, but less commented upon is that it has also occurred alongside declining Commonwealth funding per domestic student and for research, which is predominantly provided for competitively-granted projects of three to five years’ duration.

Funding that can be confidently projected for a “secure” period of three to five years, such as government funding for domestic student education, has been declining over the past decade, and has not been indexed to meet inflation.

The proportion of research funding that fits into this “secure” envelope, such as research support funding (provided to support research overheads and infrastructure), has also been declining.

As the majority of research funding is gained project by project, and supporting funding has been declining, the majority of research funding is project-tied, rather than continuing.

Research support funding now forms a much lower proportion of total research income in Australian universities. In the early 2000s, research support funding provided about 38 cents for every external dollar earned, accounting for about 28% of total research funding, By 2022, it contributed 18 cents in the dollar and accounted for about 15% of all research funding.

The low success rates of applications for research grants or fellowships increases the uncertainty of research revenue and its “insecurity” as a source for funding continuing employment. As the majority of research funding is gained project by project, and supporting funding has been declining, the majority of research funding is project-tied, rather than continuing.

The rise in research funding in the past decades, particularly in research-intensive universities, and the increasing proportion of this funding tied to specific grants or projects, has been linked to increasing numbers of research-only appointments, many of which are on fixed-term contracts.

Thus, over the past 10 to 15 years, insecure employment has grown as the balance has shifted from “secure” to “insecure” university funding, with greater reliance on successful performance in competitive granting rounds, or success in recruiting students in internationally competitive markets.

To answer concerns about insecurity of employment in Australian universities requires understanding these major changes in the nature and mix of revenue sources in Australian universities in the past two decades that have underpinned the practices that have propelled current concerns.

Secure employment

In general, Australian universities have all the foundations of good employment relations, with comprehensive enterprise bargaining agreements and underlying awards ensuring strong minimum employment conditions and workplace grievance and disciplinary processes.

Other features characteristic of the best of employers, such as mental health and wellbeing programs, flexible leave, parental leave, childcare facilities on site, and cultural, sporting and health facilities, as well as strong diversity and inclusion programs, are common.

It might be said that high autonomy and challenging work, also features of desirable jobs, are the hallmark of academic employment, and much of the professional employment offered in Australian universities.

All university employees benefit from clear commitments to occupational health and safety (and high compliance), as is also the case in relation to discrimination, harassment, and other areas that affect the circumstances in which people work.

The median annual salary for all full-time Australian workers is close to $83,000. The median salary for an academic in Australia is significantly greater, at about $128,000 per annum. This median academic salary sits in the top 20% of Australian workforce earnings.

The entry-level salary for an academic is, of course, lower than the median (at about $85,000 per annum), while professorial salaries begin at about $190,000 per annum. There’s a large range in professorial salaries, as remuneration adds salary supplements beyond the minimum, reflecting clinical loadings, high research quality, and market scarcity.

A recent investigation reported by John Ross, based on 2020 data, indicates that the 50 best-paid employees at a selection of Australian Go8 universities earn between three and four times more than the average university staff member, reflecting the salaries paid to professors recruited on the basis of their high reputation and rare expertise, as well as those holding leadership or executive positions.

For academics, the years of education and related effort that must be undertaken to enter the profession are well in excess of most others in the workforce, so it’s to be expected that salaries would also be in excess of many others.

These salaries are comparable to – and in many cases better – than the salaries offered in European countries, as well as Canada, UK and US.

Administrative and professional staff in universities have median salaries that, in many cases, are in excess of those provided in secure Commonwealth public sector employment. At Monash, the salaries for these staff range from $52,977 to $134,184 per annum, excluding those in senior management positions. The salary range for equivalent staff in the Australian Public Service is about $51,000 to $120,000 per annum.

For most fixed-term contract and ongoing employees in Australian universities, the compulsory superannuation is 17% compared with mandated national compulsory superannuation of 10.5%. In general, employment conditions are above community standards.

Read more: Responding to The Australian Universities Accord challenge

For those who hold continuing positions, security of employment is bolstered by strong legal protections in relation to dismissal and redundancy, including internal disciplinary and change-management requirements, as well as above community standard redundancy payments.

A clear test of these protections was evident recently in university responses to the pandemic. Faced with the possibility of a significant decline in revenue, the responses available to Australian universities were fewer than in many other industries, as salary reductions, compulsory taking of accumulated leave and related measures did not exist in their EBAs.

In order to take steps to reduce expenditure on staff, redundancies were the major option, with the attendant significant impact on staff and immediate increased expenditure on large redundancy payments.

In other words, many of the overall conditions, including salaries, and the access to representation by unions, as well as strong workplace protections in awards and enterprise bargaining agreements for those employed by Australian universities, make them desirable places to work.

This attractiveness is evident in the ability to recruit academic staff from across the world, and to maintain highly-qualified professional and administrative staff.

This does not mean all working conditions have improved over the past two decades, nor that there are no workplace issues to address for those in secure employment.

Evidence of Australian universities’ staff-to-student ratios shows the number of students associated with each academic staff member (and each professional or administrative staff member) has grown, increasing workload on average for staff members over the past few decades.

This has been accompanied by increased pressure for research performance and education innovation.

In general, while overall conditions compare favourably with international comparators and many other sectors, workload and performance expectations have increased.

Insecure employment

Many of the ways that increasing demands on continuing staff have been mitigated is by increasing casual employment. Academics with research grants often “buy out” some of their teaching to increase time on the research they’ve been funded to undertake, and casual staff take up these relinquished teaching duties.

There have been estimates that 31% of the academic workforce is in sessional or casual employment. Nevertheless, as the discussion paper outlines, 16% of the total university workforce is casual or sessional – below the proportion in the overall Australian workforce, which is estimated at 23%.

The employment conditions currently applied in Australian universities are based on awards derived from longstanding practice that have been “translated” into enterprise bargaining agreements (EBAs).

They are the product of years of negotiations between universities and the relevant unions, principally the NTEU. They’ve produced, as noted above, strong employment protections for those in continuing employment.

They’ve also produced complex systems for casual academic staff, enshrined in EBAs, in which both the hiring of casuals and the decisions on workload allocation and payments are dispersed across many hundreds or thousands of “supervisors” and small organisational units, such as departments or schools within faculties.

This leads to systematic difficulties in interpretation of payment schedules, and therefore payment accuracy, that have exacerbated issues for the employment and payment of those in insecure employment.

As the Accord discussion paper implies, the concerns raised about casualisation in Australian universities are directed principally to academic casuals or sessionals, rather than casual employment of administrative staff, because the systems of academic casual employment are, in general, more complex than those for professional or administrative casual work.

Fixed-term contract employment

Insecure employment in Australian universities comes in different forms.

There are two broad categories of insecure employment – those on fixed-term contracts, and those holding casual or sessional appointments.

According to the most recent data from all Victorian universities, 40.2% of FTE employees were in fixed-term or casual positions in 2022. This varied from a high of 54.% to a low of 25.7%.

Taking the data from Monash University – which would be representative of a research-intensive metropolitan university – some 39% of all staff were on fixed-term contracts in 2022.

Of this number, more than 31% of academic staff are on contracts of three years or more, compared with 68% on less than three-year contracts.

There’s a difference in insecurity of employment between those on longer contracts, compared to the circumstances of those on contracts of one year.

It’s noteworthy that, according to 2021 ABS data, the national median job tenure in Australia is five years, with 55% of employed people in their job for less than five years, including 20% less than one year.

University policies, based on the legal force of the relevant EBA, outline a series of conditions that must be met before a staff position can be offered by the university as a fixed-term contract, rather than as a continuing position.

These conditions are in place to restrict the use of fixed-term contracts to circumstances that would warrant their use. Contracts of less than three years would typically be offered to deal with short-term absences that involve replacing staff on leave or seconded to another position, or for a specific task or project not funded from continuing funding sources or student fees, but has funding tied to that project.

The restrictions or conditions on creation of such fixed-term positions were inserted to recognise insecure funding does not support continuing positions, or that there are circumstances where a fixed-term contract is “backfilling” a position usually occupied by a continuing staff member who is temporarily absent.

At Monash, the median salary of those on contracts of three or more years is about $144,000 per annum, compared with a median salary of about $107,000 per annum for those on one-year contracts. The comparison is with a median salary of more than $151,000 per annum for those in continuing employment.

Casual academic employment

The second broad category of those in insecure employment is those in casual or sessional employment, and the focus of commentary is on academic casuals.

At Monash, there are three distinct groups of academic casuals or sessionals:

1. Industry experts, typically with a career and employment outside the University, who comprise some 40% of sessional academics

2. Current Monash PhD students, who account for a further 29% of sessionals

3. The remainder of sessional academics, about 30%, who are likely to be seeking more secure employment, including as an academic.

As with those on fixed-term contracts, these three categories are not all experiencing insecurity of employment similarly.

In the first category are those generally undertaking a career outside the University, such as lawyers, engineers, economists or clinicians, and they’re providing industry or profession-relevant expertise in education or research through casual or sessional employment.

They’re not employees who could or should be transferred to more secure employment in the University. To remove these experts from the University workforce would undermine the relevance and practice-quality of the teaching the university is able to provide.

In the second category, PhD students are undertaking sustained inquiry over a number of years to obtain a major educational qualification. Many may be doing so with the intention of becoming an academic.

Sessional teaching is contiguous to their study, and adds to their future employability. It would be counterproductive to transfer the work they’re undertaking to continuing employment, because it would deprive future PhD students of similar opportunities to undertake teaching work, and enhance their skills and employability.

It is possible, however, to offer them fixed-term employment for the term of their PhD candidature, and so mitigate the insecurity of their employment during their PhD, as Monash has proposed in its current EBA negotiations.

The third category includes people seeking continuing employment, perhaps preferably in a university. There’s an empirical question about the nature of the sessional work they’re undertaking, which goes to whether it is “genuinely” temporary.

Where this work recurs in a regular way in the same fields of education, it should, in principle, be undertaken by those in continuing employment.

Some sessional work undertaken by staff in this third category is due to temporary replacement of continuing academic staff taking leave from their position, such as for parental or illness-related purposes, or for long service leave.

Some is also due to continuing staff winning research or other commercial contracts that requires or allows them to “buy out” some of their normal teaching allocation, in order to undertake the research.

Both of these situations are unpredictable, likely characterised by “insecure” funding, and/or temporary.

Reducing casualisation means balancing sessional teaching that is genuinely temporary, meeting the demands of research, or of continuing staff exercising their rights to leave against work that should be seen as continuing or permanent.

In a university such as Monash, where more than $600 million was earned in research income in 2022, this “buying out” of teaching time can be a significant part of sessional work.

Also, across a large workforce, the incidence of leave, or delays in arrival of staff who have been hired on continuing employment, produces genuinely temporary or casual work.

Reducing casualisation means balancing sessional teaching that is genuinely temporary, meeting the demands of research, or of continuing staff exercising their rights to leave against work that should be seen as continuing or permanent.

To reduce casual academic employment means separating the purely frictional and temporary employment needs of the University from the need for increased continuing or permanent staff.

This is an exercise requiring regular monitoring, as student demand for education fluctuates in total or by field of study.

It’s not a matter resolved by simple formulae. It’s not clear that the sessional workforce in a university can be less than the whole of sessional academics in category 1 (industry experts), and parts of category 2 and category 3 that meet the genuinely temporary replacement of continuing staff work.

Incorrect payment in sessional academic employment

The other area mentioned in the discussion paper is underpayment of casual or sessional staff. Universities vary in the exact terms of their payment clauses and in the way they organise casual staff work and their payments.

Areas of commonality are generally that:

• the payment clauses provide a variety of rates for different types of activity, which means many points of interpretation about the rate for the sessional or casual work undertaken
• the decision to hire a casual or sessional academic staff member and what work they will do is often widely dispersed across a large number of staff who may be subject or unit coordinators, or course or program directors, or research project leaders.

The payment schedule for academic sessional work is complex. In the Monash University EBA, there are eight categories of activity, ranging from lectures and tutorials, through various specialist areas, to marking and other academic activity, and each category has within it between two and four sub-categories.

The rates vary from $53.94 an hour for standard marking or repeat tutorials to about $371.10 for delivery of a one-hour specialist lecture.

The variations within categories add complexity. Rates vary based on whether a lecture or tutorial is “new” or a repeat, because each of them carries with it an assumption of anything from one to four hours’ extra work involving preparation, contemporaneous consultation and the like.

This means a decision about whether an activity is a tutorial or a lecture, a practical class or a clinical session, and for some categories whether it is, basic, developed or specialised for lecturing, or for marking, complex or standard, is complicated by all these potential variations.

In one category alone, Monash’s Other Required Academic Activity (ORAA), the following situations are listed:

• The conduct of practical classes, demonstrations, workshops, student field excursions
• The conduct of clinical sessions, other than clinical nurse education
• The conduct of performance and visual art studio sessions
• Musical coaching, repetiteurship, and musical accompanying other than with special educational service
• Development of teaching and subject materials such as the preparation of subject guides, and reading lists and basic activities associated with subject coordination
• Consultation with students (other than as contemporaneous consultation for a tutorial or lecture)
• Attendance at departmental and faculty meetings as required
• Attendance at any of the activities set out in one to four above of this schedule as directed.

The opportunity for inaccuracy and differences in interpretation are inherent in the many judgments that must be made by the person “commissioning” the work to be done, by the person undertaking and claiming the sessional payment, and by the person authorising the payment – who may be different people.

As ways of teaching vary by field of study, the authority for decision-making about the nature of the activity being undertaken has traditionally rested with those closest to the course or subject. This introduces greater likelihood of inconsistency in interpretation across similar types of activity within any one university.

For example, marking or assessment in a humanities subject will be different to a performing or visual arts subject, and different again from a computing or engineering subject, or biomedical or science subject.

These are some of the myriad ways the inherent complexity of these payment systems increases the potential for under and overpayment. This means there’s a “systematic” reason for underpayments (as well as overpayments) to arise.

However, this is very different from asserting that there is a “system” chosen by management to underpay sessional staff. The complexity has been the product of many years of negotiations between unions and management supporting devolved work practices common to academia, in which faculties, schools, departments, degree programs and subjects vary in how they design and describe the work, and this is compounded by the associated complex payment schedules.

A possible resolution

There’s a need to strip the complexity from the payment system, to make a simpler set of payments for sessional academic work that will reduce the chances of conflicting interpretations and incorrect payments.

To achieve greater simplicity, however, relies on agreement by unions and management for major variation to their current industrial instruments or agreements.

If there was one change that would improve employment relations outcomes in relation to incorrect payment of sessional academic staff in universities, it would be a “grand” bargain between unions and management, facilitated by the Fair Work Commission, to simplify sessional payments so they could be more easily and more accurately administered by a university. In other words, many less payment categories with less possibility for local variation.

This would be more effective than leaving the current complexity, and trying to produce consistency and accuracy by complex changes to payment policies and payroll systems.

In conclusion

There has been much recent debate about two areas of employment relations and conditions in Australian universities, the extent of insecure employment, and incorrect payment of casual or sessional academics.

Less has been said about the overall funding context, and the character of employment relations and employment conditions for those in secure employment in Australian universities, and their relationship to increasing insecure employment and casualisation.

Two elements of context are important.

First, the rise of insecure employment in Australian universities has been fuelled by growth in education and research, which is underpinned by decreasing “secure” funding, and increased market and performance-related “insecure” funding.

Second, secure employment in Australian universities, and related working conditions and employment relations, is characterised by good salaries and conditions, strong employment protections, systems of representation and voice for university staff, and support for diversity and inclusion.

In sum, secure employment in Australian universities has the characteristics of good employment, albeit accompanied by increasing demands in relation to workload and performance.

Without attention to the underlying dynamics of Australian university funding, the pressure to mitigate uncertainty and potential volatility in funding for education, and particularly research, will continue to direct hiring practices away from the high levels of employment security that characterise ongoing and longer-term contract university employment, and towards flexible, insecure modes.

In relation to insecure employment, there’s a need to be clearer about the problems to be addressed. Not all fixed-term contracts or casual employment signals inadequate remuneration and conditions for those so employed, nor are all of those so employed experiencing the detriments of insecure employment.

Should a fixed-term contract of three years or more in an Australian university with the conditions and salary outlined above be placed in the same category of insecure employment as contracts of less than three years?

Current estimates at Monash would suggest staff on contracts of less than three years are about a quarter of the University workforce. This proportion can be reduced, but is contingent on the security of support for researcher salaries in research grants.

The proportion of casual academic staff can be reduced. To do so requires tighter central university oversight and/or conditions imposed on the circumstances in which casual or sessional academic staff can be hired.

In the case of research, particular “rules” or conditions on the circumstances and the terms on which “buy out” of teaching time is allowed could reduce use of sessional academic staff.

Changes such as these, however, would likely be experienced as added burdens in terms of regulation and increased workload on non-casual academic staff.

Secure employment in Australian universities has the characteristics of good employment, albeit accompanied by increasing demands in relation to workload and performance.

If, as Monash has proposed, fixed-term contracts are provided to PhDs, who would previously have undertaken sessional or casual teaching, this will increase the numbers of staff in the university on fixed-term contracts, while reducing casual or sessional employment.

Reducing casualisation is an important objective, because this is the major area where the detriments of insecurity of employment are felt. Understanding the specific variations in academic casual employment shows where it can be reduced, but also where it cannot, and should not, be reduced.

If appropriate action is taken – and there is evidence that current negotiations on EBAs across Australia will see action taken – it may nevertheless not reduce the scale of academic casual employment below the overall proportion of casuals in the Australian workforce, because there are genuine categories of casual or sessional academic employment to access industry experts and to temporarily replace staff in more secure employment.

Finally, incorrect payments of casual staff, particularly underpayment, is a product of a complex system embedded in EBAs, and many decades of practice in universities with decentralised arrangements about how casual work is assigned and understood.

To decrease complexity and decentralisation is not easily achieved, nor may it be best-solved in the long drawn-out and multiple negotiations that would attend any attempt by universities to simplify the casual payments schedule.

The university sector needs to be assisted into a “grand bargain” in which the first step is a recognition by unions and management that complexity of payment schedules is a feature produced by industrial agreement in which all are equally complicit.

The second step is setting up some key principles that would guide discussion about how to reduce complexity.

Until these two steps are taken, the current “system” of payment of academic casuals or sessionals will continue to be an unproductive source of contestation.

In answer to the review question about sector-leading employment practices, the single-most important direct recommendation would be to encourage an “accord” or “grand bargain” over simplified sessional payments.

And the major change would be to examine and improve the balance between “secure” and “insecure” university funding in order to provide a more desirable and sustainable trajectory in future funding compacts to support more secure employment.