Casual Humans of Higher Education

11/07/2022

"Fahad and I are casual workers who met and bonded over the miserable conditions we work under and how we can’t see a future for ourselves or our colleagues in the university sector. It’s amazing that we have so much in common, especially given how different our fields and our universities are: him doing genetics at a sandstone in Sydney and me in humanities and social work at a gumtree university in Melbourne. Sadly, a lot of that common experience was also in our shared frustration at the comprehensive failure of the NTEU to create the conditions of possibility for casual workers to actually band together and fight back. It’s that shared sense that things just have to get better that has drawn us to each other.

Building the A New NTEU campaign with Fahad has been an amazing experience. We are talking to workers all over the country and what we’re finding is that it’s not only casual workers who experience these feelings of overwork and uncertainty and insecurity. We’re running with Andrew, who’s a fixed term professional staff member, and we’re connecting with all kinds of workers who are all frustrated and scared and angry and who find hope in A New NTEU’s vision. It’s a really tough time for workers in universities right now and we’re so proud to be creating a way for workers to fight back. It makes sense in a way that casual workers would be at the forefront of this push and we know that we need to bring everyone along with us if we’re going to win."

— Anastasia Kanjere, casual academic and NTEU National General Secretary candidate

Anastasia is running for National General Secretary, Fahad Ali for National President and Andrew Beitzel for National Assistant Secretary in the NTEU elections. Find out more about their A New NTEU campaign here: https://anewnteu.com/
You can also follow them on twitter !

08/07/2022

yesterday Lisa Adkins, Dean of FASS, emailed casual staff informing us there isn’t unpaid work at USyd. for the record, i was compensated for 11 of the 25 hours i spent marking final assignments this semester because, according to Adkins, if it wasn't allocated, it didn't happen. whenever i've tried to chase up HR about additional admin or marking hours i'm sent on a wild goose chase of faceless bureaucrats who return no concrete answers. many of my peers and colleagues speak openly about leaving the academy because they feel there's no promise left here anymore; teaching no longer feels fulfilling, marking is physically exhausting and emotionally draining. casualisation is depriving our universities of good teachers. mgmt needs to stop kidding itself.

-Anonymous Casual Human at Sydney University

If you're a casual human at an Australian university, message our page to share your story of wage theft. If you're an underpaid and exploited casual human at USyd, get in touch with USyd Casuals Network, which meets weekly on Tuesdays at 4pm: tinyurl.com/casualszoom

13/06/2022

"I think about leaving academia almost on a daily basis. I've made a lot of sacrifices, I've sacrificed in my personal life. I can't have children because I don't have a guaranteed income that's coming in. I have to live with my parents. As a casual worker I can't get a home loan.
[As a casual] you're always doing work that you're not paid for. I'm paid for 28 hours face to face and prep time a week and I work about 45 if not more. I'm underpaid when it comes to marking because we get paid an hour per student and it takes probably two hours... We have a contract with a set number of hours that gets put on our contract for marking. If it exceeds those hours they turn back and they say this timesheet needs to be corrected because you've claimed extra hours. So you can't claim beyond the contract."

Natalia Maystorovich Chulio, casual academic at University of Sydney Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, on ABC's 7.30 report

Watch the full story: https://www.abc.net.au/7.30/universities-implicated-in-wage-underpayment/13922848

30/05/2021

Typical of the experiences of casuals at universities around Australia. What's your experience?
Send a message to our page.

10/03/2021

The reality of life as a Casual Human in Higher Education.
Send us your stories of wage theft and help us give a voice to casuals and

This morning, Dr Yaegan Doran represented the Casuals Network at the Senate Inquiry on Unlawful Underpayment. When asked by Senator Mehreen Faruqi, “What would happen if you only did the work you were paid for only?”, Dr Doran answered:
"We either do a very poor job, we rock up to our classes and do it on a bit of a whim. Or perhaps in a one-hour class we stop 25 minutes in and go “that’s our pay done”. We basically wouldn’t be able to do our jobs. Our choice is to do our job poorly, harm our students, not be employed again, or do our job well and work many many hours unpaid."

This is the reality of life as a casual in the Australian Higher Education system. Casuals are caught between the choice of doing right by our students and working unpaid hours, or working the hours we are actually paid for to the detriment of our students and our own future employment.

22/10/2020

Have you experienced wage theft at an Australian university? We want to share YOUR story.

Help us make the voices of precarious workers in higher education heard by sending a message to our page. We can share your story anonymously or with your name attached.

21/10/2020

"I've been a casual tutor in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences for the past four years. Up until midsemester break, I had logged $4,409.52 of stolen wages. I anticipate this more than doubling by the end of semester.

For my most recent batch of marking, I was paid for less than half of the time it actually took to read, mark and provide constructive feedback to my students. Instead of the 10 hours the university thought it would take, it actually took closer to 25 hours.

I spent the public holiday marking so my students could get their feedback in a timely fashion. I work every weekend to prepare for my tutorials on Monday. There's no weekend or public holiday pay for me. I'm not even allowed to log weekend hours on my timesheets - even when I'm teaching classes timetabled on the weekend.

At this point I estimate the university owes me more than $80,000 in stolen wages. I've received not so much as a thank you in return for years of exploitation." - Anonymous, the University of Sydney

28/09/2020

18/09/2020

"Running a business has afforded me the flexibility to take on casual university teaching, which I thoroughly enjoy. I love preparing for classes and making them engaging, coaching my students, and staying up to date with the evidence. I even find marking assessments rewarding! It is however apparent that the work of casual academics is significantly undervalued. We are teaching higher education to adults. For students and employers to get the most value, it is critical we understand and apply the research and evidence, utilise adult learning principles and share experiences and strategies that will help students retain and translate their knowledge into practice. This is an important job. Despite this, recruitment processes are opaque, training is limited, performance monitoring is basically non-existent and the pay does not reflect time or expertise required. The result is huge variation in teaching quality and student experience. But because this is not routinely tracked, monitored or centrally reported, it remains invisible. This is not a critique of the University I work for, as I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity and have had a good teaching experience, but it is a huge problem for the sector and the future of tertiary education. I hope we can find a solution.

Pictured are me and my boys. Like previous posters, what makes casual academia attractive to me, also leaves me vulnerable. I like the flexibility to be present with my kids while they are young but am also stressed about insecure and irregular income." - Sarah Barter

17/09/2020

" Six years teaching at USyd Business School as a sessional lecturer and casual has taught me to distrust any email starting with "To our valued casual colleagues" from senior management. In reality they view us as a tiresome necessity and resent the meagre pay they give us. After years of dedicated teaching and mulitple awards I was dismissed over Zoom in March 2020 when Covid19 hit. Of course they waited until I had shifted the course online then the fulltime academic simply used my work and took over."
- Anonymous

04/09/2020

“To borrow words from Rob Boncardo, a member of the Casuals Network at the University of Sydney, "This university is built on stolen land and stolen wages. These kinds of theft aren’t the same, but they both deserve the label ‘theft’.”

We know that wage theft has been an issue at the University of Sydney for a long time, especially for casualised staff. Recently it’s been gaining attention in the media, and last month staff at Melbourne Uni won millions of dollars in back pay after two years of grassroots organising by casual staff.
(Story here: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-08-05/university-of-melbourne-exposed-in-decade-long-wage-theft-case/12519588) You may already know the NTEU is organising a claim around wage theft on a number of campuses.

Wage theft is an open secret at universities, but the USyd Casuals Network is making sure we’ve got evidence. This semester we’re running a workload audit for casual and fixed-term staff to track their hours and see week-by-week how much they’re being underpaid. I’ve already had more than $600 stolen from me and it’s only week 2. Another member of the Casuals Network had over $2500 stolen before semester even began.

Although the university is claiming financial difficulties and putting up course cuts, job cuts and voluntary redundancies, we still deserve fair pay for the work we do. Every worker deserves fair working conditions and fair pay. The results of this audit are designed to shame the university for the way it systematically relies on the unpaid labour of hundreds of casualised staff."

- Georgia Carr, University of Sydney

12/08/2020

"Mum died mid-way through last semester. I took time off to assist with her care and just to spend time with her. I lost more than half of my semester's income (incl all the marking). Every time mum's medical team offered me medical certificates for work I wanted to scream. I've now been teaching in the same department for three years. With no carer, sick or annual leave. I love teaching, but I can't justify the financial risk for much longer." —Emily Bieber