Anticipation and angst as Australia changes casualisation laws

Employment arrangements at Australian universities are entering uncharted territory, as new laws make it easier for casual staff to demand permanent appointment.

Under an “employee choice” provision, which takes effect from 26 August, casual workers can seek permanent employment after six months on the job. It replaces “casual conversion” arrangements that give casual staff the automatic right to ongoing employment after 12 months, so long as they worked regular, ongoing patterns of hours for the past six.

This requirement excludes most casual academics because of the sessional nature of their work. A 2021 analysis found that very few university staff had benefited from casual conversion.

The new approach, however, precludes universities from engaging casual academics on fixed-term contracts. Consequently, administrators wanting to lock down teachers for the semester cannot rely on insecurely employed staff to provide certainty.

Gwilym Croucher, deputy director of the University of Melbourne’s Centre for the Study of Higher Education, said the “full impact” of the change was hard to predict.

“Universities will need to think carefully about why they are employing casuals and how they describe the type of employment,” he said. “Casual employment is likely still appropriate in many instances, but…where there is a regular pattern of work, a fixed-term contract might be more appropriate. Some universities are already looking at new models for some employees.”

Another change requires employees seeking casual conversion to apply for it in writing. Universities must respond to such requests in 21 days and have limited grounds for refusing.

Dr Croucher said casual staff were likely to remain “a prominent part of university workforces” but “the full implications of the legislation” would take time to sink in. “If nothing else, the changes will keep the discussion alive about what fair terms of academic employment look like.”

Casual employment is a fraught issue in Australian universities, where tens of thousands of highly qualified workers struggle to buy property or start families because of the paucity and insecurity of their pay.

University leaders acknowledge this but say they are caught in a bind because of tight funding and volatile student numbers. Industrial agreements oblige them to allocate permanently employed academics’ time to research and pay substantial redundancies if declining enrolments force retrenchments.

Macquarie University vice-chancellor Bruce Dowton told the Australian Financial Review Higher Education Summit that the detail and complexity of industrial instruments had become a “real hindrance” to universities that wanted to accommodate society’s changing needs. Shadow education minister Sarah Henderson said the sector needed “more flexibility” to achieve the “high participation model” recommended by the Universities Accord.

“There needs to be some wholesale reform,” she said, adding that the “regressive new laws” on casual employment would hamper universities’ ability “to engage sessional experts – practising surgeons to teach medical students, barristers to lecture law students and so on”.

The National Tertiary Education Union defended the “relatively minor changes” to industrial arrangements. “These laws have nothing to do with universities casually hiring professionals like doctors and lawyers – we can’t see how that could possibly be affected,” said national president Alison Barnes.

“Unaccountable vice-chancellors are making unfounded complaints about industrial laws while their A$400 million [£205 million] wage theft bushfire burns out of control and precariously employed staff struggle to put food on the table. In this context, flexibility and innovation are code for even more casualisation.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com