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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/25/how-did-australias-university-system-get-so-broken-pretty-much-the-same-way-as-everything-else>
"On Monday, unionised workers at the University of Melbourne (where I teach)
will go on strike. In the faculty of arts, the Melbourne law school, student
services and library services we’ll stay out for a week – longer than any
previous dispute at an Australian university.
Readers of a certain age might marvel at the recent wave of industrial action
in higher education, perhaps remembering their own campus days with fond
nostalgia.
But the system they recall no longer exists.
Across the sector, casual and sessional staff now deliver between 50% and 80%
of undergraduate teaching. Many tutors don’t know from semester to semester
whether they’ll have jobs – an insecurity that can last decades. Often they
work at multiple institutions, assembling a patchwork of contracts through
which to support themselves.
Naturally, such conditions affect students, many of whom now face the
unexpected indexation of the huge debts they’ve run up to attend higher
education in Australia – and in return receive minimal attention from staff. In
some places, sessional employees have been allocated just 10 minutes to read an
assignment and provide feedback.
Widespread precarity has facilitated a culture of illegal underpayment, with
more than $80m in underpayments uncovered since 2020 across public
universities, according to the National Tertiary Education Union’s wage theft
report. The University of Melbourne alone has been forced to repay $45m in
stolen wages.
Both permanent and casual staff report being constantly overworked. A recent
open letter signed by more than 100 members of the Melbourne law school says:
“In our experience … many full-time employees work well in excess of 50 hours
per week; many part-time employees work full-time hours; and increasingly, we
hear of colleagues working during annual and long service leave and not taking
sick leave when ill.”
How did higher education get so broken? Pretty much the same way as everything
else. We live amid the wreckage of formerly treasured institutions and
services, despoiled by decades of marketisation and neglect."
Via Muse.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
