Victorian Inquiry Into the Labour Hire Industry and Insecure Work NTEU Submission
Recommendations (Pages 39 & 41)
That the State Government establish a Secure Work Ombudsman/Commissioner which:
has responsibility to pursue actions which reduce precarious work and increase secure work;
advocates for secure work in all sectors of the Victorian economy;
investigates employers exploiting precarious workers;
resources prosecutions against employers exploiting precarious workers;
assists precarious workers and their unions obtain more secure work, including through securing and enforcing conversion provisions;
shares successful experiences; and
reports on compliance by employers.
That the State Government audit all public entities, including all universities and TAFEinstitutions, to identify the extent of precarious work in these entities, including the level of reliance on precarious work by those entities.
That the State Government convene a tripartite committee at each public entity identifiedas relying on precarious work to:
identify measures to eliminate precarious work;
implement measures to eliminate precarious work; and
report on the elimination of precarious work.
The Secure Work Ombudsman/Commissioner could have responsibility for all elements
of the secure work agenda of the State Government, including implementation of otherrecommendations such as those in this submission and in other union submissions.
That the State Government encourage entities funded by the State Government that employfewer than 100 full-time equivalent persons annually to negotiate appropriate Multi Enterprise Agreements by the inclusion of incentive payments and structural support in funding agreements. Such incentive payments and structural support would at least offset the cost of participation in MEA negotiations and MEA implementation.
That the State Government prohibit sham contracting in agencies or entities funded by
the State Government.
Further Information
Dr Colin Long, Secretary, NTEU Victoria, (03) 9254 1930
Josh Cullinan, NTEU Senior Industrial Officer, 0416 241 763
1
PageContents
1Title & Recommendations
2Contents
3Introduction
4University Sector
4 / Extent of Casualisation6 / Direct Cost Benefit of Casualisation
8 / Second Class Employment
9 / Employer Argument of Short Term Need
9 / NTEU Membership
10 / Experience of Casual Workers
10 / Financial Hardship
15 / Future Work Insecurity and Anxiety
18 / Exploitative Unpaid Work
21 / Threat of Adverse Consequences for Complaining
23 / A Case Study – Swinburne University of Technology
23 / Systemic Casualisation of the Academic Workforce
26 / Phoenixing Activity
29Contracting out of non-academic casual staff work to labour hire agencies
30Exploitation of low pay and insecurity to cut conditions
31Other Examples of Inappropriate Conduct
34Summary of NTEU Experience and Worker Stories/Submissions
34The Role of Higher Education
35The Public Good and its Historical Prevalence
36Victoria’s commitment to Education, Workers’ Rights & the Public Good
39University & TAFE Recommendations
40Adult & Community Education Sector
40Recommendations
2
The National Tertiary Education Industry Union (NTEU) represents workers in the higher education, tertiary education, adult education and research institute sectors. The Victorian Division of NTEU represents almost 10 000 members working in these sectors in Victoria.
As part of assisting the work of the Inquiry, NTEU encouraged its members to make submissions using a special online submission form. Those submissions were collated by the Victorian Trades Hall Council (VTHC) and submitted separately to this submission. This submission draws on some of the experiences included in those submissions, as well as many other experiences and evidence.
NTEU has had the opportunity to review the submission of the National Union of Workers (NUW) and VTHC, and endorses and supports those submissions.
NTEU members work across a diversity of employers. They include:
Universities, established under Acts of State Parliament, and their subsidiaries;
TAFEs, established by State Government and managed by Boards;
Research Institutes, affiliated to or standing alone from universities, usually non-profit and largely publicly funded;
Labour Hire agencies providing services to employers, particularly universities;
Neighbourhood Houses and Adult Learning Centres, largely funded by Government;
Private Providers such as “Navitas Limited” which provide services to or direct entry pathways for universities; and
Student unions.
3
University Sector
Universities in Victoria are public sector agencies, established by Acts of State Parliament and controlled by ‘University Councils’ established under those Acts. Further, universities are Public Authorities for the purpose of the Victorian Charter of Human Rights &Responsibilities Act 2006.1
Extent of Casualisation
Whilst the extent of insecure work differs between institutions, it is beyond doubt that the Victorian Higher Education sector suffers substantial and endemic casualisation. This is not particularly unique to Victoria, Australia or the developed World. A burgeoning field of academic review analyses the precariously employed academic. In Ravinder Sidhu’s review of a new book on related matters, she bemoans the situation neatly:
As Rosalind Gill (2009) and others have argued, universities are not only rarefied havens of refined culture; they are also sites of endemic insecurities and outright exploitation. The precarious conditions of many early career and sessional academics are enabled by the complicity of well-placed, highly-paid staff in the upper echelons of university hierarchies. Deals made with research ‘stars’ who demand special conditions—above-market salaries, light teaching loads, a war chest of research funds—are often sealed without discussion with rank-and-file academics. They produce a polarised and stratified culture….2
Until recently, due to the mechanisms of reporting, there was little information available about the true proportion of the academic workforce employed in precarious work. Historically, a simple flawed metric was used by the Federal Government to record the full-time equivalence of casual staff at institutions – based on the extrapolation across a 52 week year of 9 hours per week of lectures being one full time equivalent staff member, and 25 hours per week of tutorials being one full time equivalent staff member. A non-casual academic might teach between 6 and 10 hours of lectures and tutorials across 24 or 26 weeks per year.
1See McAdam v Victoria University & Ors (Anti-Discrimination) [2010] VCAT 1429 (3 September 2010)
2Sidhu, R, Australian Review of Public Affairs, “Beyond Neoliberalism: Universities and the public good”, 2015,
viewed online
4
This system of reporting – and the largely fractional nature of casual academic work - was estimated to discount each full-time equivalent academic staff member by a factor of between 5 and 10. For example, of the reported 244 FTE casual academic staff at Swinburne University in 2013, NTEU knows there were approximately 1500 to 1800 persons employed on a casual basis in 2013. This indicates a factor of 6 to 7 needs to be applied to the old metric to obtain a headcount of real people.
The heavily limited information is starting to change: with a combination of information sourced from Workplace Gender Equality Agency (WGEA), university annual reports and NTEU analysis, we can start to piece together the number of casual staff employed by universities.
The 2014 Annual Report for La Trobe University indicates that its 602 FTE casual staff in 2014 included about 3700 people – or 6 people per full-time equivalent casual staff member. In the ballot for a new Agreement to cover all La Trobe University employees in May 2014, the employer included 3733 casual staff of a total of 6702 staff employed at the time.
In September 2014, a ballot of all 12 882 staff employed at the time at Monash University included 5 868 casual staff. In May 2014, a ballot of 7 096 non-TAFE staff employed at the time at RMIT University included 3 597 casual staff. The WGEA reporting of RMIT University for 2014/2015 states about 6300 of the 10300 staff employed were employed on a casual basis (both figures including non-academic staff.)
NTEU estimates between 50% and 60% of all staff working in public higher education institutions in Victoria are employed on a casual basis. There is a further substantial proportion of staff on fixed term contracts – as many as half of non-casual staff in some institutions.
The Federal Government “uCube” higher education statistics3reports in 2014 in the state of Victoria that there were 9823 FTE non-casual academic staff and 16 809 FTE non-casual non-academic staff (a total of 29 632 FTE non-casual staff.) NTEU estimates this represents about 35 000 people and there are at least a further 35 000 casual staff engaged in the public universities in Victoria (or about 70 000 total persons.)
This compares to 24 726 employees in the Police and Emergency Services in Victoria, 76 675 employees in Victorian Government Schools and 104 312 employees in Victoria’s Public
3
5
Health Care system.4Clearly, Higher Education involves some of the biggest public entity employers and is amongst the largest public sectors in Victoria.
Direct Cost Benefit of Casualisation
In tertiary education the casualisation of work is often tied to a simple labour cost economic argument that is true in part. Many weeks a year – ten in TAFE teaching and up to 26 in University teaching – don’t involve face to face teaching work. In universities there are many weeks of preparing for classes and marking assessments outside of the traditional face-to-face teaching periods as well.
However, this disguises very substantial direct cost savings related to casual academic staff in higher education compared to most other industries. The casual loading is generally intended to compensate for loss of minimum paid entitlements to annual leave, sick leave, carers leave, public holidays and redundancy. In the higher education sector, enterprise agreements are in place that cover all higher education workers at universities.
Those agreements provide paid conditions which generally are offset against what would otherwise have been higher wage arrangements. That is, workers are essentially paid a lower wage for beneficial conditions including:
17% superannuation;
26 to 38 weeks paid maternity leave;
26 to 38 weeks paid adoption leave;
10 to 15 days paid partner leave;
Substantially higher than minimum-standard redundancy entitlements;
Incremental advancement through classification pay levels; and
Paid personal leave in excess of the statutory minimum.
The critical issue is that these arrangements are not applied (at all) to casual workers in the sector. Their wages are tied to the lower wages of non-casual staff, and although they receive a 25% loading, this is insufficient to make up for the beneficial conditions that they do not receive.
4
6
Superannuation on its own is worth 7.5% of income. Increments for a casual academic otherwise appointed to Level A Step 2 would be worth 28% if they were permitted to incrementally progress to Level A Step 8 like non-casual academic staff. Similarly, other common non-casual pay point progressions would include Level A Step 6 to Level A Step 8 (worth 7%) and Level B Step 2 to Level B Step 6 (worth 14%.) Basic promotion from Level A to Level B could see (over 5 to 10 years) progression from Level A Step 2 to Level B Step 6, which is worth approximately 60%.
The critical point with this is that a casual academic staff member converted to ongoing employment even on a part-year or annualised hours model would immediately benefit from 7.5% better superannuation and over 5 years an A2 appointee would benefit from 28% more in direct wages. This 35.5% higher wage (after 5 years and not compounding the superannuation on the A8 wage) more than offsets the 25% casual loading – and the ex-casual staff member would be entitled to all the other benefits of non-casual work such as paid leave, redundancy and the like.
Semester-by-semester employment patterns, combined with the financial savings from casualisation, provide real incentives for employers to render employment insecure, while making it very difficult for casual workers in higher education to escape the insecure employment trap.
Of course, these arrangements do not come about by accident. We know the casual academic workforce has a much higher proportion of female and younger employees than the non-casual academic staff cohort. The chart below draws data from Unisuper5– the fund for almost all workers in Higher Education – and identifies a clear and unequivocal trend for casual workers to be younger, and much more likely to be women than non-casual academic staff workers.
5 The 2010 chart is unpublished and from the work of Dr Robyn May as part of her Doctoral Thesis, “The determinants of the casualisation of academic employment in Australia, and implications foremployees, university managements, and public policy” which waspart of an ARC Linkageproject: Gender and Employment Equity: Strategies for Advancement in Australian Universities. The Unisuper data for persons referred to in the chart as “casual” is from a ‘fund’ which is likely to include some short term contract staff. Since that form of work is precarious the same point can be drawn from the information.
7
Second Class Employment
The Australian higher education academy (primarily in its non-casually employed form) has long laboured under the delusion that there is a fundamental nexus between teaching and research that cannot be broken at any cost.
The romanticism that teaching informs research and research informs teaching is easy to understand – particularly for those in secure tenured roles with relatively low risk of job insecurity. Here the mantra of “there shall be no teaching-only roles at universities” is held in high regard. In turn, the Academy decries conversion and similar arrangements, which purportedly don’t ensure “merit based selection” to the protected enclave of the Academy. In so doing, the Academy denies the existence of the vast majority of academic staff.
The facts of the scale of insecure work in Australian higher education institutions renders this romantic view not only redundant but dangerously so: the vast majority of academic roles are teaching only – or at least only teaching is paid, with many casual academics carrying out research in their own time. The insecure worker is beaten on both sides – an employer delighted with its low wage workforce, and a profession fantasising a bygone era unprepared to grasp the reality of the modern university workplace.
8
This becomes a matter of serious economic, social and gender injustice when we note the benefits to which casual staff are not entitled are substantially subsidised by the low wages paid to casual staff. These casual staff are younger and more likely to be women than the workers whose conditions they subsidise.
Employer Argument of Short Term Need
At a micro level, many casual staff believe employer rhetoric that ‘class numbers’ are unknown until shortly before teaching periods commence. While ‘final class numbers’ won’t be known, a broad understanding of class numbers are known well ahead of teaching periods and cyclically can be understood with more certainty than the work security variables in other sectors.
For example, Southern University knows it will teach Engineering in 2016. It knows it will have between x and z tutorial classes in particular units. The argument the actual classes (y) is unknown does not prevent Southern University staffing x number classes well before teaching periods commence – even a year before could be reasonably foreseen.
In essence, the seasonal nature of teaching periods, and the minor variation in class numbers, should not be impediments to finding solutions which deal with the harsh, unfair, unreasonable and unjust experience of tens of thousands of Victorian workers in the tertiary education sector.
NTEU Membership
NTEU has almost 10 000 members in Victoria.
NTEU has approximately 26% density amongst non-casual staff in Higher Education, and 3% density amongst casual staff in Higher Education. Despite very large employers, the work is largely individualised (one tutor per class) and seasonal (semesters.) Like many other unions, NTEU has struggled to organise casual workers despite reasonable effort.
9
Experience of Casual Workers
Much of the information described above is unknown to workers in the Higher Education sector. Through a complex array of industrial arrangements – including superannuation trust deeds, contracts of employment, statements of engagement, enterprise agreements, Modern Awards and legislation – a clear picture has taken years to develop for seasoned industrial participants.
That said, most casual workers are aware of some injustices, and of significant casualisation of the sector. As part of its participation in the Inquiry submission process, NTEU has encouraged and solicited almost 100 submissions through the Secure Work portal established by the Victorian union movement. NTEU understands those submissions have separately been formally made to the Inquiry. Whilst some submitters have chosen to remain ‘publicly’ anonymous, they have all made the submission formally with personal details available and should be treated as authentic.
In this section, we draw on those experiences to highlight four categories of issues faced by insecure workers in the Tertiary Education sector:
- Financial Hardship
- Future Work Insecurity and Anxiety
- Exploitative Unpaid Work
- Threat of Adverse Consequences for Complaining
This set of experiences is an unprecedented snapshot of the gross exploitation in the tertiary education sector. It must be a catalyst for change.
Financial Hardship
I spend November to early February unemployed, and have so now for 8 years. Through my nine months of work I save up for the next three months, because I know I will be unemployed. Anonymous, RMIT
As a mother of two young children, I had to organise childcare in order to work, but childcare arrangements (in childcare centres) have to be made 6-12 months in advance of teaching timetables being finalised. …if a class is timetabled when you don't have childcare in place, you can't take the job. I am only able to continue the work I do as a sessional academic (with a PhD!) because of my husband's job, which is a full-time, salaried position. Fincina, TertiaryEducation
Between semesters I am unemployed - a period of about one month in winter or three months in summer. I save and pay my rent in advance over summer, often living off a credit card and paying it back once the following semester begins. I cannot think how much worse this