TLDR; Decasualisation might actually be really bad for the majority of the existing casual tutoring cohort.
For those who don't know, decasualisation of academic teaching is one of the live issues in this bargaining round. The NTEU's log of claims includes strengthening decasualisation clauses and limiting insecure work. The University's counter-proposal is the Secure Academic Employment Package: Teaching Associates, Senior Teaching Associates, and Postgraduate Fellows. The Provost emailed all casual academic staff about it today (1 September), and the Teaching Associate exemplars went up on the intranet the same day.
To be clear about who is proposing what, because it matters: the TA and Fellow roles as drafted are management's proposal, not the union's. But this concept is something that the union is fighting for, and so because of this, I think the objection I'm raising is one I don't think anyone is going to raise.
I want to say up front that I understand why casualisation is a problem. If tutoring is your only income, if you've spent years stitching together semesters with no leave and no certainty about next March, then decasualisation is the thing you need and I'm not arguing against you getting it. Wage theft on unpaid marking and admin is real. The claim for 17 per cent super for casuals is straightforwardly good.
But there's a group this affects badly, and it's the least organised group on campus, so I don't think our position is being put.
Ask the Engineering cohort before you believe the pitch.
The Postgraduate Fellow role has been piloted in the Faculty of Engineering, with over 100 fellows recruited for Semester 2. The Provost's email presents this as a success: most were previously casual, and now they have fixed-term employment with leave and 17 per cent super.
That is not what I'm hearing from my peers (myself included). What I've been told is that accepting a Fellowship means you can no longer tutor as a casual, and that the hours allocated under the Fellowship were fewer than the hours people had been working before. If that's accurate, then for those candidates the pilot was a pay cut delivered as a security upgrade. At least one person I know pulled their application on realising this.
You also have to do many more admin hours, and as I mentioned, are restricted from teaching more classes.
Also, even though casuals may still be around, communication says "priority unit allocation" as a benefit for Fellows. If the fellowship becomes the only channel through which you're permitted to teach, then priority within that channel is what you receive in exchange for no longer being able to pick up tutorials wherever they come up.
Every Teaching Associate exemplar is a full-time role.
Economics advertises two full-time continuing TAs for ECON1001/2. Computer Science creates a full-time TA for COMP2123, on the basis that Semester 2 still runs sixteen tutorials a week. Psychology creates a full-time TA across PSYC3018 and PSYC3020. Life and Environmental Sciences creates multiple full-time TAs for first-year Biology. There is not a single part-time fraction anywhere in the document.
I'm doing a PhD. I cannot take a full-time continuing job. Neither can any other candidate or honour's student, or entry worker that loves teaching and wants to do 1 or 2 classes during the week. So when the tutorial load in a large core unit is consolidated into one or two full-time positions, that work isn't converted for us. It's converted away from us, into roles we're structurally ineligible to hold.
Look at who the exemplars imagine filling them, too. The Computer Science TA is an Honours graduate tutoring to save money before she applies to a PhD, whose professional development time goes to writing her PhD proposal. The Economics TA has a coursework Masters. These are people on either side of candidature, not in it.
I want to be careful not to overclaim here. The exemplars don't abolish casual tutoring, and casuals still appear in them, assisting with marking and being supervised. But the units targeted are the large first- and second-year units, and those are precisely where most HDR candidates get their teaching hours. That's not a coincidence, it's the stated criterion: units where a substantial portion of teaching is currently done by casuals.
But let's say that you do want to do the full time job. It seems to be like it is a paid decrease.
Under the current agreement a casual tutorial carries associated working time: two hours for the initial delivery, one hour for each repeat. Marking is a separate activity, paid at a marking rate for the hours you spend on it.
The Economics exemplar has one Teaching Associate covering roughly eighteen one-hour tutorials a week. Priced as casual work, the tutorial component alone comes to about 37 paid hours per week, before any marking.
As a Teaching Associate, one full-time week has to cover all of it. The exemplar allocates an average of six hours a week for tutorial preparation, and the rest comes out of "flexible time" that the document says is used for marking, or preparation, or service and admin. There is no separate marking payment. When marking hits, the exemplar states plainly that flexible time gets committed to it.
So the preparation and marking don't disappear. They stop being separately counted and start competing with each other inside a fixed salary. That is the mechanism by which this package is affordable, and it comes from the University's own exemplar rather than from me.
Anyway, this is just my view. I personally am quite worried about this, and I think tutors should be too. Honestly, this post is not rage-bait. I hope someone in the comments is able to help me see why this could actually be a better situation for the majority of tutors.