I have been a member of my union, the National Tertiary Education Union, since I started teaching in 2006. Now my branch has called a strike, on 3 May 2023, and I will be participating.

In our Enterprise Bargaining Agreement presented to the University in 2022, among other things, we called for the following:
1. An 80% secure work target;
2. An improved workload;
3. Restrictions on rolling restructures;
4. A pay rise;
5. Flexible working arrangements; and
6. Improved parental leave.
You may be getting the sense from my previous posts that I believe that the tertiary sector has been broken for some time, but the full extent of this only became evident to me during the COVID-19 lockdowns. Here I am going to give a personal account of what these things mean to me, and why they are important.
Increase in permanent workforce
My academic profile currently begins with this sentence: “Katy Barnett first joined the Melbourne Law School in 2006 as a sessional lecturer and was appointed permanently in 2010.”
Why, you might ask? It’s not the best sales pitch: surely I should be touting myself as a world-class remedies law expert or something equally boastful? (Ugh. Full body shudder.)
I think it’s important to let people to know that I didn’t start off with a secure job, and that I spent several years as a casual lecturer before I got a permanent position.
In March this year, The Conversation spoke with casual lecturers, and identified the following trends:
Heavy workloads with poor pay, particularly in relation to marking (which takes far longer than the hours casual academics are paid to complete it).
Lack of recognition and respect, with casual academics not being treated in the same way as permanent staff.
Constant insecurity, with lecturers not knowing from semester to semester whether their contracts would be renewed.
I recall very well what it was like to be a casual employee. When my contract was finally made ongoing (on my third application, only after I handed in my PhD) I was so relieved. Finally, I felt like a “real” member of my faculty, with a permanent office and phone number, and a proper staff profile. Most importantly, I had a permanent salary, and my family and I were no longer wondering from one semester to the next whether I would be rehired.
When your employment is insecure, it’s also harder to speak out on issues: there’s always the possibility that your contract won’t be renewed.
Some other people stay as casual employees for decades: I was lucky to only have a short time as a casual. And casual contracts have given rise to issues with “wage theft”: casual employees being systematically underpaid.
I’ve heard accounts from several people, recounting that they were employed by a series of consecutive overlapping casual contracts. At least one person I know—an excellent researcher and teacher—left academia altogether. Others are considering leaving. When we do not treat staff well, we bleed talent.
The way in which universities are currently structured and funded produces perverse incentives: teaching is de-emphasised, as is permanent employment.
An improved workload
I’ll be frank: I’m exhausted. As I have described in a previous post, I got so unwell in 2022 that I had to take six months off, after I got the ‘flu, then pneumonia, then had a serious asthma attack, and was hospitalised for five days. This is the fourth time I’ve been hospitalised for pneumonia and asthma since I began in academia in 2006.
I was a coordinator of a compulsory subject at the time when I fell ill, and part of the reason I got so very ill was because there was no one available to replace me at short notice. There are not enough people willing or able to teach compulsory subjects.
I know I’m not alone. So many other people have confessed to being exhausted, unwell or struggling mentally.
Restriction on rolling restructures
I’ve mentioned the so-called “business improvement plan” too on this Substack. I said:
Unfortunately, in 2014, my university underwent a so-called “Business Improvement Program,” involving a “spill and fill”. Those who’d held administrative positions at the university had to reapply for their own position anew, often at a lower level of pay. Some positions were made entirely redundant. Along with several other colleagues, I stood against it at the time, and I believe strongly that we were right to do so.
In practice it meant that we lost years of institutional wisdom, that some loyal employees were totally crushed, that others went and found jobs elsewhere, and that those who remained out of loyalty were overworked and burned out. It was so entirelypredictable. The echoes still resonate through our administration, six years later.
Good administrators are essential: they’re another part of the glue which holds our institution together.
I didn’t mention that it was followed by a Pandemic Reset Program, with more restructuring and voluntary redundancy. Professional staff are so important to me as an academic: people who help me navigate the forms, the non-intuitive software and bureaucratic processes. I confess, I’m not a natural administrator. Teaching and research are my strengths.
Our university keeps being gutted, and so much knowledge has been lost. The processes keep changing; and the people to whom I speak keep leaving or being made redundant. And nothing gets improved.
I don’t want more marketing leaflets, or a new shiny building, or another layer of bureaucracy. I want academic staff to be supported. I want professional staff not to be overburdened because there are too few of them to do an overwhelming job. I want students to know who to go to, and to have proper support.
A pay rise
Living costs are rising. I am lucky enough to be a full Professor, but I can imagine that it is very tough for people on lower salaries as inflation and interest rates rise.
Another aspect is that in most areas of law, a person can earn much more in private practice than in academia. I imagine the same is true for areas such as medicine, dentistry, accountancy, engineering and so forth. Salaries have to keep parity to an extent.
Flexible working arrangements and parental leave
When I had my first two children, I did not get paid maternity leave. I was a casual employee at the time. I cannot say how much of a difference it made to get paid parental leave for my third child, and it also made returning to work much easier.
I am lucky with regard to flexible working arrangements. When I was first hired, I noted that I had small children, and might not be able to work 9 to 5. The then Deputy Dean said, “As long as you publish and as long as you turn up in person for class, that’s the main thing.”
Other staff members are not so lucky. COVID-19 lockdowns has shown that more people can work flexibly than we previously thought. It’s important to keep options open for employees where this is possible.
Conclusion
Academics have to beware making our jobs a vocation—we should not give our life and soul to it—however, our jobs are important for income, reputation, social life and health. That is why it’s important to get together, not just to protect our own interests, but also the interests of our colleagues and our students.
I feel that the issues facing universities are deep and structural, baked in, with perverse incentives which have accreted over the past forty years in particular. Nonetheless, I am passionate about teaching and research.
I am lucky to be supported by excellent colleagues in both the academic and the professional spheres, and I will stand in solidarity with them.
Katy, stay healthy and thank you for giving us a peak behind the curtain and the bravery to speak out. 👍
Yes, all true. Just got re-elected to the Academic Board by my Business School peers based on this agenda:
I have been a member of the AB since 2021. I believe the AB needs the occasional critical (yet constructive) voice more than ever.
Among the current issues that need urgent attention, and action, are:
-The failure of the University, for 15 months now, to finalize new EAs for faculty and staff
-The failure of the University to adequately address the real-wage losses implied by the current inflation rate
-The failure of the University to adequately address increased workloads
-The failure of the University to deal fairly with casuals (and provide stable working conditions for them)
-The failure of the University to reign in the infringement of academic freedom through top-down EDD interventions. Very demotivating.
-The failure of the University to cut significantly red-tape in procurement issues such as travel arrangements
-The failure of the University to walk its talk regarding trust-based decision making
Consider the above enumeration my agenda.