In unity

Posted on | October 7, 2009 | 3 Comments

**We urgently need billets for the State of the Industry conference. There has been an amazing response from young interstate scholars wanting to come, and we’ve funded airfares for everyone we could, but some people won’t attend if they can’t get accommodation. Please let me know if you can offer a bed or a couch.**

Taking account of the number of registrations already on hand, we’ve had to move the State of the Industry conference to a bigger venue. We’re basically at capacity before our main advertising campaign has started. If you haven’t checked the line up for a while, we now have four plenaries, Simon Marginson (Melb), Genevieve Kelly (NTEU NSW State Secretary), Margaret Shiel (ARC) and Genevieve Bell (Intel). On top of this, some of the biggest names in Australian cultural research will be speaking in a way that will be unfamiliar to many – no power point, no papers, just honest insights on things they’ve noticed working in academia. Open discussion is the main focus.

If you haven’t registered and plan to come, please help us out by going to the website and downloading the form (which goes to Alison Huber). This is really vital for planning. There is also a Facebook page if you are into that sort of thing. It has the draft of the promo poster we’ll be sending out soon. Let me know if you want one for your workplace.

The response to the event so far is really encouraging. I still regret coming up with the idea, in the sense that it has meant more work on top of everything else. Starting a new job this semester has been busy enough. But it has been fun (and unusual) to work collectively on a project that is bigger than the regular – read insular – academic concerns. It’s given me the chance to get in touch with a range of people working in various roles around the country, and to learn from different age groups how much has changed (or not) in academic employment.

To that end, I should probably report that when I met with Genevieve Kelly last month to outline the conference mandate, it was clear that the union has yet to really catch on to the problem of casualisation as a lived reality. In saying that, I certainly appreciate that the present bargaining campaigns are featuring limits on casualisation as a core objective, and that’s absolutely appropriate. My concern is that “casualisation” doesn’t begin to convey the difficulties that young scholars in particular are facing.

Casual teaching on contracts has happened for a long time. What seems genuinely new now is the amount of people doing this and other forms of work without much pretense of supervision. I’m talking about those who are employed across several campuses in a range of teaching and admin roles. These multiple jobs, and the forms of institutional negotiation involved in keeping them, don’t register on the radar of fellow staff, who are stressed out enough with their own workloads. They are given out as if they are a privilege to people who don’t even get a place to hang up their coat, let alone make a cup of tea or dock their laptop. Well, they can’t afford a laptop that works anyway.

Union membership presumes a steady relationship with a single employer. Genevieve mentioned her experience showing up to meetings on campuses where members were present but not on file. The idea that there could be several unis employing them simultaneously was foreign. But this happens regularly.

Then there’s the casual research assistant or postgrad who also doubles as general staff. Do they join the same union? Maybe not, if the NTEU can’t recognise their chameleon status. The industry as a whole fails to account for these workers who don’t fully occupy a coherent employee identity – as if this situation were only temporary, and not deeply structural.

There’s no one in particular to blame here: in fact, it’s the constant management and administrative flux internal to organisations that allows these tiny incidents of casualised labour to go missing. Who notices when casuals don’t come to work? Who cares if there are dozens of RAs working in the library rather than having offices? Surely postgrads should be able to pay for home broadband to mark 100 online assignments in a week? So what if a student has to miss class if their tutor falls ill?

I’m all for a Kafkaesque attitude to bureaucracy, but some of these things can be fixed. When a government promises an education revolution, it needs to provide a frontline. And in the shift to flexible work cultures, it is too convenient for organisations to pretend not to know, let alone take responsibility for what’s going on.

This is particularly in light of the number of PhD graduates whose challenge to pay the rent is the first priority that detracts from their ability to “plan” “careers”… starting in their mid-30s or older… by publishing articles, writing books or applying for grants that position them for ongoing employment. These “casual” workers cope with crap from both ends – they do the teaching that tenured staff don’t want to do, and in some places the co-ordinating too. As research support or “professional” staff they also get to implement the increasingly horrible corporate jargon and branding initiatives of management.

If they are trained in critical disciplines, that is, the humanities and many of the social sciences, this sort of experience can only feel like the worst kind of schizophrenia or hypocrisy.

Last week’s LH Martin Institute briefing concluded that without better efforts to create long term strategy, good people will simply leave the academic profession. Oh, but *so many* already have. If your experience had been routinely dismissed as passing by management cultures perpetuating a permanent state of exception, would you really wait around for Baby Boomers to retire, just to be invited to fix such ingrained indignities?

The sense of invisibility many young scholars know so well is precisely the structure of feeling unions are designed to address. What I’m hoping is that the State of the Industry conference can bring the NTEU’s work and cultural research into better dialogue, to reawaken a labourist project for a very different academic workplace. These are also some of the thoughts I’ll be taking with me to Canberra this month as an NTEU delegate to the HASS on the Hill meeting. I’d be happy to take more – and to hear others’ ideas both here and elsewhere…

Category: Academia, State of the Industry 2009, Work
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Comments

3 Responses to “In unity”

  1. Dr Mum
    October 11th, 2009 @ 2:58 pm

    Mel, I couldn’t agree more with the comments you make here. And I am looking forward to State of the Industry. What particularly resonates for me is your mention of general staff. As an early career academic with a young family, I have taken a general staff position. The conditions are more family-friendly than casual academic jobs across multiple campuses! Career planning indeed…

  2. melgregg
    October 13th, 2009 @ 10:04 am

    I’m so glad to hear you’ll be coming. This is just the experience that needs to be heard. Thanks Agnes.

  3. Research careers and the big questions : home cooked theory
    May 18th, 2011 @ 1:31 pm

    [...] of PhD graduates relative to jobs is simply untenable. But of course we’ve been through this before – and the situation is subject to change over [...]

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