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.
Think of universal healthcare, something of which Australians were once rightly proud. Like education, the system looks serviceable enough if you squint at it from the outside. But behind the veneer, healthcare workers report ongoing staff shortages in chronically underfunded hospitals, with beds often unavailable and emergency departments stretched beyond capacity.
Back in 1945, Ben Chifley explained that every man and woman possessed “an indefeasible right” to social security.
“Deprivation of those rights or whittling down of the terms of those provisions would,” he said, “be a breach of trust with the whole Australian nation.”
Today, in a far, far richer country than Chifley could ever have imagined, the majority of those receiving jobseeker and parenting payments live below the Henderson poverty line. As a recent government report explained, many of the unemployed lack the ability to meet “the essentials of life”.
During the second world war, the old Commonwealth Housing Commission described the provision of affordable housing as a fundamental responsibility of government. “We consider,” it explained, “that a dwelling of good standard and equipment is not only the need but the right of every citizen – whether the dwelling is to be rented or purchased, no tenant or purchaser should be exploited for excessive profit.”
In 2023, almost three-quarters of young people believe they’ll never own a home. As for rent, Anglicare’s Kasy Chambers says bluntly: “Virtually no part of Australia is affordable for aged care workers, early childhood educators, cleaners, nurses and many other essential workers we rely on.”
Once upon a time, even Bob Menzies could urge funding for universities on the basis that they upheld “values which are other than pecuniary”.
But Menzies’ Tory paternalism suffered the same fate as Curtin and Chifley’s social democratic reformism, supplanted by a philosophy that considers “values other than pecuniary” a category error.
Higher education duly evolved into a huge industry, raking in billions from the lucrative overseas student market. Jockeying for profit, the universities employed the same strategies as other corporations, spending millions on consultants, including from scandal-ridden companies like PwC.
FOI documents from 2018-19 and 2019-20 revealed the extraordinary remuneration of top university executives: the 50 highest-paid employees at Sydney, Queensland and UNSW took home $350,000 a year, even before super and other benefits.
Many vice-chancellors receive huge bonuses on top of their already engorged salaries.
The University of Sydney pays Mark Scott a salary of $1.1m including bonuses; at Melbourne University, Duncan Maskell takes home $1.5m annually. Yet both Sydney and Melbourne feature among the worst-rated campuses in surveys of undergraduate experiences.
It doesn’t have to be like this. We don’t have to accept the transformation of our institutions into corporations enriching the few while others have to strike for basic conditions. If previous generations could imagine services wholly dedicated to the public good, there’s no reason why we can’t do the same.
But that means being prepared to fight – at the universities and everywhere else.
Jeff Sparrow is a Guardian Australia columnist
