The Intellectual Pecariat - Challenges for Academic Unionism

In his brilliant yet blood-curdling study of precarious labour (Nice Work if You Can Get It: Life and Labour in Precarious Times New York University Press) Andrew Ross writes (p.8)

Once an impregnable stronghold of occupational security, higher education in the United States is now awash with contingency; almost two thirds of its teaching workforce have been casualised, leaving a minority in teh tenure stream to exercise the academic freedoms that are the signature of the porfession in a society that still regards itself as a leader of the free world.

These conditions are replicated elsewhere, including Australia where the rapid expansion of higher education over the last quarter century has largely been staffed by an intellectual 'precariat': jobbing seasonal workers, highly exploited and highly vulnerable. In the search for 'maximum flexibility' university managers staff classrooms with a reserve army of postgraduate students and others who are treading water waiting for increasingly elusive tenured job. The situation is particularly dire in those areas - like the humanities, social and natural sciences - with large numbers of PhD graduates with few alternative sources of employment beyond academia. Many teach long hours with two or more universities in order to cover themselves for the periods between semesters (roughly half of the year) when they are unemployed. It is now the norm for casuals to have much higher teaching loads than the tenured staff alongside whom they work.

The pedagogical arguments against such a system have been well rehearsed. Despite the fact that some in the academic precariat are heroically devoted to their students and work beyond the hours they are paid for, it is clearly preferable for students to be taught by staff with more secure employment. Casual staff are not obliged to be around outside the hours they are employed to teach and consult with students. They are often drafted at the last minute and struggle to find their feet in the first few weeks, especially when teaching subjects new to them. Many are preoccupied with research and understand their career prospects depend much less on their teaching performance than their publication record. In general, the experience of students learning in classrooms staffed largely by tenured staff is likely to be better than for those taught largely by casuals.

So what are the prospects for of collective action to challenge casualisaton? Andrew Ross is sanguine (p.8):

For the largely younger ranks of adjuncts and graduate students, the experience of deprofessionalisation has triggered an embryonic labor movement that may yet transform the workplace, regardless of whether it can arouse large numbers of the securely tenured from their apathy

The problem, however, is that the politics of such resistance are complicated. In some ways the interests of tenured and untenured staff are opposed. As governments have required the institutions to respond to rising student numbers by becoming more 'efficient' -staff student ratios have doubled in the last twenty years ago - so universities have used casualisation as a way of sandbagging the wages and conditions of tenured academic staff (and those of the ever-growing managerial class) against the effects of diminishing real funding levels.

Supervisors/ advisors who tell their post-graduate students that they should get some teaching experience are in part acting as mentors. But they are also performing a managerial role, ensuring the academic reserve army is replenished. It does not take much sociological imagination to realise this. Postgrads and recent doctoral graduates who resist such overtures risk alienating those upon whom their future career prospects depend.

So what are academic unions doing to counter casualisation? In Australia, under Howard's Work Choices legislation the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) was prevented from seeking industrial agreements to limit numbers of casual staff. The industrial climate under Rudd's Labor government is now less hostile. However, casuals have only limited power and industrial representation as the executive committees of the NTEU - at local, state and national level - now reflect the ageing tenured demographic. Over the last fifteen years, the union has sought to combat casualisation by pricing it off the agenda, seeking higher percentage salary increases for casual staff than for full time staff. However, this has had only limited effect. Casuals allow universities greater flexibility and to avoid paying the entitlements which accrue long-term staff. Serious decasualisation would require a much, much larger increase in casual salaries than the NTEU is able to deliver.

But casualisation produces its own contradictions. Universities (and specific university departments) which rely heavily on casual staff are houses of cards. Campaigns aimed at encouraging casual boycotts of targetted institutions with the demand that more continuing positions be created in these places, would very rapidly bring things to a head. However, such action could only occur if the NTEU has the stomach to work for the interests of the most precarious workers. This would require the organisation to challenge the arguments often voiced by senior tenured staff (ie those who pay the highest union dues) that there is nothing wrong with casual labour; that it provides a stepping stone for young aspirants towards an academic career.

This is (and always was) a specious position. Over the years I've seen many good people come to the realisation that the stepping stones run out well before the opposite bank can be reached, and give up in frustration at their ambition for an academic career. It has been a long-standing principle of trade unionism that it is better to have fewer secure jobs than many employed as casual labourers. It is time to make the pursuit of this principle a paramount concern for academic unionism.

Global Education/ Precarious Lives

Serap (not her real name) is studying at university but has not yet been accepted into the Bachelor of Arts. My university runs a scheme whereby aspiring students can pay to enrol for a half-time course load. If they pass they are admitted to the degree. Many of these provisional students, including Serap, have poor literacy skills. Many are also the first from their families to progress beyond school and have little understanding of what is expected of them at university. The liberal humanist pedagogy we practice, encouraging students to be critical and independent, is foreign to those used to treating the teacher’s word as gospel. In Turkey, where Serap spent most of her High School years, rote learning was the norm. The habits of deference are hard to break and she addresses me as ‘sir’, declining to call me by my first name, despite being prompted to do so.

She spent her early years in Sydney’s Western Suburbs but was taken back to Turkey as a young teenager where her parents ran a business in a regional city. They brought Serap back to Sydney to allow her to pursue her studies but are ambivalent about this decision. She tells me her father has threatened to take her back to the homeland, to arranged marriage and a life of domestic servitude if she does not succeed at university. ‘But you’re an adult’ I tell her, ‘you can’t be forced to do anything’. She responds with a look of weary resignation that communicates much more than words. How could I understand the consequences of defying her family? Beyond the Turkish community she lacks even the most rudimentary social networks without which the stability and social mobility she craves are well beyond reach. She is caught between the dreams of independence and patriarchal communal expectation.

So far as Serap is concerned I am a gatekeeper, and she deals with me with politeness and frequent visits to my office for counsel and direction. She implores me to go easy on her work, tells me how important it is for her to pass the course. Can I read a draft of her essay? Is she on the right track? Can I give her some hints about the content of the exam? Funding cuts and increases in student numbers has produced a conveyor-belt educational culture and it is very difficult to provide the close attention she demands. But I give her my time and attention anyway.

Her early marks are not encouraging. Students are asked to summarise an opinion piece from The Guardian and it is clear that she cannot write in clear sentences and has difficulty in comprehending the material. The work is littered with grammatical errors. Google, computer checking functions and the assistance of friends and family can mask shortcomings in prepared essays. But many of those who are called on to produce in pressured circumstances are often very dramatically exposed. I do not like to assess students by examination but the epidemic of internet-assisted plagiarism has forced academics to do so more often now.

Mine is an invidious task. Most of those, like Serap, whose lives are on a knife edge, are shy or unassertive and do not come forward with such narratives. I am conscious that by allocating fail grades I consign many earnest and well-intentioned young people to lives very different to the ones they had planned for themselves. But I am frequently angered when students I know are unable to write intelligibly are allowed to slip through by colleagues who are reluctant to take the difficult decision to fail them. The qualification must have some integrity. I am even angrier that my cash-strapped employers enrol students whose intellectual and cultural resources are insufficient to give them good prospects of passing. We try to cater for cultural difference but there is no time to provide the strugglers with the intensive assistance they require. In the end, and whatever we might think about it, English is the language of power and it is our responsibility in part to evaluate the students’ proficiency in it.

Occasionally someone like Serap pierces the cloak of bureaucratic indifference in which we wrap ourselves to remind us that education is a global business and many of our students are playing for very high stakes. As academics we have for some time been aware that universities are no longer the province of the elite, as Western governments have dealt with youth unemployment by directing more and more young people towards degree and diploma courses. But we are only just beginning to understand our pivotal role in global migration flows and in the inter-generational conflicts in which many students from cultural minorities are embroiled. While their children cultivate First World aspirations, migration to the West can frequently lead first generation migrants towards a fierce and embattled traditionalism. Such an outlook threatens to constrain their daughters much more than their sons.