A Letter to the Federal Minister for EDucaTIon
Dear Minister,
No doubt your government has been inundated with submissions about the problems with university governance in Australia, following the recent Senate Inquiry into the Quality of governance at Australian higher education providers.
The bloated salaries of Vice-Chancellors and managers. The declining enrolments of local students. The growing budget deficits. The ballooning spending on external consultants, and the conflicts of interest at the highest levels. But I want to tell you a personal story, an anecdotal tale of lived experience as university employee. A story of institutional disrespect, disinterest and dissimulation.
Last month I resigned from my two-decades long job as a sessional teacher at a respected Australian university. I had first began working at the university two decades ago. I loved the work, the staff collegiality, and our brilliant students. But as a sessional teacher in the vocational education sector, the pay was woeful. No proper remuneration for class preparation or marking. No adequate compensation for the hours I spent dealing with the tsunami of emails from students and managers. No payment for completing the compulsory Certificate IV in Training and Assessment the university required (and to update it several times), or for the networking and self-education I needed to do to remain ‘industry relevant’. This was done on my own time. But I chose to stay in the job because our students were brilliant, and many of them went on to become leaders and award-winners in our industry. The vicarious pleasure has been immense.
After I completed a Doctorate in my teaching field there was a small uplift in my casual pay rate. Just enough incentive for me to continue turning down offers from other employers and keep doing this work that I loved, in spite of not qualifying for holiday leave, sick leave, parental or carer’s leave, or long service leave.
But in 2021 our union revealed that the university had been underpaying me (and many other staff members) for years. When the wage theft was finally acknowledged by our employer, there was a belated repayment, but there was no apology, and no interest paid on the money the university had illegally withheld from us.
And then in 2023 our union informed me that long term casual teachers like me were in fact entitled to long service leave. This was the first I’d heard of it. When I contacted the university payroll department, they flatly denied I was owed any paid time off. I insisted they check again, and finally they grudgingly admitted that, after two decades of teaching, I was owed the grand total of seven days long service leave.
When I took some of that leave in 2024, I naturally assumed the per day leave payment would equal what I was paid per day as a teacher. But no. The university calculated my long service leave pay as if I were employed fulltime, rather than according to a sessional teaching rate. On my return to work, I discovered that taking leave had effectively involved a significant pay cut during that time. In the middle of a cost-of-living crisis, with a mortgage to pay, the income loss left me scrambling to pay the bills.
But wait – there’s more.
Last year our Enterprise Agreement was due to be re-negotiated. University management were clearly aiming to reduce teachers’ pay and conditions even further. The process was gruelling, and the university repeatedly took our union to court. Towards the end of last year, we were told an agreement had been reached, and that we would all be receiving a long-awaited pay rise. At last! Hooray! So I agreed to sign up for another semester of sessional teaching.
Except that, for the first time, that was nothing to sign. Following the introduction of new federal legislation regarding long term casual teachers, the university told me that, although I could keep teaching for them, I would not be sent a new contract. So there was no document which clearly stated my pay rates.
Then came the last straw. The day after I began teaching again in semester one, I discovered (via a fellow teacher, not from a university manager) that I was about to cop an effective $40 pay cut per teaching hour. For teachers like me, the promised pay rise had been a mirage.
I grew up in a family where university education meant everything. My mother was a respected academic. My brother and sister both completed doctorates and taught at universities. It has been a privilege to nurture my own students over those two decades and watch their brilliant careers unfold, largely as a result of completing our excellent course.
I am so profoundly disappointed and disturbed by what has happened to the Australian university sector. The disrespect with which teachers like me have been treated is only the tip of the iceberg - as the current Senate Inquiry is no doubt discovering.
Without a vibrant, well-resourced, well-managed tertiary sector, and without fundamental respect for those involved in teaching and learning, this country will continue to fall behind – economically, culturally, and socially. And dedicated teachers like me will continue to abandon these exploitative workplaces.
Yours sincerely,
Dr Sian Prior