Introduction

In the last two decades, insecure work in universities has grown exponentially in many countries, alongside the rapid marketisation of higher education. Reflecting the neoliberal ideal of a flexible workforce, research and teaching is now routinely carried out by precariously employed, hourly paid academics. In Australia, where we work, the bulk of teaching is now carried out by these ‘casual academics’ (Coates and Goedegebuure, 2010). Of course, casual teachers are needed to meet short-term needs – to fill in for sick staff, give one-off specialist lectures or provide insights into current practices, for instance – however, they should not be used to meet ongoing teaching needs. Structural dependence on casual academics poses a range of risks. It undermines the academic career path, and thereby the profession as a whole; threatens the quality of university education, posing a reputational problem for the sector and individual universities; and creates industrial injustice for casual academics who are locked into a permanently insecure marginal status. In this chapter, we focus on the possibilities for challenging casualisation through ‘statistical activism’, to force stakeholders to address these risks.

Our interest in these possibilities arises from a problem we encountered in a study on the impacts of a new entry-level category of academics designed to reduce casualisation. The introduction of this employment category was a milestone in the ongoing campaign of the university staff union, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), to address the industrial injustices experienced by its casual members, specifically the failure by universities to provide: mechanisms for conversion into continuing positions, paid leave, recognition of scholarship and research contributions, and rights to advancement on pay scales. From 2012 onwards, the creation of these positions was agreed during enterprise bargaining in many universities across Australia, reflecting acknowledgement by both the university managements (Hugo and Morriss, 2010) and the NTEU (2016) that the significant growth in precarious employment in the sector was neither sustainable nor desirable. For both managers and union activists to meaningfully assess the impact of these new positions on casualisation, reliable estimates of casualisation trends are needed. Yet the statistics on casualisation presented by universities and the Department of Education (DET) present a partial picture.