Casual and Sessional University Staff: The Exploitation of Academics

The Hidden Workforce Running Australian Universities

When a student sits down in a university tutorial, there is a good chance the person at the front of the room has no guaranteed income next semester. They may have a PhD. They may have published research. They may be brilliant at their job. But under current arrangements, they are likely employed on a casual or sessional basis - meaning they are paid only for the hours they are formally scheduled to teach, with no sick leave, no job security, and no guarantee of work from one semester to the next.

This is not a fringe issue. Casual and sessional staff make up an estimated 60–70% of undergraduate teaching at Australian universities, according to figures cited by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). The exact number is difficult to pin down because universities have long resisted transparent reporting - itself a telling sign.

What Are Casual Academics Actually Paid?

The pay structure for casual academics sounds reasonable on paper until you understand what it does and does not cover.

A casual academic at a Group of Eight university might be paid approximately $185–$220 per hour of contact teaching time under enterprise agreements. That sounds generous. The problem is that rate is supposed to compensate for everything: lecture preparation, marking, student emails, administration, and re-reading research. In practice, the allocated preparation time baked into the rate is laughably inadequate.

A typical sessional tutor might receive payment for:

• 1 hour of teaching
• 30 minutes of preparation
• 15–20 minutes of associated marking

But experienced academics report spending 3–5 hours of unpaid work for every hour in the classroom, particularly when marking essays or developing new course materials. When you account for this unpaid labour, effective hourly rates can fall well below $30–$40 per hour - less than many retail or hospitality workers who receive penalty rates, leave entitlements, and superannuation on every dollar.

Casual academics also frequently fall below the superannuation guarantee threshold, or work contracts structured to minimise employer super obligations, further eroding their long-term financial security.

Who Does This Affect?

The people most likely to be trapped in sessional work are:

• Early-career researchers who have just completed PhDs and are trying to build an academic career
• Women, who are overrepresented in casual roles and underrepresented in tenured positions
• First Nations academics, who face additional structural barriers to secure employment
• Migrant academics on temporary visas, who may be reluctant to raise concerns for fear of losing income or visa sponsorship

This is not a temporary stepping stone for most. Research by the NTEU and others shows many casual academics spend 5, 10, or even 15 years in insecure employment, effectively subsidising the university sector with their labour while waiting for permanent positions that may never materialise.

Why Does This System Exist?

Let's be direct: it exists because it is cheap and flexible for university management.

Australian universities receive significant public funding - over $11 billion in Commonwealth grants in 2022–23 alone - yet have increasingly operated like corporations, with executive salaries rising sharply while teaching staff are casualised. Vice-Chancellor salaries commonly exceed $1 million per year. The University of Melbourne's Vice-Chancellor received a total package of over $1.5 million in recent years.

Casualisation allows universities to expand and contract their teaching workforce with zero risk. If enrolments drop, casual staff simply are not re-offered contracts. There are no redundancy payments, no consultation obligations, no reputational cost. The financial risk of running a university is effectively transferred onto the most vulnerable workers in the system.

What Have Governments Done About It?

Not enough - under either major party.

The former Coalition government oversaw the JobReady Graduates package in 2020, which cut Commonwealth funding for humanities courses and pushed more financial risk onto students and institutions. It did nothing meaningful to address casualisation.

The Albanese Labor government, which took office in 2022 with strong union support and rhetoric about secure work, commissioned the Australian Universities Accord, which was released in February 2024. The Accord acknowledged casualisation as a serious problem and made recommendations around minimum conversion rights - the ability for long-term casuals to request permanent employment. However, implementation has been slow, the recommendations are non-binding, and universities have significant discretion in how they respond.

The Fair Work Act does provide a pathway for casual employees to request conversion to permanent employment after 12 months, but in practice universities have found ways to reset this clock, restructure contracts, or simply not re-engage staff before the threshold is reached.

Why Does This Policy Persist Despite Being Widely Criticised?

Because the people who set the rules are not the people who suffer under them.

University governing bodies are dominated by management and external appointees, not teaching staff. Federal education policy is shaped by lobbying from Universities Australia - the peak body representing vice-chancellors - not the academics in front of students. Both Labor and the Coalition receive donations from and maintain relationships with university leadership.

The casual academics most affected are politically atomised: spread across dozens of institutions, often too financially precarious to take industrial action, and frequently silenced by the fear that complaining will end their access to future contracts.

What Would Voters Actually Choose?

This is where direct democracy becomes relevant. Poll after poll shows Australians support secure work, fair pay, and quality education. If voters were asked directly whether public universities should be permitted to employ the majority of their teaching workforce on insecure contracts with no leave entitlements, the answer would almost certainly be no.

But voters are never asked. Instead, two parties negotiate education policy in Canberra, influenced heavily by institutional interests with money and access. The casual academic has neither.

Direct Democracy proposes something different: policy shaped by the people who actually experience its consequences, not by the institutions that benefit from the status quo.

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