Opinion | Senate Select Committee Inquiry on Job Security hears from Hunter workers about casualisation's insidious impact

Hunter Workers welcomes the committee's visit because workers and their families in the region deserve security and respect from their employers.

The Senate Select Committee was established because casualisation and the proliferation of insecure work is an issue in many industries nationally.

Major industries and employers in the Hunter are implicated, including manufacturing, mining, TAFE, the community sector, food production, and the University of Newcastle.

Today as many as 60,000 teachers and principals across NSW will walk off the job for 24 hours. The strike is in response to myriad issues facing teachers, one of which is unsustainably high levels of casualisation in our schools.

Casualisation, or job insecurity, is a problem for many reasons.

One immediate impact is work insecurity leading to wage theft.

A 2019 audit by the Fair Work Ombudsman estimated that one in five workers is being underpaid across many sectors including accommodation, hospitality and retail.

Insecure work is also a harmful cause of stress - people in insecure work report stress from the constant feeling they can never say no to any opportunity because they don't know what work they will or won't have in the future.

The COVID pandemic revealed the extent of insecure work and reliance on casual workers when thousands of jobs were lost overnight. Longer term, job insecurity limits how workers can plan for their lives and futures. Major life events like having a family, buying a house and retirement take planning, and work insecurity undermines the ability to plan.

The University of Newcastle is one example of a major employer in our region with a large proportion of staff employed casually.

University management, guided by the federal government, continue to evolve a business model built around casual workers and short-term contracts.

While staff may be classified as casual, the nature of their work is anything but. Much of the work casualised staff do is regular, ongoing, and stable over time.

Casualised staff do the teaching and research that are the core business of any university. Casualised staff provide the student support and other essential administration that gives students the opportunity to go to university, and to succeed when they're there.

New casual conversion laws introduced by the Morrison government allow almost limitless discretion in denying long-term casual workers the right to convert to permanent roles.

At the University of Newcastle management referred to the new laws as they refused permanent employment to all but a handful of casualised staff.

In protest, the NTEU held a 12-hour Digital Sit-In last month, with participants reading out hundreds of rejection letters.

The casualisation of university workforces is a widely popular, deliberate cost-minimisation strategy that allows universities to shift financial risk onto staff and to exploit workers.

We know that in Australian universities, where an estimated 70 per cent of all staff are casual or fixed-term, exploitation and wage theft is rife - so much so that the Fair Work Ombudsman has called them out on it.

A NTEU survey of 2174 professional and academic staff nationally found almost four in five academic respondents claimed one or other form of underpayment. A survey at the University of Sydney found 82 per cent reported doing unpaid work.

Additionally, casual employment allows universities to more easily re-classify the types of work casuals perform to pay them lower rates, despite performing the same work.

In 2020, the University of Melbourne underpaid staff by classifying tutorials as "practice classes", paying staff less than a third of the pay they were entitled to despite performing the same work.

Over two days of public hearings in Newcastle, casualised workers from a range of Hunter industries will share with senators evidence of the many ways insidious casualisation negatively affects workers and their families.

Our fervent hope is that the senators are able to use that evidence and make employment laws that provide job security and dignity of work for all.

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