University work becoming more precarious

By Jeannie Rea. The Commonwealth Department of Education recently released the university workforce data for 2012. This data, collected from the universities, reveals that since 2005 only one in four (24%) new jobs at Australian universities has been an ongoing or continuing job.   Three out of four have been contract or casual. Consequently, only one in two staff (on a full time equivalent (FTE) basis) employed at Australian universities now have secure employment (see Fig. 1). This means that the proportion of insecure workers in universities is much higher than the national average. More...