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Swinburne Sessionals – Major Justice Campaign Close to Launch

Posted 14 February 2012 by Charlie Sanders (Swinburne University of Technology)

Well over half the teaching performed at Australian Universities is being carried out by Sessional staff, and at Swinburne specifically more than two thirds of the Academic workforce is casual! Many Sessionals have been employed at Swinburne for years on end, with no job security, little to no access to resources such as offices, computers of their own, or ongoing library or network access, and are also routinely left out of the strategic processes of the University such as staff meetings and consultation. And let’s not get started on the pay…

Swinburne University Sessionals have been meeting to discuss issues affecting Sessional staff, and Sessional members and Delegates are developing a major campaign, which will involve:

-          investigating job security and demanding that the University provide permanent positions for long-term Sessional staff

-          looking at wages, including the enforcement of pay for marking and ways to counter the loopholes that are being used to steal Sessional hours in other ways to make up for the rights we’ve won

-          talking about collegiality and requiring the University to include Sessional staff in all professional activities, and on paid time, too!

All up, this is an exciting campaign and we welcome our ever-increasing Sessional membership and ask you to talk to your incoming colleagues about these issues and invite them along to the meetings we will be having on these and other issues.

Before we finalise these next steps, we will be conducting an action survey of staff. This survey will be released soon. Sessional members should also be aware a National survey is being conducted, and members are encouraged to participate in that as well.

If you’re a Sessional member and you’d like to get more involved, we will be having meetings at Lilydale, Prahran, and Hawthorn in the second week of teaching. The details of these meetings will be emailed as soon as our Delegates have organised them.

BY THE WAY: For an interesting read on the ‘precariat’ – a new class of workers in insecure employment – click here: http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/3820486.html. Sound like you? Me, too! Let’s create a new future together.