Australian universities are in the midst of a deep crisis. Between 2020 and 2021, university managers slashed an estimated twenty-seven thousand jobs. Indeed, the real figure is difficult to determine, since official statistics don’t count casual academics and university staff on fixed contracts. In part, this is to conceal the vast extent of insecure, precarious work throughout the sector. According to some estimates, at a number of universities, precariously employed academics make up more than 70 percent of all teaching staff.

Casuals are not the only workers suffering in a sector beset by decades of neoliberal reforms and austerity. This was only compounded by the pandemic, as the federal government excluded universities from extensive crisis support funding given to other sectors. As a result, those who didn’t lose their jobs over the last two years still face the threat of new rounds of redundancies while they struggle to keep up with the increased workloads that have resulted from job losses. Meanwhile student debt and class sizes are growing, and thanks to insufficient COVID-19 control measures, safety continues to be an issue for both staff and students.

There is, however, an obvious solution to these problems: a strong industrial campaign led by the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU). Indeed, some union activists in the sector have been pushing for this for years, arguing for new organizing models that can oppose — and perhaps even reverse — decades of deterioration.