The system nationally has undergone a revolution over the past ten years. In real terms, for TAFE teachers, this has led to increased workload, increased pace of work, and little involvement in the process of reform. Ominously, a key feature of the reform process has been the growth in tendering out and huge funding pressures on individual TAFE's and state systems. Casualisation of the TAFE teaching workforce has grown to such an extent that individual teachers, both on-going and casual, are carrying the burden of reform.

Federal TAFE President, Pat Forward analyses the crisis of casualisation in TAFE.

Casual employment has become a defining feature of modern capitalist societies. Few countries, however, have embraced casual employment as enthusiastically as Australia. The growth in casual modes of employment is a bad omen for the future, and whilst its implications for individuals and for society at large are grim, its implications for teaching are catastrophic. I want to make it clear at the outset that whilst there are probably industries for which hourly paid work represents a reasonable way of dealing with the uncertainty of work as a practice it should be condemned. Hourly paid work, often represents an attempt to cut costs, and creates insecurity and uncertainty for those individuals forced to take such work. A casually employed workforce is a compliant workforce, unable to participate fully in society or maintain any security of income, or reasonable standard of living. These features of casual employment are to be condemned anywhere, but for teachers, the phenomenon is made all the more difficult because casual employment attacks the very foundation of the profession. It is ironic that the much heralded National Training Reform Agenda, and the revolution in TAFE organisation which has been a feature of the Australian system for the last ten years has as one of its hallmarks an unprecedented growth in the use of casual and sessional teaching work. The most significant causal factor in this growth has been the funding pressures on TAFE systems. The perception that TAFE needed to become responsive to industry saw the creation of a so-called 'Training Market' where the public providers were forced to compete against each other and against private providers. TAFE organisations lowered their costs in order to be successful in tendering. The most costly and vulnerable element in the process was teacher wages and public providers were forced to tender with the 'impediment' of having to pay award conditions, unlike their competitors in the private arena. Casual or hourly paid teachers represented a cheap alternative to cutting costs.

The human cost of casualisation is enormous, and it is common across a range of industries. Casual teachers are poorly paid, have no security of employment and therefore no capacity to plan their futures. They have reduced access to professional development, reduced capacity to form collegial relationships with their fellow teachers and little if no opportunity to participate in the community life of their workplace. Caught between the competing tensions of the demand for an institutional loyalty, whilst at the same time having to maintain self-sufficient working lives, they are condemned to existences working out of the boot of their cars, or cardboard boxes.

They cannot reliably form professional relationships with their colleagues and are often shunned because their existence represents increased workload for more securely employed teachers. Their relationships with students, even their capacity to professionally teach are constantly challenged by their employment mode. Most often, they are paid at an abysmally low rate for the hour that they stand and deliver, they are rarely paid for preparation and correction, for travel between campuses, or for student interviews and counselling. They can and should attend institution meetings, they are told, but they will rarely be paid for the privilege. Caught between the isolation of never being involved in the department's day to day work, or having to give up their own time to attend such meetings, they often choose the latter.

Whilst some states have figures which are disgraceful, casualisation has become a feature of all state TAFE systems to a greater or lesser extent. Before the recent demise of the Kennett government in Victoria, a senior OTFE bureaucrat gave advice to TAFE directors that they should recoup the cost of an inadequate pay offer from the government by moving their sessional ratios in Victorian TAFE to 30 per cent of total training effort. In the event that award conditions were followed, the total sessional teaching workforce would have been greater than 50 per cent. 1996 figures for the level of sessional employment in Victoria shows that 10 per cent Equivalent Full Time (EFT) were sessionally employed. Anecdotally, the figures are now much greater, as some Victorian institutes have greatly increased the proportion of their teaching effort delivered casually. One large and so-called 'successful' Victorian institute, with a shocking industrial relations history, has been able to achieve cash reserves of millions of dollars at a time when several other TAFE Institutes are close to bankruptcy. The correlation between high casual rates, and a surfeit of funds is not accidental. Is quality threatened? The answer is yes, and students and teachers will testify to this.

Perhaps one of the ironies of the TAFE and VET system is the fact that it is close to impossible to get reliable figures on the composition of the VET workforce. It is ironic because we are an industry that depends for its survival on estimating and meeting the training and education needs of the rest of the Australian workforce. On a daily basis now, TAFE and VET teachers deal with truckloads of statistical data on discreet workforces in a range of industry sectors, devising training packages, marketing strategies - 'meeting their needs'. At the very same time, there has been appallingly little done on the size, the breakdown, the qualifications, the employment modes of those working in the whole VET sector. There is no overall view about professional development, retraining or qualifications because there simply is not the will, nor the information to support any such development.

What percentage of the teaching workforce in the VET sector is casually employed? It is almost impossible to get figures from the respective state authorities, and ANTA.

In Victoria, where the most recent reliable figures that we have are for 1996, 41 per cent of total staff were employed in an ongoing capacity, 32 per cent in contract positions, and 27 per cent were employed casually. Within these figures, teachers had the lowest proportion of ongoing employment 36 per cent, with 29 per cent employed on contract and 35 per cent casually employed. Further figures from the State Training Board in Victoria show that while 24 per cent of teachers employed before 1992 were employed on contract, after 1992, that figure had risen to 49 per cent. Similarly, before 1992, 18 per cent of teachers were employed on a casual basis, and after that date, the figure had risen to 42 per cent. Not surprisingly, there were gender implications in these figures, with males comprising 26.5 per cent of the 36 per cent of ongoing teachers, and women comprising 9.7 per cent. Of the 29 per cent of contract teachers, 12.3 per cent were male, and 16.3 per cent female. Of the 35 per cent who reported being casually employed, 15.9 per cent were male, and 19.4 per cent female. Whilst the figures above represent total numbers of employees, when measured on an effective fulltime (EFT) basis, the 35 per cent of teachers who are casually employed represent 13 per cent of EFT, contract 34 per cent of EFT and on-going teachers 52 per cent EFT. Between 1993 and 1997, the proportion of EFT ongoing staff has decreased from 58.7 per cent to 52.3 per cent, the proportion of contract staff EFT has risen from 31.2 per cent to 34.8 per cent and sessional EFT has risen from 10 per cent to 13 per cent. In Tasmania, figures for 1997 show that there were a total of 1,708 staff employed by the Tasmanian Department of Vocational Education and Training. Of these, 495 were employed under the TAFE staff award, 484 as sessional teachers, adult education tutors or casual staff, and 719 were non teaching staff. Across the sector, 52.5 per cent of staff were permanent, 19.2 per cent were temporary and 28.3 per cent were employed casually. The figures do not breakdown teaching and non teaching staff. In October 1998, the new Minister in Tasmania announced that over 70 temporary teachers would be offered the opportunity to convert to permanent employment.

In Queensland, June 1998 figures show that 23 per cent of fulltime equivalent teacher numbers are filled by temporary fixed term employees, and the same is true for 64 per cent of tutor positions.

In NSW, there were over 11,300 teaching staff in TAFE in 1996-7. The data for this period does not include casual staff. The NSW data is difficult to interpret. 1993-4 data shows that there were 6,198 full time teaching staff in NSW, suggesting that 5,800 EFT teaching staff were either part time or casual. In 1997, there was a total of only 767 part time staff employed by TAFE NSW, suggesting that there is a very high proportion of casual teaching staff. The NSW Teachers Federation estimates that 70 per cent of teaching positions in NSW TAFE were casual in 1998.

In South Australia, no data was available, but the SA Branch of the AEU has articulated growing concerns about the proportions of contract and casual staff in TAFE. There were, for example, about 40 lecturers whose contracts have been rolled over for more than ten years, and more than 200 who have had contracts rolled over for five years or more. In 1998, a new rule which required contracted staff to have their positions thrown open after five years was imposed, but a successful campaign by members at Adelaide Institute has seen this rule suspended for the time being.

In the ACT, in 1993, Canberra Institute of Technology employed a total of 427 full time teaching staff of whom 23 were temporary: 47 part time staff of whom two were temporary, and 818 casual, part time staff. Of the total 1,292 teaching staff, 34.8 per cent were permanent, and 63 per cent were casual. By 1998, the situation had changed. Of the total 1,490 teaching staff, 25.2 per cent were permanent, and 71.8 per cent were casual. It is estimated that casual teachers provide about 39 per cent of total EFT loads. These are the harsh realities of the contemporary TAFE and the VET. It is clear that the proportion of sessional teachers is increasing alarmingly in each state.

The rhetoric of the market has intruded into every sphere of TAFE's work but to use the language of the market, the 'core business' of the whole VET sector is, and must continue to be, teaching and learning. This is no longer an unassailable reality, or a truth. We have to assert it in every forum we can.

The advent of 'content' free training packages, and the incursion of CBT into more and more areas in VET leaves us witnessing a fundamental shift in the nature of education and training. This shift is not driven by considerations of the education and training needs of students, despite the rhetoric to that effect. It is driven in the end by factors associated with cost.

Trainees are being assessed, not trained or taught. Their skills are being narrowed, not broadened, their life chances are diminishing not increasing. That great hope which formed the kernel of TAFE in Kangan, that belief that TAFE could represent a real opportunity for all Australian citizens to participate in education, is deteriorating before our eyes.

Casualisation is one feature of a system in turmoil, but it is a critical feature. We are in danger of witnessing the development of an itinerant and disconnected teaching workforce, wandering from workplace to workplace assessing competencies. If you do not invest in the long term in teachers, the quality of the work they are doing will inevitably decline. My argument that there is a crisis, not an impending crisis, but a real crisis now, may sit at odds with the rhetoric of ANTA or the state training systems. It may do, but it shouldn't. The crisis is here, and we as a union know that to be the case. One of our problems is that the severity of that crisis is still partially hidden by three related factors. The first is that most state systems are still able to rely on a trained and experienced, but ever-decreasing and discontented core of permanent staff. The second is that there is still a 'reserve army' of trained and qualified casual teachers, diminishing though they are. The third factor is the abundance of goodwill which still, against all odds, exists from teachers in the system. The old adage that teachers are their own worst enemy, holds true. When push comes to shove, they do not want to 'hurt' or disadvantage students.

As the permanent workforce continues to decline, as the 'reserve army' dries up, as the goodwill deteriorates, who will do the real work of TAFE and the VET system? It will not be the marketers, or the PR experts, or the managers or the CEOs or the administrators. It may not be a new generation of enthusiastic, well trained, experienced vocational educators, for who, in their right mind at this point in time would even consider a career in the VET sector. As the Kennett government exited the stage recently in Victoria, one director said that it had left time bombs in the systems, and they were ready to explode. He was referring in particular to the poor state of building maintenance and the attendant OH&S issues. What he said, however, was true on a much broader front, and it applies not just to Victoria or the Victorian government, it applies to Australia.

Casualisation is the biggest time bomb in the VET sector. What can be done? We must continue to argue and debate, nag and pester, fight and struggle to improve the situation of casual teachers. They are victims of the revolution in the systems, but they are not, individually victims, and as a trade union, we have to be careful not to perpetuate a culture of victimisation and martyrdom.

Isolated, disjointed, fragmented, casual teachers are powerless to fight for their conditions and their rights. As members of a union which proves that it is prepared to address the issue of casualisation seriously, casual teachers have power. The days, in our union, when casual teachers were seen as middle class women working for pin money, or ostracised because they represented a threat to on-going or permanent teachers are long gone. But any strategy has to recognise these twin historical impediments to 'doing something' for casual teachers. We must articulate and prove our commitment to this critical section of our workforce - all of our members must - and equally we must, fight the system and win the arguments to give a platform and a forum to the views and the needs of casual teachers. Like any 'fringe' or marginalised group, they are constructed as 'the other', in any debate. Ultimately, the only people who can do something about casual employment are casual workers, but they can only do that knowing that the secure workforce is prepared to stand with them, recognising that which we have always known - the objectives are the same. Teachers want a professional and secure workfore. The future of TAFE and of the reform agenda in the VET sector depends upon this. Much more significantly, the future of may hundreds of thousands of Australians, both young and not so young, depend upon this.

From AEU (SA Branch) Journal, March 8, 2000