A landmark court decision could force Australian universities to constantly increase their casual staff numbers just to cover their routine teaching needs, according to a litigant who has thrown a spanner in the works of the sector’s employment practices.

Computing lecturer Greg Baker says his legal win, which obliged Macquarie University to convert his employment status from casual to permanent part-time, will unleash a “deluge” of copycat applications across the country.

Most will come from casual academics employed solely to teach. If they win permanent employment, their universities will have to hire them in accordance with institutional enterprise agreements – some of which limit teaching-only employment.

Consequently, the applicants might have to cut their teaching activities by up to 60 per cent, forcing their universities to employ more casuals to cover the gap. The new employees could themselves qualify for permanent conversion six months later, putting universities in the same position all over again.

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The predicament has emerged after Baker secured the first court enforcement of the 2024 “employee choice” rules, which entitle casual staff to permanent employment after six months of reasonably regular work meeting the ongoing needs of their employers.

Baker had been working at Macquarie for about 17 hours a week since early 2023, teaching introductory computing and artificial intelligence subjects. The university rejected his request to convert to permanent employment but the Fair Work Commission found that his work patterns were inconsistent with “genuine casual employment”.

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Macquarie argued that it could not grant Baker permanent employment because its enterprise agreement did not permit teaching-only roles for part-time staff. Commissioner Stephen Crawford rejected this argument, finding that casual conversion rights overrode conflicting provisions in enterprise agreements.

Baker said the case would open the floodgates to casual conversion requests across the country. The latest available Department of Education statistics suggest Australia has more than 13,000 casually employed university academics on a full-time equivalent basis, performing well over 34 per cent of the sector’s teaching work.

Although universities might want to place their newfound permanent employees in teaching-only roles, their enterprise agreements might preclude this. “If the university has a minimum floor on the number of teaching and research roles, and 30 per cent of the staff are casual, then they will very quickly hit that floor,” Baker said.

“The universities would need to hire yet more staff. If they use casuals to fill [the] gap, then they hit the same problem six months later.”

Most universities have primarily teaching academics holding what are variously described as “focused”, “specialist”, “intensive” or “associate” education roles. But at least nine enterprise agreements place limitations on their numbers, typically capping them at between 20 and 35 per cent of continuing and fixed-term academics.

Although Australian university staffing data are out-of-date and often unreliable, Times Higher Education’s analysis of the available figures suggests that at least four institutions – Charles Sturt and Macquarie universities, Swinburne University of Technology and UNSW Sydney – would be in breach of these limitations if their teaching-only casuals converted to teaching-focused permanent positions.

Charles Sturt said it monitored developments in workplace law and industrial relations to ensure ongoing compliance with its legal obligations. “At this stage, requests for casual conversion continue to be considered on a case-by-case basis,” a spokesman said.

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UNSW said the Baker case and “numerous other inputs” influenced its “constant thinking around how we create more secure employment and clearer career pathways”.

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Macquarie, which confirmed that it was not appealing Crawford’s judgment, said the decision highlighted “broader challenges” in the interaction between university employment practices and Australia’s industrial relations framework.

“The university sees the ruling as an opportunity to engage constructively with staff and their representatives, including the NTEU [National Tertiary Education Union], to ensure our employment arrangements are fit for purpose and provide sustainable, long-term employment and career pathways,” a Macquarie spokesman said.

The NTEU said universities were “misreading the decision” if they used it to justify an expansion of teaching-only roles. “This is one decision on one person’s circumstances, not a green light for universities to start carving teaching out of academic roles,” said general secretary Damien Cahill.

“Research is integral to teaching. The threshold standards clearly require teaching staff to keep up with developments in their fields. That can only be done through research being an important part of their job.”

But Monash University policy expert Andrew Norton said the higher education funding system did not support teaching-research jobs. “You cannot have this contradictory model where employment is on one basis and funding is on another,” he said.

Norton said the system had been “propped up” by international education revenue, which was now in decline. “It just can’t work, in my view. Education-focused staff are absolutely essential for the system to operate.”

Baker said that while universities faced a “very complicated problem” in funding their workforce model, they had made the problem worse by “playing absolute fast and loose” with rules around casual employment – which was appropriate for dealing with “random fluctuations” in enrolments, but not for staffing core subjects such as the “850-student unit” he had taught “semester after semester”.

“There is a need for casualisation to some extent...but we have we have definitely swung too far,” he said. “Now we’re doing something about it. What it looks like at the other end of that, who knows? At least we’re going to end up somewhere sustainable.”

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john.ross@timeshighereducation.com