UTS Casual Contract Freeze - Know your rights survey
Legislation was enacted on 26-08-24 to make it easier for casual staff to be transitioned into secure work. These changes along with our hard won conversion and job security clauses, provide an opportunity for universities to finally recognise the recurring nature of our education, research, and service work by decasualising the sector.
Under our agreement UTS
has an opportunity to expand the use of our casual conversion processes, engage post-grad
students with fixed-term contracts, and hire more academics to secure roles. Doing so would ensure that casual contracts
are only used where it is appropriate, such for truly short-term, unpredictable work.
Unfortunately, UTS appears to be avoiding their expanded responsibilities as an employer of casual staff. They have frozen the issuing of new casual contracts, and appear to be working on making what casual contracts remain, even less secure, potentially by reducing notice periods for rostering.
We are on the precipice of a real cross-roads:
We can ignore the breaches of our agreements and rights as casual, fixed-term and continuing staff, and let UTS continue to intensify workloads and degrade job security.
OR
We can use the power of the clauses we've already won to hold UTS executives to their responsibilities as stewards of a public institution with a mandate for the public good.
Tell us your choice by answering a couple of short questions in this survey.
You can also register your interest for information on your rights around job security and around workloads.
