Study finds 40,000 tertiary jobs lost during pandemic

The National Tertiary Education Union launched a week of action as a study it commissioned revealed that a shocking 40,000 tertiary education staff across Australia – nearly one in five – have lost their jobs during the pandemic. And, says the study: “Job losses are getting worse, not better.” Higher education has been hit harder by COVID-19 than any other industry.

Most of the jobs lost in the 12 months to May 2021 – 35,000 – were at public universities. Others were lost at technical, further and vocational colleges. University job losses have been much higher this year than in the first year of the pandemic.

Under initial lockdowns, casual workers suffered the largest job losses. “They now mostly affect permanent and full-time positions,” says the report. “The pandemic is thus reinforcing the perverse trend of casualisation in universities.” More than 60% of the jobs lost were held by women.

Published by the Australia Institute's Centre for Future Work, An Avoidable Catastrophe: Pandemic job losses in higher education and their consequences was authored by Eliza Littleton and Jim Stanford and was released on 12 September.

“This report details the wholesale job destruction at our nation’s universities and the future consequences of the federal government just letting this sector drift,” said Dr Alison Barnes, national president of the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), in a 13 September statement.

“It is now incumbent on vice-chancellors to step up and secure jobs and careers. The pandemic must not be an excuse for further casualisation and wage theft.”

The report proposes a AU$3.75 billion (US$2.7 billion) support package to enable universities to recover lost jobs. “Compared to other Commonwealth expenses during the pandemic – including the AU$70 billion JobKeeper programme, which arbitrarily excluded universities – this is a modest and necessary investment,” said Barnes.

NTEU’s week of action at universities around the country ranged, in these pandemic times, from online rallies to picnics and petitions. Activities are listed here. Staff have been meeting to organise responses to the national crisis, said NTEU.

The job losses

Australia’s higher education system was struck harder by the pandemic and resulting recession than any other non-agricultural sector in Australia’s economy, the report points out.

“Public health measures and the closure of Australia’s borders to international students created a financial and operational catastrophe for Australia’s universities.”

The national government made matters worse by “arbitrarily excluding universities from the JobKeeper wage subsidy programme”, which was originally budgeted at AU$130 billion and meant to support six million jobs through the initial lockdowns, write Littleton and Stanford.

“Universities were left on their own to deal with collapsing revenues, operational challenges (like online learning) and health restrictions. Academics, researchers, support staff and students have all suffered immensely from this painful but avoidable crisis.”

COVID-19 arrived in early 2020. Border closures had a huge and immediate impact on international students and their fees – which accounted for AU$14 billion per year in tertiary revenue – while challenges such as adapting to online learning imposed a heavy toll on universities and staff.

Before COVID-19, employment in tertiary education had been growing strongly: by about 10% per year on average from 2015 through 2020, says the report, which draws on Australian Bureau of Statistics labour force data.

Universities did not substantially reduce employment during the initial lockdowns. This was due to contractual commitments for the academic year, uncertainty about how long the crisis would last, and hope that government aid would be forthcoming.

Soon, however, thousands of casual employees began losing their jobs. By the May quarter of 2020, nearly 8,000 casual tertiary jobs had been shed. The loss of casual jobs accelerated, reaching 10,000 positions by late 2020. It has since abated somewhat, with universities now rehiring some casual staff.

This year, permanent staff have faced the main job losses. “Having had time to adjust staff plans in light of the pandemic and the loss of international students, university administrations began to attack permanent positions with a vengeance,” the report continues.

Year on year permanent jobs in public tertiary education dropped by more than 34,000 jobs in the first half of 2021. During the 12 months to May 2021, total tertiary education jobs fell by nearly 40,000 positions. Over 90% of those positions were full time.

“These heavy job losses occurred even as Australia’s economy was rebuilding strongly after the initial lockdowns: in the same period, the national labour market created almost one million jobs (over 400,000 of them full time).”

All tertiary job losses so far this year have been in public institutions. Job cuts look likely to continue as international student enrolments remain low and government fails to support universities through the crisis, write Littleton and Stanford.

“The continuing loss of permanent positions, combined with some gradual recovery in casual hiring, is causing a resurgence in the overall incidence of casualisation in Australian universities. Across the whole sector, casual staff accounted for 22.4% of total employment in the May quarter of 2021.”

Gender impacts

Of the 41,000 jobs lost from public tertiary education in the first half of 2021, some 25,000 were women employees. “That represents 61% of job losses in the year – slightly higher than women’s proportion of total employment in the pre-pandemic period. Thus in both absolute and relative terms, women have borne a disproportionate share of total job losses.”

“However, this is not the whole story,” says the report. During 2020, when the sector was still growing, job growth was weaker for women (10%) than for men (12%). This reflected women’s greater concentration in casual positions. Women have also faced “intense challenges to combine paid work with family and caring responsibilities”.

Financial implications

As has been extensively reported over the past 18 months, government’s closure of national borders and the precipitous drop in international student numbers, cost universities dearly.

By 2019-20, international student fees accounted for over AU$12 billion in fee revenue for Australian universities – almost quadrupling over the previous decade – the report says.

“International fees thus represented as much as one-third of the total revenue base of the university sector.” Personal spending by international students contributed more than AU$20 billion per year to the national economy.

The government’s COVID policies disrupted higher education finances, says the report. Although policies were implemented in the public interest, the government still had a “corresponding responsibility to ensure this vital sector survives the resulting chaos. In that regard, the Commonwealth government failed.”

The report called for “extraordinary crisis supports” to allow universities to retain staff and adapt to the loss of international student revenue. It estimates, based on average total labour costs, that AU$3.75 billion per year would be needed to restore the 35,000 jobs to public universities.

While this might seem expensive, Littleton and Stanford argue, relative to the scale of support given to other sectors and to the financial losses incurred by closed borders, “it is modest and appropriate”.

The government’s most recent budget tagged total expenses associated with fighting COVID-19 at AU$311 billion: AU$3.75 billion was thus just 1.2% of the total cost of the COVID response.

And action is imperative, the report continues: “Reduced staffing and increased casualisation will hurt the quality of education, and undermine the ability of Australian universities to support national economic recovery.”

The future

Dr Alison Barnes worries about the long-term impact on the academic workforce.

“Every day I talk to early career academics in their 20s who rely on marking and tutoring work to supplement their PhD stipends so they can become the medical and engineering researchers of tomorrow,” she said in the NTEU statement.

“We are losing a generation of researchers and teachers. It’s an incredible brain drain.

“But worst of all, future students will miss out on a gold standard education system in which to thrive. That’s despite politicians telling us again and again that high quality education and research is the most important human resource we have in this country.”

Barnes concluded: “This report finds job losses are getting worse, not better, as we go further into the epidemic. People forget universities were deliberately excluded from last year’s JobKeeper package – so this year’s layoffs are like getting kicked when you’re down.”