Alice-Mary Higgins (Independent) | Oireachtas source

I am sharing time with Senator McDowell.

These important initiatives and debates allow us to look a little deeper and go a bit wider on important topics. In this case, the motion relates to an issue that affects all our higher education institutions and universities, which Senators McDowell and Mullen and I represent. I welcome the Minister of State, Deputy Niall Collins, to the House. I regret that the Minister for Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science is not here given that he previously gave some commitments to addressing this issue when we debated the Higher Education Authority Bill last year. I am sure the Minister of State will pass on the concerns we raise.

I thank my colleagues on the National University of Ireland panel, namely, Senators McDowell and Mullen, for agreeing to and supporting the motion. The motion also has the support of the University of Dublin panel Senators, namely, Senators Ruane, Norris and Clonan. Importantly, I welcome also the support we have received for the motion from the Irish Federation of University Teachers, the Irish Precarity Network, the Postgraduate Workers Organisation and the Union of Students in Ireland. It gives a sense of the breadth of support for highlighting the issue and the broad demand for action on the issue. It comes from every level within our university communities.

The motion seeks to highlight and address the systemic and widespread issue of precarious workplace conditions in our higher education institutions. I was reminded at the briefing of the 2018 report, which I launched and wrote a foreword for, by the Think-tank for Action on Social Change, TASC, called Living with Uncertainty: The Social Implications of Precarious Work. At the time, I was engaging with that issue because I had been looking at insecure conditions in the hospitality sector, and we were very aware of the prevalence of insecure contracts throughout that sector. It was interesting that in the 2018 report, higher education was identified as an area of accelerating and escalating insecurity in which precarious practices were being embedded and spreading. In my foreword at that time to the report, I wrote:

It seems that insecure contracts have become prevalent in the very spaces relied on to analyse and examine the employment landscape. It would certainly be worrying if such practices were ever to chill the intellectual challenge and critique which policy makers such as myself welcome and rely on when shaping new policy solutions.

Those who can analyse the trends within our society are themselves subject to these insecure conditions.

Unfortunately, in the years since then, the issue has not improved. In contrast to what we might have expected in the past, when there was a ladder of progression, an old tenure track on which people could move forth in their university careers or a myth that if they just stayed with it, they would continue to progress, we have actually seen the opposite, namely, a slippery slope where conditions are deteriorating. What we heard at the briefing and I have identified in the motion is the extraordinary spread of insecure contracts and the fact it slides all the way down. For example, reporting from Noteworthy has demonstrated that an average of 11,200 lecturers have been working on a temporary or casual basis in recent years in universities and institutes of technology. We also heard today that we are moving from those circumstances of insecure and temporary contracts, in many cases fixed-term contracts that apply only during academic term time, do not allow for any research work and mean that many of those on the contracts are forced each summer to lose their employment to seek social welfare payments and have the insecurity of not knowing whether or how they may be employed the following September. This means no continuity of contract builds up and people do not build up towards permanent status, and it creates incredible uncertainty including, as we have heard, in cases where persons will lose their housing because it is very difficult to get a lease or housing without a permanent contract. It is very difficult to move forward in any aspect of life when you can point only to an eight- or nine-month contract.

What we heard since that research is that we are not looking just at the fact a progression path is not there for full staff or just at temporary contracts for part of the year. In fact, some of those who have been on an endless cycle of short-term contracts that end each May are now being told this May or June that they may not have a contract in September because an even more insecure form of contract is being favoured. This is what has been described as almost a gig economy version of lecturing, where persons are being hired to lecture hourly. Contracts that were meant to be special-purpose contracts, such as for a visiting lecturer who comes to give an expert perspective on black holes or 19th-century Italian dance and may appear occasionally, are now being misused as contracts to say the standard teaching on core courses will be done on an hour-by-hour basis by lecturers hired on that basis. Crucially, of course, when that happens, they are not having time allocated for marking, the developing of courses, research and any of the other work that goes into good academic practice, good intellectual work and the kind of quality we need from our institutions.

When we follow the track along, we see also the circumstances faced by postgraduate workers and students. Again, a lack of recognition of employee status deeply disadvantages them not solely when they are undertaking their PhD but also in years to come.Having a five-year or seven-year period in which no PRSI contributions are made, and relevant employment protections and rights such as maternity leave, parental leave or sick leave are denied, can lead to long-term disadvantage not just in the gaps in pension contributions but also in the gaps in access to other social supports. Interestingly, it has been highlighted to me that this is also a gender issue, right through from university lecturer level to postgraduate worker level, because not being able to access supports like maternity leave has an effect on who can afford to remain. International students, some of whom are women, face a double layer of disadvantage regarding these issues. For many people, including extraordinary candidates, continuing or completing a PhD becomes unaffordable or unmanageable. As they are not represented as workers, the power imbalance is so extraordinary that they cannot even be properly represented by unions.

In those situations, it is important to note that it is not solely the individuals affected who lose out. Our institutions lose out in terms of their credibility and the quality of the thinking and the work that happens. The students lose out in terms of the continuity of the work and the continuity and quality of education. Society loses out because when we have these kinds of insecure contracts and practices, we do not have the kind of diversity we need within our institutions. The dangers of groupthink become a problem. We lose out when we look to the role our universities can and should be playing in terms of the public good and in terms of developing solutions to the collective problems we all face as a society.

Many more issues could have been listed in this motion. The Cush report, the committee on further and higher education, and others have all called for this to be addressed. To conclude, I want to emphasise briefly the very clear calls to action: engagement with the representative organisations of lecturers, postdoctoral and PhD researchers; regulations and legislation to ensure all persons employed to teach in higher educational institutions earn a living wage, are recognised as employees and are entitled to the relevant benefits; revision, though abolition would be better, of the employment control framework, which has limited universities' capacity to move forward and accurately and appropriately recognise and support staff and hire people in the long term; and a vision in terms of the institutions' transformative role in education. This comes at a time when the Minister of State will be aware of proposals in research and innovation that are coming. This is how trust can be built within the university community.