Tertiary Update Vol 16 No 24 - Casual employees want security not flexibility

Tertiary Update is our weekly bulletin about news in the tertiary education sector from the perspective of people working in the sector. Is this email not displaying correctly? View it in your browser. Casual employees want security not flexibility Seven out of every eight TEU members who are on casual, fixed-term or insecure employment agreements would like permanent work, according to TEU's recent survey of casual work. [Read more…] Hinemoana Baker - eight years without a holiday If Hinemoana Baker is looking relaxed it's because she has just come back from her first holiday in "maybe eight years". With her long string of casual short-term jobs, and her partner self-employed, it is not easy to align days off that overlap. [Read more…] MOOC questions need answering Both Waikato and Massey universities are discussing how to approach massive open online courses (MOOCs). Professor Mark Brown, from Massey University announced to TechDay "Massey University will be making an announcement in the next few weeks about how it intends to take advantage of the MOOC movement to more widely share its world-class expertise." [Read more…] PBRF pressures changing our workforce The Otago Daily Times reports that the proportion of staff employed as lecturers at New Zealand universities dropped by a third over the space of a decade. [Read more…] Digital information creating workplace stress An Australian Workload Productivity report that found digital communications are creating huge workloads, pressure and workplace stress received front-page coverage from the Dominion Post yesterday. [Read more…] Treasury misses the point of tertiary education Treasury's bizarre working paper Private Returns to Tertiary Education, which it released this week, seems to argue that New Zealand should move from emulating equitable and economically successful countries like Sweden, Norway or Japan to copy Portugal, Turkey and Hungary instead. [Read more…]   Friend on Facebook Follow on Twitter Forward to a Friend Other news The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent US$472-million (so far) on higher education. So why are many in academe not writing thank-you notes? - The Chronicle of Higher Education We have a vacancy for an organiser based in our Palmerston North office. This is a fulltime position and we are seeking applicants committed to the trade union movement with a combination of organising, advocacy, communication and administrative skills - TEU "For the lowest income 30 percent of our households, I estimate they have faced inflation over the year 0.2 to 0.3 percentage points higher than the official CPI. The increase in housing prices, particularly rents, up 2.1 percent for the year, hit low income families harder than others because they are a larger part of their incomes." - Bill Rosenberg, CTU Challenging times continue for Aoraki Polytechnic as it stares down a forecast loss of $1.6 million and a predicted drop of 276 students. Acting chief executive Alex Cabrera said he would be talking to the council about the figures tomorrow. Factors impacting this included a strong regional economy with low unemployment. As a result of the drop in students, redundancies could happen, he said – Timaru Herald Governments are nearing the end of negotiations on one of the most far-reaching international free trade agreements in history. The deal, called the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), is aimed at boosting trade among 12 participating countries, and the next and final round runs July 15-24. And because information on the negotiations is not public, it's hard to know what the impacts will be - Mother Jones  follow on Twitter | friend on Facebook | forward to a friend  This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 New Zealand License.  2013 Tertiary Education Union  You are receiving this email either because you are a financial member of TEU and we have added you to our mailing list, or because we have a record of you previously opting to add yourself to our mailing list. Our mailing address is: Tertiary Education Union PO Box 11 767 Wellington, Wellington 6142 New Zealand Add us to your address book  unsubscribe from this list | update subscription preferences