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Inadequate government funding for universities, reduced autonomy, infrastructural decline, falling academic standards, and the politicisation and privatisation of education have led to increasing precarity in academic employment in South Africa, as they have elsewhere in the world (Shrivastava and Shrivastava, 2014). A recent survey conducted at a leading South African university found increasing casualisation and precarity in academic employment (ASAWU, 2016). Precarisation in this context typically takes the form of poor pay, short-term contract renewals, requests to perform duties outside of work specifications, and wide discrepancies in rates and duration of contracts. These practices often reflect gender disparities, with women particularly vulnerable to casualisation. Individuals typically report a negative impact on morale and working relationships with others on account of their temporary status (ASAWU, 2016). Importantly, certain structural conditions seem to be driving trends toward precarity in academic work. Key to these trends is the recent systematic underfunding of the country’s university sector (Bozzoli, 2016; Universities South Africa, 2016). Given the more recent political disempowerment of the country’s traditionally strong labour federations (Lindeque, 2017), concerns exist that university management cost-cutting imperatives and the rising precarisation in the country’s universities are increasingly overshadowed by political issues and an increasingly aggressive populist political agenda. This Global Issues piece seeks to highlight the vulnerability of academic workers to certain contextual changes. On the basis of recent developments, it is argued that these workers currently face a “perfect storm” of contextual forces that threaten the labour gains and the political power of labour federations in the country. Heightened budgetary constraints arguably create conditions akin to forced privatisation, as university managements resort to commercialist and managerialist logics to drive massification and performance in a context of dwindling resources, at increasing human cost.

The Coming of a Perfect Storm? "Forced Privatisation" and Precarious Labour in South African Academia