‘I Had to Take a Casual Contract and Work One Day a Week’: Students’ Experiences of Lengthy University Placements as Drivers of Precarity

Abstract

University students are increasingly required to undertake lengthy unpaid placements, and for many students this needs to be balanced with the paid work they already do. The literature about internships has focused on whether internships help students get jobs post-graduation, or if placements are exploitative, given pay is minimal or non-existent. This article contributes to this literature by examining how placements affect students’ current paid employment. Vosko’s framework, published in 2010, which identifies the precarious features of the employment relationship and interrogates the social context and location of this employment, is drawn on here. The article is based on a quantitative and qualitative survey of social work students at an Australian university, who need to complete a lengthy placement. The argument made here is that the requirements of lengthy placements restrict the conditions in which students can engage in the workforce and by doing so increase the precarity of their workforce participation.

Keywords

casual employment internships precarious employment precarity social work students student placements student workers tertiary education

Introduction

The vast majority of full-time tertiary students in Australia are in the workforce (Arkoudis et al., 2018). This can largely be explained by the limited financial support that is available to Australian students to enable them to meet their living costs while they are in tertiary education (Arkoudis et al., 2018). This article examines how lengthy unpaid undergraduate placements impact on students’ current working lives. It aims to understand whether these placements increase students’ precarity in the workforce. While the concept of precarious employment has been understood in various and often overly broad ways (Alberti et al., 2018), precarious conditions of employment include working non-standard hours, not having a regular number of hours of work each week or having no leave entitlements. State support for students is significant in determining the extent to which students’ engagement in precarious work causes students to experience precarity itself. A study comparing students in Italy, England and Sweden found that there are three aspects of a student’s ‘welfare mix’ – labour, family and state sources – and that there was a different ‘mix’ in each of the countries examined. For students without sufficient family resources, whether precarious employment led to precarity depended on the types of state support available to students (Antonucci, 2018). For Australian tertiary students without family resources they can rely on, this suggests that engagement in precarious work is likely to lead to precarity. Given this, it is important to understand the implications of lengthy placements on students’ working lives.

Concurrent with paid participation in the workforce, Australian students are increasingly participating in the workforce on an unpaid basis due to university requirements that they undertake work-based placements during their degree. Placement programmes such as these are also common in many other countries (Grant-Smith and McDonald, 2018; Hewitt et al., 2018; Jacobson and Shade, 2018; O’Higgins and Pinedo, 2018; Stewart et al., 2018). The term work-based placement is being used here to designate a programme of workplace experience for students, which is integrated within the broader curriculum of their course of study and supported by their education institution (Grant-Smith and McDonald, 2018). Work-based placements are a specific type of internship, a broader category used to refer to positions in which students participate in a period of unpaid work in an organisation to gain on-the-job experience (Grant-Smith and McDonald, 2018; Jacobson and Shade, 2018). The sociology of work literature has predominantly focused on two key issues concerning undergraduate placements or internships for students or recent graduates. The first is whether this work is exploitative given that students are either not paid or minimally paid (Hewitt et al., 2018; O’Connor and Bodicoat, 2017; Samaluk, 2021; Skujina and Loots, 2020; Stewart and Owens, 2013; Stewart et al., 2018). The second is whether internships improve students’ employment outcomes (Allen et al., 2013; Jacobson and Shade, 2018; McDonald, 2020; O’Connor and Bodicoat, 2017; Samaluk, 2021; Weiss et al., 2014). A small body of literature also questions the equity of these programmes. Not all recent graduates will have the financial resources to work for a period of time without pay (Allen et al., 2013; Leonard et al., 2016; McDonald, 2020; Shade and Jacobson, 2015) and there are other mechanisms that limit the access certain groups have to some of these programmes, such as age requirements (Samaluk, 2021). Several organisations with a stake in work and education, including the International Labour Organisation (ILO), have also undertaken research and devised policy regarding internships (International Labour Organisation, 2012; Stewart et al., 2018). In Australia this includes government agencies such as the Fair Work Ombudsman (Stewart and Owens, 2013) and the Commonwealth Department of Employment (Oliver et al., 2016).

This article takes a different focus and examines how unpaid undergraduate placements impact on students’ existing working lives. With the exception of international student workers (see Clibborn, 2021; Maury, 2020), research about student workers is limited (see Besen-Cassino, 2014; Nickson et al., 2017; Rikowski et al., 2000). Contributing to this literature, it is argued here that lengthy unpaid placements can compete with students’ paid work, sometimes displacing this work altogether, but more often changing the terms in which students participate in the workforce. In doing so students can be left more precarious in the workplace. The impact of this on students’ precarity itself depends on the alternative financial support students have available, and for many students this is minimal. According to a large survey of students at Australian universities commissioned by Universities Australia (2018), 32.2% of university students receive some kind of government living allowance through Centrelink (the government agency delivering social security payments and services). The main allowances that are relevant to students are Youth Allowance, Austudy and Abstudy. Youth Allowance is available to full-time students and apprentices aged between 18 (sometimes 16) and 25 years old, subject to personal and parental income and assets tests. Austudy is available to full-time students 25 years and over, subject to an individual’s income and assets (Gale and Parker, 2013; Services Australia, n.d.; Wyn and Woodman, 2006). Abstudy is a payment available to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students (Services Australia, n.d.). For students who received payments in 2017, the median value was AUD $9,900 (Arkoudis et al., 2018).

Social work placements in Australia

This article examines the experiences of Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) students who are undertaking lengthy placements as a necessary component of their degree at a university in Australia. To graduate from the BSW, students need to meet the requirements of the accrediting body, the Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW), which mandates the completion of 1,000 hours of placement. These hours need to be completed across at least two settings, within the normal hours of the practice, and each of these placements to be of at least 250 hours. Unless an exemption is granted the placements are to be full-time (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2020). The aim of these placements is to integrate classroom learning with professional practice. The AASW guidelines state that by doing placement students:

. . .refine their ways of thinking, doing and being. Field education socialises students into the profession through immersion in real practice contexts, while allowing a constructive and reciprocal learning space to develop. Students make sense of what it means to be a social worker by developing their professional identity, integrity and practice frameworks. (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2020: 9)

This is not dissimilar to the placement programme in the United Kingdom where students are required to complete 200 days, including 30 ‘skills days’ (Cromarty, 2018), but in some countries the hours required are fewer. In Canada, for example, 700 hours are required (Spolander et al., 2011). In Australia, unlike the United Kingdom and in the United States, a person does not need to have completed a social work degree or be registered with a professional body to refer to themself as a social worker, but in practice AASW accreditation is a requirement of most social work positions (Association of Social Work Boards, 2020; Cromarty, 2018; Parliament of Victoria, 2009).

The BSW has a particularly lengthy placement component, but other courses such as nursing and occupational therapy also have long placement programmes at the undergraduate level. Nursing students are required to complete 800 hours of placement across their undergraduate degree (Mason, 2013). Different to the social work model, in many professional qualifications most of the placement hours required of students are either part of a postgraduate qualification (such as psychology) or as work-based supervision after graduating (such as teaching). It is notable that many of the courses with long placement hours are health science courses heavily dominated by women, such as nursing or occupational therapy.

Constructions of gender and class are integral to the social work profession. Social workers are predominantly women, but tend to be paid less and have more restricted opportunities than men (Koeske and Krowinski, 2004; Mallinger et al., 2017). Historically the profession has been associated with a particular social construction of femininity (Orme, 2002; Walkowitz, 1999). Class, too, is a dominant aspect of the identity and the work of the profession. The earlier history of social work is of women with means undertaking volunteer or charity work (Walkowitz, 1999: 10). Today its close engagement with welfare means that it is intimately engaged with judgements relating to class. Walkowitz in making this argument suggests that the profession is ‘patrolling the boundaries of class’ (Walkowitz, 1999: 10). To determine who are their clients, he argues, social workers make judgements about who is ‘below’ them, but this also requires the profession to make a claim to those ‘above’ for the authority to make such judgements. Placements may be one barrier to the entry of female students from a working-class background to this female dominated profession, one that is engaged in judgements about class.

Precarious employment and precarisation

Precarious employment, as a concept, is used to identify a series of insecurities experienced by workers in their employment. These usually refer to employment practices that deviate from the Standard Employment Relation (SER) in ways that reduce a worker’s security of employment (Rubery et al., 2018). While aspects of precarious work practices can cross all forms of employment, it is particularly associated with types of employment such as temporary contracts, zero-hour contracts, part-time work and work outside of the formal labour market. It is often argued that precarious work is increasing (Adams and Deakin, 2014). Precarious work in Australia is most commonly associated with casual employment. Casual employment is employment without the usual rights of ongoing positions, particularly leave entitlements, and often involves variable hours of work (Campbell and Burgess, 2018). According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) approximately one-fifth of all Australian workers are employed under these work arrangements. Campbell and Burgess (2018) argue that casual work is strongly associated with insecurity of employment, earnings and working time, but these aspects of precarity can also be found within permanent employment as well. In Australia the casualisation of the workforce increased substantially in the 1990s, but this upward trend does not appear to have continued in the following decades (Laß and Wooden, 2020; Markey and McIvor, 2018).

How precarious work is conceptualised has significant political implications. In studying a selection of European countries, for example, Rubery et al. (2018) argue that there has been a ‘normalisation’ of precarious employment. This has included increasing some protections to workers in Non-Standard Forms of Employment (NSFE), such as a minimum wage, while reducing some of the protections accorded to workers in SER work. They argue that changes such as this have often been accepted by trade unions, amongst others, on the basis that they will both protect workers in NSFE, and protect the continued existence of SER (Rubery et al., 2018). Alberti et al. (2018) suggest that it is more useful to understand this not as a state of precarity but as a process of precarisation, with both managers in firms and states being key drivers of this process. Managers, they argue, explicitly drive precarisation through the contractual forms they use and drive precarisation implicitly by encouraging a sense of insecurity among workers. States too drive precarisation through the forms of and access to welfare and social protection (Alberti et al., 2018).

Vosko’s (2010) framework for analysing precarity is drawn on here because it both explicitly locates precarity within social contexts and identifies features of precarity rather than identifying it with a particular type of work. Vosko (2010) identifies precarious work as remunerated work with low income, uncertainty of employment, and limited social benefits and statutory entitlements. This means that it is not to be understood as limited to a particular type of work, such as temporary work. In this model precarious employment is shaped by interaction between three aspects of the employment relationship itself and two that relate to the broader social context in which this employment is located. The three key aspects of the employment relationship are:

. . .employment status (i.e. self- or paid employment), forms of employment (e.g. temporary or permanent, part-time or full-time), and dimensions of labour market insecurity. . . (Vosko, 2010: 2)

Labour market insecurity is identified in this as based on four key features. These are (1) the degree of certainty of continuing employment, (2) degree of regulatory effectiveness, (3) control over the labour process and (4) adequacy of the labour process. Outside the employment relationship are two broader social dimensions:

social context (e.g. occupation, industry, and geography) and social location (or the interaction between social relations, such as gender, and legal and political categories, such as citizenship). (Vosko, 2010: 2)

The precarity of student work: Students’ social context and social location

Before examining aspects of the employment relationship for this group of student workers, it is important to contextualise this in terms of the students’ social location, and the social context of their engagement in the workforce. Students enter the workforce from a particular social location, which brings with it different demands and requirements. Student workers are manoeuvring around the demands of work, study, and other requirements, such as – if eligible – meeting the conditions of government payments. This constrains the terms on which they engage in the workforce. It is, perhaps, the perspective still that tertiary students do not need an income and are engaging somewhat incidentally in the workforce to supplement other sources of income they have available to them. This is not an accurate representation of students’ participation in the workforce. A Universities Australia study found that in 2017 more than 83% of full-time domestic students worked, and of these 47% worked more than 15 hours a week (Arkoudis et al., 2018, see also Brough et al., 2015; McInnis and Hartley, 2002; Oliver, 2009). In the study, 58.2% of domestic undergraduate students agreed with the comment ‘My financial situation is often a source of worry for me’ while 14.6% agreed with the statement ‘I regularly go without food or other necessities; I can’t afford them’ (Arkoudis et al., 2018: 39).

Low paid work and highly casualised industries, mainly hospitality and retail, are usually the social context of student work. Based on data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), Gilfillan (2018) found that in 2016 the most casualised job category was hospitality worker with 79% of all employees employed casually, similarly 75% of food preparation assistants were employed on a casual basis. These sectors also have a high concentration of low paid workers, including workers employed on the National Minimum Wage (Yuen et al., 2018). According to Campbell and Chalmers, 46% of the part-time retail workforce is made up of 15–24 year olds who are full-time students (Campbell and Chalmers, 2008). A survey conducted in 2003–2004 of two universities in capital cities in Australia found that of the 1,200 undergraduate students that responded, the majority worked in retail or hospitality (Oliver, 2009, 2011). A previous study (McInnis and Hartley, 2002) also found students to be employed in corresponding job classifications. Of students classified as ‘traditional entry’ 61% were working in jobs classified as elementary clerks or in sales and service, while 29% of mature age students also worked within these job classifications. Most commonly this was as a sales assistant, followed by food and drink services (McInnis and Hartley, 2002). More recent research in 2018 with young people aged between 15–24 years, not specifically tertiary students, found that the top three positions in which young people worked were general sales assistants, check out operators and office cashiers, and waiters (Department of Jobs and Small Business, 2019).

Student workers undertaking placement are located within this broader social context, but it will be argued that the particular limitations placed on students through placement requirements affect both the social context of their work and, to follow Vosko’s (2010) framework, their employment relationship more directly. These students need to work in industries that afford them greater ‘flexibility’ to work around placements, to work during non-standard hours of employment, or to alter the hours they work. The flexibility gives them the opportunity to work, but may also afford them a more precarious employment relationship. This is most especially in terms of the dimensions of labour market insecurity, but also in terms of the form of employment and their employment status.

Methodology

Situating the study

This study was conducted at a metropolitan university, characterised by a student body that is from a lower socio-economic background than is the case at other Australian universities. The two first authors hold academic positions at this university. Staff from the social work programme had reported that students in the course appeared to be experiencing extreme financial hardship and mental distress while undertaking placements. This is part of a broader study that examines the welfare and financial implications for students of undertaking placements, and the wellbeing aspects have been reported elsewhere (Hodge et al., 2021).

A non-probability sampling strategy was adopted. The researchers sent an email to all third year (n=50) and fourth year (n=51) BSW students currently undertaking an unpaid work placement inviting them to participate in a study about their placement experiences. A message was also placed on the Learning Management System space for the field placement course on behalf of the researchers. Students were clearly advised that participation was voluntary, would not impact their studies, and that data would be anonymised. Students completed this as an anonymous online survey. The survey included several closed questions, but also several qualitative questions about: the extent and nature of financial stress associated with placements; course attendance and placement information; sources of income and employment arrangements; financial challenges and study choices; and the ways they negotiated placement and paid work. Sixty students opted to participate in the survey, representing a 60% response rate. All participants responded to both quantitative and qualitative components of the survey, though not always to every question. Most responded to almost all of the qualitative questions. The survey was open to the third-year cohort between July and August 2018 and to the fourth-year cohort between November and December 2018. For both groups, this was at the end or immediately after their placement. The third and fourth year placements are of the same length and for this reason it was decided not to analyse them separately. Ethics approval for this study was obtained by Victoria University’s Human Research Ethics Committee.

Data analysis

The qualitative data obtained from open-ended questions in the survey was analysed thematically. This approach was guided by Braun and Clarke’s (2006) six phases of Thematic Analysis (TA). Braun and Clarke identify the stages of analysis in this approach as: familiarising yourself with your data; generating initial codes; searching for themes; reviewing themes; defining and naming themes; and producing the report. They suggest this is flexible and interpretive, rather than based on a pre-existing theoretical framework. The researchers repeatedly read and coded the qualitative survey responses. The codes were then organised into possible themes, with all the relevant data collated from across the entire data set for each theme. To examine the relationship between placements and paid work, themes were organised under two overarching codes (1) the extent to which students relied on paid work and (2) the strategies students used to negotiate their placements and paid work.

Participants

Forty-eight of the 60 respondents identified as female, 11 as male and one as non-binary. In the BSW course itself, there is a large cohort of mature age students and slightly more than half of the 60 respondents (n=34) reported that they were 25 years of age or older. A significant number of participants had children (n=11),¹ of these all but one were women and all were over 25 years old.

Placement students are already workers

The vast majority (81.67%) of the social work students who participated in this study were already in paid employment. Most commonly (60.42%) students were working 10–20 hours per week. As the study was conducted at a university in which the student cohort comes from a socio-economic background lower than the average for Australian universities, this might be expected to increase the number of students needing to work. The high number of mature age students might also be expected to increase these hours. The number of participants in work, however, was only slightly higher than was the case in the Universities Australia study (Arkoudis et al., 2018). In the current study 77% of students spent more than 10 hours in paid work per week, which is in line with other Australian social work courses. In 2014 Johnstone et al. (2016) surveyed undergraduate and postgraduate social work students, as well as undergraduate human services students, at eight universities in Queensland, Australia and found that 83% of respondents were working. More than 80% of participants in this study were undergraduate social work students (Johnstone et al., 2016).

Most (79%) students in this study said they needed to work during their placement, many stating that they had to work to meet the necessities of life. This is comparable to a study of Australian social work students from universities across Australia, which found the majority of students experienced financial stress during placement (Gair and Baglow, 2018). Many participants said their financial situation worried them. A number pointed out that they were doing this work in order to be able to study. As one said, ‘Work is important because without it I can’t study’. Some students were supporting others financially. One participant said: ‘work is important as I am the only earner. I have to also pay rent and other utility bills’. There is a distinction between precarious work and an individual worker’s experience of precarity, given that an individual worker’s precarity also depends on the sources of financial support available to them (Antonucci, 2018; Campbell and Price, 2016). The financial necessity of work for many students suggests though that this insecure work is experienced as precarity for many. A couple of respondents also put this in terms of their long-term financial needs, with one saying: ‘Because we live in a time of immense pressure especially financial pressure. Most young people and people my age know that they have no hope of ever owning a house’.

For some students, placements displace paid work entirely

Placements displaced paid employment entirely for a small number of students. Some stopped working before starting placement, others decided during placement that they were unable to combine the two. One participant stated: ‘I had to give up paid work because [it’s] not possible to do both at the same time.’

Various reasons were given for this. One parent explained that childcare responsibilities contributed:

My children have to attend afterschool care and school holiday programmes, which is every day during placement. Travelling cost, parking cost to and from university and placement. The fact that placement has to be fulltime or three days minimum, meant that I had to quit my part time job in order to complete my yearlong (total) placement.

The decision to stop working was not always a decision students made themselves. One said: ‘I got fired because I couldn’t provide enough hours during their opening hours.’

Even with a workplace willing to support the student’s work around coursework hours, it was not always possible to work around a placement. One student said that they had a ‘fantastic’ workplace that made it possible to work around a different course timetable each semester, but this was not possible during placement. Of the students that did not work, two of the younger (both in the 18–24 year range) students were able to get some support from family, one (35–44 year range) said she ‘lived simply’ and the other five (across all age ranges between 18–54 years old) reported that they relied, in part, on Centrelink payments.

Most placement students were still in the workforce, their forms of engagement changed

It was more common, however, for students to remain in paid employment but – drawing here on Vosko’s (2010) framework – to change aspects of their employment relationship. For two students this was through a change to their employment status. Both reported that they undertook work in a self-employed capacity because they could manage this alongside the demands of their placement. One of these students said they were ‘doing odd jobs for neighbours and on Facebook’ while the other was doing work for family and friends: ‘I worked for family and friends so that the work could be taken up in free time. . .it was limited hours.’

Only one student in the study reported that they needed to change their form of employment: ‘I had to take a casual contract and work one day a week’. While most participants did not experience a change in their employment status or form of employment, it was very common for students to indicate changes to their employment, which suggested that their labour market insecurity had increased. This is examined below.

Working at limited times of the week

Given that placements take place in normal business hours, when asked how they undertook paid work, many participants indicated that they were forced to alter their work schedules to work on the weekends or after hours. Students said, for example:

With great difficulty! I changed my availabilities to just the weekends, but I only get on average, two shifts a month.

During a normal semester I normally work 4-5 shifts (5-8-hour days) per week. However, during placement I was only able to work 1-2 shifts on weekends.

. . .where I have been on placement. . .working fulltime. . .and being at uni one day a week doing a unit has been really difficult. . .it has pretty much meant that my work hours have gone from doing 10-20 hours a week to 1-5 hours during the week. . .meaning that in order to financially be able to afford to support myself I have had to work additionally on the weekend effectively having a 7 day week. . .which obviously impacts on the other areas of my life.

It was pure luck that I already worked Saturdays as part of my rostered shifts. However, I was unable to take on any new shifts, had to give up my weekday shifts and as a result suffer financially due to placement being 9 am-5 pm, 4/5 days a week and my place of employment only being open 8:30am-8 pm.

Many studies – although not all – have suggested that there are negative health implications from working non-standard hours, as this work is, and that there is a significant impact on the work-life balance of these workers (Dixon et al., 2014; Lee et al., 2015; Venn et al., 2016; Winkler et al., 2018). Most of these students were also working with little certainty over their weekly hours or the longer term predictability of their schedule. This type of work, Sargent et al. (2021) argue, is detrimental to workers’ health outcomes because it limits their ability to develop routines, ‘rhythms and rituals’, around this work. For many students their ‘work-life balance’ was impacted in important ways such as forgoing the social connections of catching up with friends or playing sport. This included some students who were also balancing caring responsibilities. It was not just students with children that had caring responsibilities, but this is a very important group, and of the 11 parents four worked during their placement² (five did not and two did not respond to this question). Of these, two reported that they were able to negotiate or able to work standard hours because of their placement arrangements, but two of them were working on the weekend. One said: ‘I worked on weekends to pay my bills and feed my kids and I did my placements on weekdays.’

The other worked a limited number of hours: ‘I could only work on a Saturday every 3 weeks and then I had to wait until university finished before I could work one day a week’.

This parent said, in response to a different question: ‘I feel like I need to be a super Mum and super woman who can do everything but I don’t want to be this person.’

Working in a limited number of sectors

Because most students needed to be able to alter the hours in which they worked, this limited the sectors in which they could work while on placement. Working outside of highly casualised sectors was difficult. Many students referred to working shifts and needing to change these shifts. The benefit of working in hospitality, one of the most casualised of all industries, was mentioned by one student: ‘I have worked in hospitality which gives me flexible hours to work as I can work in the evenings and on weekends’.

Another student said that she had difficulty getting work, because she was a mature age student and this sector preferred younger workers. As suggested earlier in this article, many students work in this sector already. This is a sector that is already highly casualised (Gilfillan, 2018) and has a high concentration of workers on the National Minimum Wage (Yuen et al., 2018).

Uncertainty of on-going employment

After their placements were over, some students were able to resume their previous working arrangements, and it seemed to have had minimal implications for their on-going work situation. A couple of students said their workplace was understanding and accommodating of the changes they needed to make during placement. One pointed to the flexibility their workplace afforded them: ‘My work was flexible and were happy to have me only work one day per week, on the weekend.’

The other pointed to the impact of this on their workplace, specifically on their boss:

I am extremely lucky I have an understanding boss who allowed me to work reduced hours. I would leave placement and drive straight to work for an evening shift, while my boss had been working extra hours to cover me during this period.

For other students, however, their ongoing work situation became more insecure, or they felt that it would become more insecure. A couple of participants explained how their placement had a detrimental effect on the relationship they had with their employer. One said:

I would attend classes on the Monday, placement attendance from Tuesday-Friday and work long hours on Saturday and Sunday. My head manager was understanding about my situation, but I don’t think they were entirely happy with reducing my shifts (I am considered senior staff and am in a more ‘valuable’ position than the juniors). I had several discussions with them about pushing to finish placement earlier as we were heading into the peak retail season.

The other participant explained this insecurity of on-going employment in terms of the perception of their commitment to the workplace: ‘. . .I wasn’t able to give as much commitment to my paid work which has definitely impacted the relationship there.’

Some students reported that they had reduced their hours at work during placement and one student, responding to a question that asked what they had to give up due to placement, said: ‘Work hours. I was on a contract for 25 hours a week, and I had to drop down to 8-11 hours a week, and after placement I won’t be getting those hours back.’

Discussion and conclusion

The literature examining student placements and internships focuses on the important questions of whether they lead to better employment outcomes after students have completed their course of study, and whether placements and internships are exploitative because they pay minimally, if at all. This article is concerned instead with how placements shape students’ experiences of work while they are studying. The results of this study show that lengthy placements have a significant impact on the way students participate in the paid workforce while they are studying, and for many students this leads them to occupy a more precarious position in the workforce. The overwhelming number of students who participated in this study were in the paid workforce before they began their placement. A small number of these students were unable to combine work and study during their placement and stopped working altogether while they completed their placement. It was far more common, however, for students to continue to work, but to modify the ways in which they engaged with the workforce. The participants’ responses suggest that for many of the students who did continue to work, their participation in the workforce became more precarious. This study examines the experience of students who are undertaking the Bachelor of Social Work degree, but it could be expected that these findings are applicable to other courses that have lengthy placements.

Vosko (2010) understands precarious work to be shaped by the intersection between employment status, forms of employment, labour market insecurity, and the worker’s social context and social location. Not many of the participants in this study changed their employment status or their form of employment. Many students did, however, report changes that are likely to have increased their labour market insecurities. Most students reduced their hours of work, limiting their already low income. For many students the hours of the week or the times of the day in which they could work became more constrained. Placements are usually during standard working hours and so students were usually undertaking their paid work in non-standard hours of work. These requirements combined to give students fewer alternatives in the workplace, fewer options in terms of the workplaces or industries they could work in. While some students were lucky to have supportive employers, for others it increased their insecurity about on-going employment or their reduced availability created tensions at work, or they lost shifts that they did not think they would get back after their placement ended.

The experience of working and studying is not the same for all students, but student workers do comprise a distinct group of workers. As a group, the student’s social location is shaped by limited state provision for the living expenses of students while they are studying. The state payments available to students differ between countries (Antonucci, 2018). The minimal state payments available in Australia suggest that there is an expectation that tertiary students are dependants who can be funded by their families. Professional bodies like the AASW also demonstrate such an expectation when in most situations full-time placements are required. Numerous Australian studies have demonstrated that this is not the case, and that many students across Australia are reliant on paid work (Arkoudis et al., 2018). Because of the limited financial support available to them, many students need to work around the restrictions on their availability that their study commitments create. Placements are a particularly onerous restriction on students’ engagement in the workforce. The expectation that students can afford to study full-time without working, and thus complete full-time placements, is difficult to sustain in Australia, where minimal financial support is provided by the government to meet students’ living costs. The implication of such an expectation is to minimise the accessibility of the professions to working-class students and students with more restrictions on their time, such as those with caring responsibilities. It could be expected that placements are most especially an economic barrier to the participation in tertiary education of students with limited financial means or with greater pressures on their time. This situation may exist because of their family background, or because both their time and resources are limited because they are supporting their family or others. At a university such as the one in which this study was undertaken, where there is a higher than usual working-class cohort, this is perhaps most apparent. In a course too, where there are more mature age students than is the case in other degrees and where the student cohort is comprised overwhelmingly of women, this might be even more apparent, given that female mature age students are more likely to have caring responsibilities than other cohorts of students.

The student workers’ social location is an important reason why students engage in precarious employment, and this contributes to the availability of a precarious workforce. Students need employment that allows them to manoeuvre around the particular restrictions – in this case placements – their study imposes. It is the conditions that make this work precarious that allow students to continue working, and with this, reduce their experience of precarity itself. Many industries are highly reliant on having access to workers, such as students, who are willing to work under such employment conditions. Casual employment, as noted above, is very high in Australia and student workers are concentrated in some of these sectors of employment, most notably hospitality. Rubery et al. (2016) argue that while there is truth in the argument that flexible work can benefit some employees with other responsibilities who need to work, this needs to be differentiated from an analysis of the ways these conditions benefit employers. They point to the costs this has for both the state and the family because it limits the responsibilities of employers. This is certainly the case for student workers and there is a need to be vigilant as this already vulnerable group of workers, student workers, may be increasingly pushed further into precarious conditions at work.

Footnotes

Funding

The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by a grant from the Feminist Research Network, Victoria University.

ORCID iDs

Nicole Oke

Lisa Hodge

Heather McIntyre

Shelley Turner

Notes

Nicole Oke is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

Lisa Hodge is Senior Lecturer in the College of Health and Human Sciences at Charles Darwin University, Darwin, Australia and an Adjunct Fellow at Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia.

Heather McIntyre is a research assistant with the Mental Health and Suicide Prevention Research and Education Group, University of South Australia.

Shelley Turner is Adjunct Senior Lecturer in the Department of Social Work at Monash University, Melbourne and the Chief Social Worker at Forensicare (The Victorian Institute of Forensic Mental Health).

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