1 Special Edition: Working in Australian Academia Al Rainnie, Caleb Goods, Sue Bahn, John Burgess Introduction In the 15 years between 1996 and 2011, Full Time Equivalent (FTE) casually employed academics grew by 81 per cent….By 2011, casual academics represented 25 per cent of teaching and research and teaching only academics…Casual academics are estimated to carry 50 per cent of the teaching load, including up to 80 per cent of first year teaching load…When it is considered that one FTE casual ranges from one to 16 persons, it is not surprising that there are now twice as many casually employed academics in Australia as there are academics in continuing employment, including fixed term employment (Ryan et al 2013: 1) The Australian academic profession has lost its attractiveness due to declines in status, control, prestige and salary (Bentley et al 2013: 30) In February 2013 the annual conference of the Association of Industrial Relations Academics of Australia and New Zealand (AIRAANZ) was held in Fremantle, Western Australia, and organised by Curtin University Business School and the University of Western Australia Business School. The conference brought together nearly 120 academics from Australia and New Zealand, as well as visitors from France, the UK, Canada, Singapore, the US, and Switzerland. Keynote speakers were Pun Ngai, from Hong Kong University, talking about ‘Apple, Foxcomm and workers struggles’, and Michael Burawoy from the University of California, discussing ‘Social movements in an era of neo- liberalism’. Streams/sessions at the conference ranged from ‘Green Jobs’, though ‘Precarity’ to ‘Industrial Relations Theory’. Subjects familiar to AIRAANZ around unions and collective bargaining figured strongly, as did less familiar areas such as ‘Creative workers and cultural industries, and ‘Work and migration’. Special panel sessions discussed ‘Labour in the Asian century’, ‘Gender and recession’, and ‘Work and career in Australian universities’. It is to the last of these panels that we have turned for the focus of this special edition of Labour and Industry, drawing entirely on contributions to AIRAANZ 2013. The theme of AIRAANZ 2013 was ‘Work, employment and employment relations in an uneven patchwork world’. The conference was held in Western Australia, a region in the grip of a skill/labour shortage in the resources sector but declining employment in manufacturing. The much discussed ‘resources curse’ with its associated high dollar was also causing problems for work and workers in sectors such as Higher Education and care work. The contrast between sectors, between the East and West Coast and more dramatically within China, Europe and the US remains stark. In this complex, uneven world, workers, their communities, employers and governments face an unpredictable and often dramatic and threatening future. This refrain echoed around the conference. And yet, when examining academia in this turbulent world, Bentley et al (2013: 1) conclude that: Given its importance, surprisingly little at an aggregate level is known about people who teach and carry out research in universities, about the characteristics of the academic profession or about what is required to ensure its sustainability and future development.