Downsizing Knowledge Workers in Higher Education: Casualization, De-Professionalization, and Stratification

The analysis of the higher education labour system shows how upper-middle-class professionals have been able to take advantage of economic inequality to enhance their wealth and privilege. As knowledge workers themselves, the top 9.9% of the income earners rely on a stratified job economy where inequality is rationalized through a process that blames individuals for their own economic circumstances. This chapter argues that the current exploitation of many knowledge workers can be partially traced back to higher education and the casualization, de-professionalization, and stratification of academic labour. In examining why so many people with doctoral degrees now work in part-time, precarious jobs, the chapter reveals how an unintentional structure shaped by perverse incentives has functioned to drive down wages for highly educated knowledge workers. On the most basic level, universities over-produce people with PhDs so that they can create a buyer’s market for academic labour. While the chapter does not argue this is an intentional conspiracy, we suggest this artificial labour market serves the purpose of devaluing graduate education through an internal process of stratified exploitation. Thus, a system that represents itself as being progressive and egalitarian is actually highly exploitive and hierarchical.