The pursuit of education is widely regarded as a positive and empowering journey, promising individuals the essential tools to enhance their intellectual capacities and make valuable contributions to society. However, beneath the facade of opportunity lies a darker reality – the issue of student exploitation. From the staggering burden of student debt to the unsettling commodification of knowledge, the education system perpetuates a distressing cycle of exploitation, benefitting the capitalist class at the expense of the proletariat. By understanding how the capitalist class utilises this great social injustice, the working class can strive for a more equitable and inclusive society that truly empowers all individuals to revel in the fruits of their labour, free from exploitation and oppression.
Envisioning a utopian model of education sheds light on the exploitative nature of the current economic system, where students are often overworked, underpaid, and regularly subjected to unpaid labour as a core component of their ‘learning’. It is appalling to continuously hear the Labor government providing lip service to the working class, only for this so-called “workers party” to gain power and maintain the status quo at the expense of the working class, for the benefit of the bosses. The vast majority of student placements in degrees like social work, education and health are in government agencies, whether public schools and hospitals or the Department of Communities & Justice. The Labor state government has a direct role in the rampant exploitation of students who are required to work unpaid for hundreds of hours each in the public sector, often with very little opportunity for real learning beyond what a regular employee would pick up when they begin a new job. There are often excuses made that public funding is just not available, but with a federal Labor government behind the various Labor states, these excuses are wearing thin. The money is there, the issue is not going away, and every sitting week of parliament that does not address this issue pushes students further into poverty.
The extent of these placement requirements in various degrees is staggering. Social work students must complete 1000 hours of vocational training, with no opportunity to apply for allowances in recognition of prior learning or qualifications. Nursing students are required to complete 800 hours, and most other health qualifications require a similar commitment either within the undergraduate qualification or as part of postgraduate accreditation. Undergraduate teaching students must complete at least 80 days in the classroom, which amounts to around 500 hours at minimum, with some institutions like the University of Sydney seeking to expand this requirement to include a 10-week practicum as the final year internship. Importantly, no one denies the importance of practical learning as part of vocational training or higher education – the chance to gain pre-service experience in schools and hospitals is crucial in building the skills required to work effectively in these sectors. What is opposed is the requirement to complete these placement hours without any form of financial support and without the recognition that what occurs during these hours is work, whether a student is learning from their experience or not. As a result of the current staff shortages in key industries, many students have reported that they are treated like volunteers or interns on their placements rather than students, often carrying out demanding, repetitive, or emotionally involved labour which should be conducted by paid staff. As the pressure on students mounts, universities need to realise that learning does not have to come at the expense of pay, workplace rights, and fair treatment.
The pressure on students is amplified by the steadily increasing cost of living in Australia. Many students find themselves grappling with the consequences of the commodification of human rights such as food, electricity, and housing. To truly belittle them further, students are faced with a 7.1% rise to our student debts, lumping many workers with debt increases this year, despite many having contributed thousands of dollars to their principal repayments. Unsurprisingly, this has forced many into insecure work rife with exploitation and wage theft. Students are forced to work additional hours without payment, constantly battling with their boss to recover stolen wages, tips and benefits. If they dare to stand up to their employer it is often at the threat of unemployment, poverty and homelessness. This is no accident, under the capitalist structure these students are systematically manipulated into exploitation as a feature of this system.
This cycle of exploitation occurs to keep working class students desperate, insecure, and willing to take on work which regularly pays below the federally mandated minimum wage. Naturally one will ask, who benefits from keeping the next generation of highly educated individuals so destitute? That answer is, of course, the bosses who attempt to engineer society in any way to suppress wages, cut costs and increase profits. Most jobs available to students offer minimal wages, limited benefits, and little job security. Employers may take advantage of the large pool of students seeking employment, knowing that many will accept any job regardless of its exploitative conditions. This leads to a cycle of student exploitation, where students are forced into precarious work merely to survive. The requirement for student placements to be unpaid is a natural consequence of this logic – of course employers (including the state) would jump at the chance to take on free labour! Unfortunately, many university course coordinators and heads of department have swallowed this logic without question, and some now vociferously defend the importance of keeping placements unpaid to preserve their role as ‘learning’ opportunities.
It is unsurprising to learn that this oppression disproportionately affects communities which have been brutalised and oppressed by the bosses and the state. How is a single mother expected to ever achieve higher education when the cost of education, which now also includes the huge burden of unpaid placement hours, is so immense? How are First Nations peoples able to acquire these qualifications when the state monopoly on violence is routinely used to strip them of their wealth, land and communities?
The systemic injustice that occurs through mandated unpaid work placements in the higher education sector is a prime example of bosses taking advantage of the desire for practical education opportunities to entrench a system of institutionally mandated free labour. Charging students thousands of dollars to provide their labour without remuneration is reprehensible. Many students are forced to cease their current employment to undertake these placements. Others are forced to discard their dreams of achieving a tertiary education or live in extreme poverty while completing their degree. This is a blatant form of wealth-based gatekeeping, ensuring only the wealthiest of students who can rely on the capital of their parents are able to effectively achieve higher qualifications. This illustrates the age-old cycle of capitalists ensuring that the working class are barred from education and “class mobility” by cloaking meaningful advancement behind a wall of status and wealth.
Even the working-class students who have survived this intense exploitation of their labour must ask themselves, at what cost? They have skipped meals, missed rent, years of their life undoubtedly lost from the impact of stress and their interest in life whittled away by the draining reality of poverty. Despite these enormous hurdles, resilient and relentless members of the working class choose to subject themselves to extensive exploitation at the hands of the ruling class solely to expand their knowledge and entertain the dream of class mobility and ascending to the fabled “middle class”.
Eighty years on from the creation of this mythical class status, we now know the middle class does not truly exist for workers. It is only those sometimes referred to as the ‘petite bourgeoisie’ born into wealth or willing to exploit the labours of others that are able to fabricate claims about the hard work required to accumulate their wealth. It is a depressing thought that every year thousands of students will experience irreversible damage to their physical and mental health, and accumulate lifelong debt in a desperate attempt to be freed of their exploitation. This begs the question, surely the Labor party is aware of this? The party of trade unionists and “socialists” must surely be acting with great haste to rectify this injustice!
Of course, the federal Labor government acknowledges the severity of student poverty, yet insists on dealing with this as a ‘long-term challenge’ through the University Accord. The Accord is populated by an amalgam of businesses and corporate university executives. Unsurprisingly, these groups do not have the interest of the working class at heart, they only desire to expand their ludicrous accumulation of capital by manipulating the university experience. The power to make change is given to the same group of people who profit from wage suppression, unpaid labour, and stolen wages. The same people who created a system where students will accrue thousands of dollars in debt to toil without remuneration, are expected to fix this issue.
This situation raises a broader issue about the influence of the capitalist class on the lives of the working class, including students. Allowing corporate interests to dictate solutions for student poverty could perpetuate a system that prioritises profit over the well-being of the most vulnerable members of society. While no doubt the Accord panel will work tirelessly to create innovative, market-driven solutions such as corporate subsidies, corporate tax breaks and perhaps even indentured servitude to satiate the beast of the free market, it is unlikely they will create a single solution that will meaningfully uplift impoverished students. If they do, it will only be because students and workers made these solutions unavoidable through mass protest and workplace struggle. Only students and workers collaborating in solidarity to find a meaningful solution to address this exploitation can succeed.
It is obvious that those who are impacted by an issue would naturally have the insight and knowledge available to resolve the problem. This is a core principle of anarchism and socialism more broadly – that workers themselves must drive the reform of the current system as they alone know what is required at the workplace and community level. It is impossible to imagine a world where workers decide to impose a $50,000 debt on themselves merely for their own ‘self-improvement’. Likewise, it is impossible to imagine workers electing to arbitrarily increase that debt during a cost-of-living crisis, as the Labor government did in July of this year.
It is only due to the immense capital we generate for the capitalist class that they enforce systemic exploitation and oppression upon us. This is a fact workers must always remember when the corporate executives elect to starve you, leave you without shelter, and refuse to help so they can expand their luxuries, hoard their wealth, and abstain from partaking in meaningful labour. Should we choose to withhold our labour, the capitalist will be left with nothing. The struggles we face today are not impossible to solve, they are not even difficult to solve. There is one solution, revolution.
In a revolutionary society run by the working class, for the working class, nothing will stand in our way of abolishing unpaid labour, exploitation, and burdensome student debt. Students would not find themselves going hungry as the commodification of food will be abolished, nor will they find themselves homeless, exhausted and exploited. We have been raised in a society where mass collective action and militant unionism is mostly a distant memory, confined to the annals of history books. While the task of seizing power from the capitalist class may seem unfathomable, it is of the utmost importance that we as workers remember: we already run society. The capitalists only exist as a parasitic class to exploit our labour. The only thing we need to do is reclaim our labour for our own ambitions.