#fairpayinhe

[ucl-ucu-blog]

Why are lecturers on strike this week? An open letter to UCL students.

Dear UCL Students 

The University College Union (UCU) has called a national strike for 25-26 May, Wednesday and Thursday this week. Many academics at UCL will be cancelling all teaching, administration and office hours on both days. This is a way to put pressure on universities to meet our demands. 

Why is the strike happening?

Ultimately the strike is about the future of higher education across the country. In particular, lecturers are making three key demands. 

1. a pay raise of 5%, to begin to make up for the erosion of our pay by inflation. Academics’ pay has fallen by 14.5% in real terms since 2009. Imagine what you’d do with a 14.5% cut in your loan or your summer job wage. Imagine what friends or family who are working would say to a 14.5% cut. We’re not asking for a real terms raise, just one that keeps pace with the rising cost of living. The universities have offered us just 1.1%!

2. end the shocking gender pay gap in the profession. Women working as academics earn much less than their male counterparts. At UCL the gap is 15%! More details here. 

3. greatly reduce the proportion of staff on insecure contracts like fixed-term posts and zero hours contracts. 75,000 members of university staff nationally are on these sorts of contracts. It’s very difficult to plan and to live a stable life and perhaps start a family when you have no job security!  

Doesn’t a strike just hurt the students?

It is not the intention of your lecturers for their industrial action to impact adversely on their students, and we do all we can to ensure this doesn’t happen. Just like the junior doctors, sometimes it is necessary to withdraw our labour temporarily to demonstrate to our employers what an important job we do all day every day. The aim of the strike is to ensure better quality education for all involved, in a university that actually puts gender equality into practice, so that students can be well taught by lecturers who are given adequate time to prepare for classes and receive a fair wage in return.  

Lecturers’ working conditions are students’ learning conditions! 

It's austerity, everyone's taking a pay cut

Except they aren't. The UCL student magazine The Cheese Grater very correctly reported last month that there are 444 staff at UCL earning over £100,000. While a small number of these may be big shot professors in certain areas like medical or scientific research, the vast majority are not academics. The average salary of university Vice-Chancellors is now more than a quarter of a million pounds. There is plenty of money on universities’ balance sheets, including UCL’s. They’re just not spending it on academic and support staff!

Where are my fees going?

According to UCL's own accounts for 2015, only slightly more than half (55%) of UCL's expenditure goes to pay for the staff who teach, research, administer your course, run our libraries and keep the computers working. For every £9,000 paid by a student in fees, an astonishing £4,000 is spent on 'non-staff' expenditure: buildings, business consultants and bonuses. 

What students can do

You can sign this petition, organised by a group of students nationally https://www.change.org/p/petition-support-fair-pay-for-our-university-staff

On Wednesday and Thursday the UCU will be asking everybody not to cross the picket line. A picket line is a symbolic barrier. When a picket line is in place your lecturers (who are on strike) ask you not to make use of university buildings or services. Whether or not to cross a picket line is entirely your decision. We ask you to make sure, however, that it is an informed decision. 

On strikes in previous years, many students came themselves to the picket line as supporters, to show their solidarity with the staff and discuss our mutual goal of securing quality and freely accessible education for all, provided by well paid and valued staff.

[precariousfaculty]

+ @UCU #casuals #University #strike over #FairPayinHE to hit exam season by @jgro_the  @timeshighered

Student exams are likely to be disrupted after the University and College Union announced that its members will stage a two-day walkout over pay later this month.

Lecturers and other higher education staff will hold a two-day strike on 25 and 26 May in protest at the offer of a 1.1 per cent pay increase for 2016-17, the UCU announced on 9 May.

Further strike days may also be held in June and July if employers do not improve their current pay offer, said the union, which is also asking staff not to undertake overtime or voluntary duties under a “work to contract” action starting on 25 May.

See also:

https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/8210/UCU-confirms-two-day-strike-at-UK-universities-over-pay

http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8121/FE-wall-of-support-poster/pdf/FE_claim_support_poster_2.pdf

https://twitter.com/hashtag/fairpayinHE

[iambenign-blog]

Profits, pay days and protest: 7 Reasons University Pay Gaps Need to Be Tackled

In the first few weeks of 2015, most university bosses will have earned the annual wage of their lowest-paid member of staff. Students across the country have been holding ‘pay day’ stunts to mark the date when their vice-chancellor (VC) passes this threshold, drawing attention to the dismal pay inequalities across higher education. Here Josh […]

[sorana-officer-blog]

University management needs to stop seeing their (postgrad) staff as a cost. We're an asset.

[sorana-officer-blog]

We need to talk about casualised staff

Written with Dr Jamie Melrose

The UCU dispute, specifically the possible marking boycott, was front page news. Why should staff, however righteous their cause, adversely affect the progress of students by not marking their essays and exams? Students are rightly concerned about the potential impact of the marking boycott on their studies and future prospects. As is often said, no one wants a strike: they are a stressful business. The case for the marking boycott, therefore, must rest on a positive case: the quality of education. If staff continue to have their work devalued by an ever shrinking pay packet, if their concerns about improving students’ education through greater investment are ignored by a high-handed managerial class, is students’ education being valued? Similarly, is your education being devalued by the increasing casualisation of staff?

Lecturers and teachers are not just professors with decent (ish!) salaries. They are also hourly-paid postgraduate students, early career researchers and academics on fixed-term contracts. They are individuals doing the ‘bread and butter’ work an academic institution entails: teaching seminars, tutorials, attending labs, marking essays and exams and delivering lectures. Yet these workers don’t have permanent contracts, don’t have any job security.  Universities try to cut costs and fix the problems created by a broken funding system by doing education on the cheap, exploiting aspiring and junior academics.

Doctoral students face a Catch-22 situation: needing teaching experience when looking for academic jobs and the money (postgraduate funding is extremely scarce), it is extremely difficult to turn down rotten contracts, lacking job descriptions and expectations. Some contracts don’t even cover office hours to offer support to our students. ‘Working to contract’ thus becomes a convenient fiction. Caring about their students’ education, casualised teachers work hard to ensure students receive proper feedback and answer every query. They effectively end up doing a lot of free work for the university which in return sees them as cheap and disposable. You fulfill your job and do it well? There’s no guarantee you come back next academic year! Want to contribute to the teaching and learning strategy in your school, feedback your students’ experiences? Sorry, staff meetings are for full-time staff only! Many permanent staff unfortunately do not realise being casualised is not a rites of passage to get into a competitive profession, it is a fact of precarious life being entrenched by the modern university.

Facing job insecurity every year, wages barely covering our rent, bills and food, 56 hour weeks, just to be able to teach what we are passionate about, with no time for research and developing our publication list which might ultimately gain us a permanent position: recent doctors have dire stories to tell.

The UCU pay dispute was not about the greediness of well-paid academics. It’s about staff who have received a real-terms pay cut over the last 5 years, and it is about solidarity with all teachers, lecturers and university staff who want to stop the race to the bottom with regard to conditions and pay. But is also about casualised staff, many of whom support the strike because they are aware that the current university is not working.

[classwarkitteh]

RIGHT NOW historic strikes are sweeping across the UK higher ed system. Check it out on twitter, follow #fairpayinHE - rt and repost pictures to your facebook! RAISE YUR PAWS! Don't have twitter? follow it here:http://www.ucu.org.uk/fairpayinhelive

Original pics: Pumpkin. Cat.

[the-pamphleteer]

The Pay Strike And Its Discontents

The ballots are out, the wheels are in motion. Union members have until Thursday 10 October to vote on strike action over the latest derisory pay offer of 1% (if you haven’t received a ballot, go here). The justness of the cause seems clear enough. Since 2009, every pay award has been several percentage points below inflation, leading to a consistent real terms drop in pay. And some of those paltry increases were only attained after negotiations. Yet, despite the protests from above (and excepting a brief dip in student numbers), British higher education is in fine financial health. The overall wage bill is decreasing at the same time that surpluses are growing. And for “growing” read “more than doubling”, from £488 million in 2007/8 to £1.1 billion in 2011/2012. Managers are reaping their rewards accordingly, and a significant portion of Vice-Chancellors are seeing their pay go up by 10-20%. At Sussex, for example, Michael Farthing is now paid £280,000 (including pensions contributions), as compared to £178,000 in 2007 (that’ll be a 57% increase then).

And yet there is a foreboding. Fear is a factor, nondescript anxiety another. Perhaps an awkward sense that any level of action is somehow at odds with the academic code.

Articulated objections come in two stripes. First, the we-haven’t-got-it-so-bad defence. Beyond the usual ‘all in it together’ austerity ideology, there are pay increments (which most permanent academic staff get automatically). Real wages aren’t declining so hard if you move up a pay step each year. This is on its own a pretty restricted ambition, since it amounts to a kind of career “progression” that leaves you standing still. It is also, for all the talk of solidarity with lower-paid workers, a selfish analysis.

In the last 5 years, the pay for new lecturers and tutors has dropped 13% in real terms. Following the USS pension saga, they (we) have each had tens of thousands of pounds taken from them over the course of their careers, while staff that retained their old rights are paying more every month into a scheme that was, let us recall, nowhere near crisis. There are fewer scholarships and research grants than before, and an increase in teaching-heavy posts. Consumer-driven logics are set to make that worse. On the horizon, just over there, is a US-style expansion based on precarity, a prestige elite, and debt bubbles. Some at the top are already breaking from the national pay spine, inaugurating a two-tier system. Consider this trend alongside the state of university finances. What is it to look at this and say things aren’t so bad? I put it to you that such a position is detached, complacent, and irresponsible.

Second, there is the strikes-change-nothing complaint. This has better justification. Local actions over the last years have not reversed policies. Pensions were stripped down anyway. And there is something peculiar, isn’t there, about the idea of day-long walkouts and picket lines in a sector so based on relatively scattered student-teacher interactions. There is no machinery to fall silent, no buzzing shop floors to stand empty. Just a day of saved wages for management and probably a whole stack of reorganised lectures, academics not really being the types to withhold knowledge (or, rather, unwilling to see knowledge as labour). There is a sense that the old tactics are dead, and should be left in their graves.

On the one hand, this is an argument for more radical action. If employers can handle strike days, we need more. Or, alternatively, forms of action that do not fetishise the picket line. Something that will make VCs pay attention, like a marking boycott or withholding final grades. In a customer-orientated culture this is the pressure point, especially if action begins to alter the results of the National Student Survey, that Big Other of the academic scene (what do students really want?). The complaint goes up that the national union lacks the imagination to instigate these actions, and that we should therefore turn to more vibrant kinds of opposition. But new forms of resistance nevertheless confront established modes of punishment. When full pay is withheld day on day, when even partial performance leads to the forfeit of full wages, how quickly will we really buckle? We know something has to break the pattern, but we’re not sure we’re capable of it, or that the sacrifice is worth it. In other words, we find ourselves a little too close to text-book academic bitching: something more fundamental needs doing, but we’re not likely to be the ones to do it.

On the other hand, the fear and the paralysis can be found closer to home. Complaints about the union form do not produce their alternative ex nihilo. There are possible replacements, but no actually-existing ones. Nor does the appetite for creating one seem to exist. And for good reason. The paradoxical character of academic subjectivity is both to consider ourselves in a position of real epistemic and social privilege and to be so despondent about our influence on things as to merely absorb the changes thrust upon us (working conditions, impact agendas, research restrictions). The legal protections of strike action have no parallel, truncated as they are. Creative alternatives have raised energy, and served as political classrooms in their own right, but they haven’t actually stymied ‘reforms’ (whether on fees, outsourcing or investment portfolios). And, strange as it may sound, universities are probably happier taking draconian action against their workers than their students. A faculty occupation, if we could even imagine such a thing, would not end well.

None of that is to say that we (there’s that intangible collective again) should walk zombie-like to the picket. Fersure, let the rejuvenation of academic democracy proceed apace. In the meantime, we have to ask ourselves seriously what the consequence is of another pliant year. There are murmurings that a failure to win this ballot will endanger collective bargaining itself. If we cannot muster the resolve to deliver a strong yes on action short of a strike, and a strong yes on strike – if we cannot even deliver a serious turnout – that’s probably as much as we deserve.