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Why I'm on strike
Feb. 20th, 2020 10:07 amI'm participating in the UCU strike on pay, pensions and working conditions. I intend to tell you why. This will also expose some inaccuracies and generalisations in a recent Guardian article about inequality in Cambridge: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jan/12/beyond-cambridge-spires-most-unequal-city-tackles-poverty?CMP=share_btn_tw
The article has the usual difficulty in understanding the gap between colleges and the University, and also doesn't even mention that colleges are not all equally endowed. I strongly support the campaign to get the colleges to pay the Living Wage, and I hope that this can be prioritised when the colleges do their small annual redistribution exercise.
But the thing I really want to take issue with is this:
"Academics are protected from the worst financial pressures of living in Cambridge, benefiting from central, subsidised college accommodation, free meals and access to a cheap, university-backed shared equity mortgage scheme."
This is basically not true for most employees of the University. The biggest employment group in the University is Researcher. Then there are the admin staff, and academic-related staff, like me. We don't get college accommodation (neither do married fellows - I'm not sure which fellows are eligible for it these days; also, having a room in college for teaching is not the same as having subsidised accommodation). We're not eligible to be affiliated with a college for the most part. The equity-backed mortgage scheme is only open to new lecturers who have moved to Cambridge, so if you'd done a post-doc in Cambridge and then earned your lectureship, you're out of luck.
Living in Cambridge is expensive. Average house prices are north of £400,000. Average rents are high - you can realistically expect to spend from £500 to £1000 a month on rent. The lower end is only if you're prepared to live in a house share, or are lucky enough to qualify for one of the University-owned flats. This turns my salary (~£36,000) from a very nice salary in most parts of the country to one that's not really adequate if one wants to buy a house or have children. And good luck saving for a deposit with those rents. And if I'm priced out of the housing market by all the tech employees, what of the assistant staff who are paid much less well than I am? (I should know, I was first employed as assistant staff. It's miserable.)
Like many people, I've got a contract for as long as we can win the grant money. Fortunately, we're on quite a long grant at the moment, so I've got nearly 30 months before I need to worry about my job security. I'll point out that I'm 40. There are plenty of researchers in my building who are around my age and who are on the same kind of contracts as I am. The people with the secure jobs are all over 50. Hope you didn't want kids, or that you're prepared to disrupt their schooling as you throw yourself around the world (or the country) in search of your next job. If you don't want to do that, you have to leave academia. This is how tech siphons off ever more of the best and brightest - they may get to do original research, but it's in service to Google. We used to be able to offer good pensions, but the pension provision is being hollowed out, and our contributions are going up, That latter negates our pay rise for the year.
Pay rises. Yes. We've had 10 years of below inflation pay rises, resulting in about a 20% loss in real earnings. This year's pay rise was 1.8%, which is 0.1% above one of the measures of inflation (but below others). It's way below the increase in e.g. rail fares or housing costs. I'll note that this hits hardest on assistant staff who aren't covered by UCU - I think that's wrong, but pay rises won by those of us on higher salary points will translate into raises for the lowest paid, because of fairness (well, because some of us believe in fairness, and management are averse to the kind of bad publicity that will result).
My grant-funded full time position is actually one of the better outcomes. Lots of people are employed to teach at 0.25FTE. They have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They often don't get paid across the summer (no students). In Cambridge, most of those people are employed by the colleges. Some are PhD students and Postdocs getting experience and a little extra cash at the same time. Some are basically peripatetic teachers. In Cambridge, these people mostly aren't covered by the strikes, because they're employed by the colleges. Well, not employed as such. They're technically running their own small business, and the college is not their employer. Locally, we can work to get them taken on by departments as Affiliated Lecturers, so they can have more security, sick pay, and a pension. Nationally, we can work towards getting people longer-term and more substantial contracts. There are definitely lots of students available, and they'll definitely need teaching. We can't use an AI to teach them, so we should make sure that the people teaching them are able to do so to the best of their ability, not desperately stressed because they have to reapply for their current job in 6 months. Or desperately stressed because they have to put in extra hours to do the job properly, so they're actually averaging less than minimum wage.
This brings us to workload and conditions. A colleague of mine is seriously considering not applying for a lectureship, because all the lecturers they know are desperately overworked, and have very little time for research, especially at first. Even at the level of researchers, most people are seriously overworked, because there's not enough time to do good research, write the papers, do outreach or serve on committees or serve as conference organisers or do lots of peer review and so on - all of which are needed to try to apply for more secure jobs. And the example set by most of the people above you is that you do long hours, otherwise you can't get the job done. That's a terrible message for everyone, and this goes double for disabled people and people with caring responsibilities (still disproportionately women).
And there's the gender pay gap. Cambridge recently published its annual report. My grade is fairly evenly balanced. It's basically the bottom grade on the academic/academic-related track. Below me, there are more women than men; this is mostly admin grades. Above me, there are steadily fewer and fewer women. It's probably better not to ask about the pay differentials for BAME and disabled staff. It's probably grim reading, if only because the declared number of people in each category is exceedingly small and gets smaller as you go up the hierarchy.
So we're on strike, to try to get the Universities to commit to safeguarding our pensions, to help improve national pay scales, to get universities to commit to real action on pay inequalities, to move to more secure contracts, and to do something real about managing workloads. Platitudes are not enough. Pilates is not enough (though please don't cut it!)
It's not a case of our diamond shoes being too tight. I'm doing sort of OK, but I'm doing this for my colleagues who are effectively getting less than minimum wage. And I definitely support underpaid and overworked members of other industries to go out on strike. Please do pay your paramedics and your teachers more. Please do raise the minimum wage. The government can maybe support small businesses and the NHS to do this by e.g. taxing Amazon and Google and Facebook properly. There's a lot of money out there. Perhaps we can reroute it to people who are stuck in the gig economy.
Academia isn't the ideal ivory tower that most people imagine. It's full of a few people who have secure jobs and high salaries (though most of those at the professorial level are shockingly overworked), slightly more people who have secure jobs and good salaries, and a lot of people who have insecure jobs and OK salaries, and some others who have insecure jobs and poor salaries. If we want to keep academia as a place where people can learn things, and research things that can change how we look at things or how we do things, we need to improve pay, pensions and conditions.
The article has the usual difficulty in understanding the gap between colleges and the University, and also doesn't even mention that colleges are not all equally endowed. I strongly support the campaign to get the colleges to pay the Living Wage, and I hope that this can be prioritised when the colleges do their small annual redistribution exercise.
But the thing I really want to take issue with is this:
"Academics are protected from the worst financial pressures of living in Cambridge, benefiting from central, subsidised college accommodation, free meals and access to a cheap, university-backed shared equity mortgage scheme."
This is basically not true for most employees of the University. The biggest employment group in the University is Researcher. Then there are the admin staff, and academic-related staff, like me. We don't get college accommodation (neither do married fellows - I'm not sure which fellows are eligible for it these days; also, having a room in college for teaching is not the same as having subsidised accommodation). We're not eligible to be affiliated with a college for the most part. The equity-backed mortgage scheme is only open to new lecturers who have moved to Cambridge, so if you'd done a post-doc in Cambridge and then earned your lectureship, you're out of luck.
Living in Cambridge is expensive. Average house prices are north of £400,000. Average rents are high - you can realistically expect to spend from £500 to £1000 a month on rent. The lower end is only if you're prepared to live in a house share, or are lucky enough to qualify for one of the University-owned flats. This turns my salary (~£36,000) from a very nice salary in most parts of the country to one that's not really adequate if one wants to buy a house or have children. And good luck saving for a deposit with those rents. And if I'm priced out of the housing market by all the tech employees, what of the assistant staff who are paid much less well than I am? (I should know, I was first employed as assistant staff. It's miserable.)
Like many people, I've got a contract for as long as we can win the grant money. Fortunately, we're on quite a long grant at the moment, so I've got nearly 30 months before I need to worry about my job security. I'll point out that I'm 40. There are plenty of researchers in my building who are around my age and who are on the same kind of contracts as I am. The people with the secure jobs are all over 50. Hope you didn't want kids, or that you're prepared to disrupt their schooling as you throw yourself around the world (or the country) in search of your next job. If you don't want to do that, you have to leave academia. This is how tech siphons off ever more of the best and brightest - they may get to do original research, but it's in service to Google. We used to be able to offer good pensions, but the pension provision is being hollowed out, and our contributions are going up, That latter negates our pay rise for the year.
Pay rises. Yes. We've had 10 years of below inflation pay rises, resulting in about a 20% loss in real earnings. This year's pay rise was 1.8%, which is 0.1% above one of the measures of inflation (but below others). It's way below the increase in e.g. rail fares or housing costs. I'll note that this hits hardest on assistant staff who aren't covered by UCU - I think that's wrong, but pay rises won by those of us on higher salary points will translate into raises for the lowest paid, because of fairness (well, because some of us believe in fairness, and management are averse to the kind of bad publicity that will result).
My grant-funded full time position is actually one of the better outcomes. Lots of people are employed to teach at 0.25FTE. They have to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. They often don't get paid across the summer (no students). In Cambridge, most of those people are employed by the colleges. Some are PhD students and Postdocs getting experience and a little extra cash at the same time. Some are basically peripatetic teachers. In Cambridge, these people mostly aren't covered by the strikes, because they're employed by the colleges. Well, not employed as such. They're technically running their own small business, and the college is not their employer. Locally, we can work to get them taken on by departments as Affiliated Lecturers, so they can have more security, sick pay, and a pension. Nationally, we can work towards getting people longer-term and more substantial contracts. There are definitely lots of students available, and they'll definitely need teaching. We can't use an AI to teach them, so we should make sure that the people teaching them are able to do so to the best of their ability, not desperately stressed because they have to reapply for their current job in 6 months. Or desperately stressed because they have to put in extra hours to do the job properly, so they're actually averaging less than minimum wage.
This brings us to workload and conditions. A colleague of mine is seriously considering not applying for a lectureship, because all the lecturers they know are desperately overworked, and have very little time for research, especially at first. Even at the level of researchers, most people are seriously overworked, because there's not enough time to do good research, write the papers, do outreach or serve on committees or serve as conference organisers or do lots of peer review and so on - all of which are needed to try to apply for more secure jobs. And the example set by most of the people above you is that you do long hours, otherwise you can't get the job done. That's a terrible message for everyone, and this goes double for disabled people and people with caring responsibilities (still disproportionately women).
And there's the gender pay gap. Cambridge recently published its annual report. My grade is fairly evenly balanced. It's basically the bottom grade on the academic/academic-related track. Below me, there are more women than men; this is mostly admin grades. Above me, there are steadily fewer and fewer women. It's probably better not to ask about the pay differentials for BAME and disabled staff. It's probably grim reading, if only because the declared number of people in each category is exceedingly small and gets smaller as you go up the hierarchy.
So we're on strike, to try to get the Universities to commit to safeguarding our pensions, to help improve national pay scales, to get universities to commit to real action on pay inequalities, to move to more secure contracts, and to do something real about managing workloads. Platitudes are not enough. Pilates is not enough (though please don't cut it!)
It's not a case of our diamond shoes being too tight. I'm doing sort of OK, but I'm doing this for my colleagues who are effectively getting less than minimum wage. And I definitely support underpaid and overworked members of other industries to go out on strike. Please do pay your paramedics and your teachers more. Please do raise the minimum wage. The government can maybe support small businesses and the NHS to do this by e.g. taxing Amazon and Google and Facebook properly. There's a lot of money out there. Perhaps we can reroute it to people who are stuck in the gig economy.
Academia isn't the ideal ivory tower that most people imagine. It's full of a few people who have secure jobs and high salaries (though most of those at the professorial level are shockingly overworked), slightly more people who have secure jobs and good salaries, and a lot of people who have insecure jobs and OK salaries, and some others who have insecure jobs and poor salaries. If we want to keep academia as a place where people can learn things, and research things that can change how we look at things or how we do things, we need to improve pay, pensions and conditions.
