What’s worse than being a casual worker in academia? Being an outsourced casual worker in academia.

In June 2019, the University and College Union (UCU) released a report, Counting the costs of casualisation in higher education. It details the increasing precarity of work in the HE sector, and vividly lays bare the prevalent use of “atypical” employment/engagement practices by UK universities. Of note is the report’s observation of the widespread use of casual worker arrangements and the role of doctoral research students within this landscape:

“Many [atypical academics] are PhD students, teaching during their studies, dependent on their teaching earnings to fund their studies. Many are also contracted as ‘casual workers’, a form of zero hours contract that means that they are paid by the assignment, like temps, and have fewer employment rights. Prominent universities that use casual worker status include UCL, Warwick, Birmingham, and Nottingham among others.” In this guest post, Robert Stenson outlines his experience as a ‘casual worker’ at Nottingham University.

UCU’s ‘Syriza moment’: Putting university managements on notice!

Despite strong support from the Greek people, in July 2015 the Greek government by Alexis Tsipras gave in and accepted major further austerity measures in exchange for a third bailout agreement with the Troika, consisting of the European Commission, the European Central Bank and the IMF (The Guardian, 13 July 2015). Against the background of a bitter dispute over cuts employers in British Higher Education (HE) want to impose on the USS pension scheme in pre-1992 universities (see Britain: Universities on Strike), here too, UCU negotiators felt they had no other option but to accept an agreement, which involved major cuts (see UCU ‘agreement’, 12 March 2018). Nevertheless, pushed by its members, UCU ultimately did not buckle and rejected the ‘agreement’. In this blog post, I will analyse the underlying reasons for this different outcome.

Asserting power: The political economy of USS pension fund valuations.

The University and College Union (UCU) and the employers’ organisation of pre-1992 Higher Education institutions UUK are currently involved in an industrial conflict over plans by the employers to impose draconian cuts to the USS pension scheme. At the heart of the conflict is the valuation of the fund in 2017 by USS, apparently revealing a large deficit of about £6 billion, which needs to be addressed. In this post, I do not want to engage in economics arguments over how big the deficit actually is. Rather, I will focus on a political economy analysis of the actual struggle over who is in charge determining the criteria for the valuation in the first place. The valuation of the health of the fund is not an objective, economic task. It is ultimately a political decision on how to estimate the risk and especially on how to spread the risk across staff and employers

Striking for USS: four ways university managements have misjudged the situation.

The University and College Union (UCU) and the employers’ association for pre-1992 institutions UUK are currently locked into a bitter battle over pensions in the UK Higher Education sector. Overall 14 days of strike action have been scheduled for February and March (see Lecturers on strike). To the surprise of the employers, support for lecturers on strike has been strong resulting in a fragmentation of UUK. The University of Oxford is only the latest in a line of universities changing their position (The Guardian, 7 March 2018). In this blog post, I will identify four ways in which the employers have seriously misjudged the situation.  

Lecturers on strike

On Thursday 22 February, lecturers at most universities in the UK went on strike. They also stayed on strike on Friday 23 February. They will continue to do so for three days this week, four days the week afterwards, and five days the week after that. In total, unless the dispute is settled in the meantime, 14 working days will be lost to industrial action in an industry that seldom sees action of any kind. In this guest post, Steven Parfitt reflects on the underlying reasons and wider implications for Higher Education in the UK.