On 29 June 2022, all the staff at Queen Mary University of London, where I work, received an email from management. To our horror, they were threatening to withhold 100% of our pay for 21 days of both July and August, because we were participating in a marking boycott over pensions, pay, labour precarity, inequality and working conditions. Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017. But at that moment, I not only resolved to continue to strike, but redoubled my efforts to get as many colleagues as possible to join me on the picket lines. The condescension from my employers made me feel something stark and visceral.
Going on strike does mean losing your pay. That’s what the union’s strike pay fund is for.
Hmm? Your union doesn’t have one of those? Because you’ve not been paying unions dues large enough to build up a strike pay fund?
Gosh.
’I finished my PhD in law in 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research…’
Those who can, do. Those who can’t..?
It rather looks as though marking precarity sadly doesn’t chime with a lifetime of paid service in education.
Life in the higher education sector had been getting tougher ever since I started my career in 2017.
The latter third of her very short career was seriously disrupted by Covid. I’m betting there’s a lot of recency bias going on here and she’s only considering the cushy life of lockdown where working from home and not having to to interact with students distorted her view on what life is really like.
Still, if she doesn’t like it she can always learn to code.
’I finished my PhD in law in 2016 and was ready to begin a life of service in education and research…’
Another one wants to be paid to indulge their hobby. Are there no limits to the number of these people?. If he’d learned to be a plumber he’d be providing a service people want. And not needing to strike for higher pay.
As for “working conditions”… Manacles & a whip would be a good start
I wonder why he believes mentioning that the overwhelmingly taxpayer funded higher education sector superannuation scheme is £40bn over-funded (coming from an academic let alone guardian contributor I’m inclined to doubt that anyway) was a good tactic.
In the unlikely event that he’s correct I hope future taxpayer contributions are cancelled until the position is rectified.
“superannuation scheme is £40bn over-funded”: whether it’s overfunded or underfunded depends on the rather arbitrary definitions of the day and the state of asset markets, and interest rates, on the day of the calculation.
Over the last couple of decades it’s looked badly underfunded nearly all the time but interest rates have increased so now it’s apparently overfunded (he claims, perhaps correctly).
What I want to know is whether it will survive long enough to see my widow out. Nobody can tell me for the excellent reason that nobody can possibly know.
Otherwise I proffer my usual advice to academics whinging about pay and conditions – if you don’t like them eff off and do something else for a living. (Ditto train drivers, nurses, doctors etc). But I feel compelled to add that if universities haven’t been docking the pay of strikers then the senior admin people should be sacked and taken to court to be found personally liable for the costs.
BIS,
“Another one wants to be paid to indulge their hobby. Are there no limits to the number of these people?. If he’d learned to be a plumber he’d be providing a service people want. And not needing to strike for higher pay.”
My father taught a module on local government law, but it was after he’d worked in that area for over 20 years. He taught a lot of the “book” stuff, but also added a lot of things based on experience. I don’t think he earned very much but it was low stress and he liked passing on his experience.
That’s how this should be. Like my college lecturer was a woman who had worked for a decade doing programming. Decided to start a family and college works better for that. But I got a decade of someone who had done the job. These people who go straight from the books to teaching, what do they have to add beyond what’s in the books? What can someone who has done a PhD in English teach you, compared to one of those £100 videos by David F**king Mamet?
Bloke on M4:
I agree entirely. My penultimate job was training such people – skilled tradespeople and professionals – to cope with the ridiculous and sometimes appalling exigencies of Further Education institutions. Most were excellent, and many would have done just fine if left alone. The most fun ones were the builders, plumbers and carpenters who had worked all their lives on building sites, and now “needed” to be taught all about equality and diversity, safeguarding, and radicalisation.
“What can someone who has done a PhD in English teach you” A pal had a story that amused me. He discovered that the wife of a new chum had a PhD in American Literature. So he went home, checked his bookshelves and, yes, he had a Webster’s. He gave it to her as a present. She was thrilled: a dictionary of American English!
Then an intuition hit him; if she didn’t already own a Webster’s … “Have you ever visited the US?” he enquired.
Nope she hadn’t.