Pay Dispute

[a_cubed]

As many will have seen if they've seen any of the TV news over the last week, the pay dispute between lecturing staff and universities in the UK has, after two and a half months of industrial action by staff and only one morning of negotiation with employers, finally begun to actually interfere with students' exams and graduation. here's a couple of interesting snippets about what's going on.

From today's Guardian:

"Unloved and overlooked by all governments, academics have seen their pay slide in comparison with other professions. Between 1981 and 2001, non-manual average earnings rose by 57.6% above inflation. Over the same period, lecturers' pay increased by at most by 7.1%, and in some cases less than that. University vice-chancellors have had fat increases in recent years; their staff have not. The current pay offer, of 12.6% over three years, only just begins to make up the difference. It is not hard to see why lecturers are unhappy."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/leaders/story/0,,1778463,00.html



Also a report about what's happening at Northumbria University:

"Members at Northumbria University have not set examinations so the
management did all of the preparation. But in the examination halls today
they handed out the answers along with the examination papers."


For those who think the 23% over three years claim is ridiculous:

The expected public sector rise over the next three years is about 14% (or around 4.5% per year). According to our figures, University lecturing staff have had, on average, a shortfall of 2% per year for over twenty years compared with the average public sector pay rise. If that continues for another twenty years, academics will be earning the same as average manual wages.

Universities are receiving between 20 and 25% increase in their funding over the next three years through a combination of:

new student fees of ~2000 extra per student per year, starting in 2006 and following that cohort through;
an increase in HEFCE funding of 5% above inflation
a significant increase in the support funding for research projects to pay 80% of the estimated full economic cost of the research, up from about 25% of the full economic cost.

Comments

Hmm

[meepfrog.livejournal.com]

My father working in a University..though not as a lecturer, he says that 20 years ago, they were also saying that lecturer's wages were way behind the norm then as well....

Re: Hmm

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

And they were then too. Historically, this profession has been paid as a hobby rather than something you train for for 7 years just to enter - just like medicine.I'm about to become a Professor and junior GPs are still getting paid more than me.

Re: Hmm

[sharikkamur.livejournal.com]

On top of which, universities do not have the cash to employ the number of staff needed already, let alone pay them decent salaries.

I'm in Iceland because RGU couldn't afford to extend four contracts, in spite of the effect that the loss of the lecturers would have on the teaching load of the remaining staff. Here too lecturers are ill-paid, and many have second jobs. It's still better than the UK though.

Re: Hmm

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

I believe we got a bump in 1981, the last time we seriously sued the "non marking" dispute approach. (Note: we also used it in 2004 but no one took any notice because we got half of what we asked for and caved in on the other half.) That's what people who've been int he union for more than 25 years tell me, anyway. That's well before I even went to University myself.

As other in my university have noted on the staff discussion email list, and as perpetuated by a complete ignoramus in yesterday's Times Higher Education supplement, most of the population seem to think that academics still live in an ivory tower spending their days doing nothing. Well, even when they spent their days doing apparently nothing, they were thinking about deep issues. Time to do this is sadly lacking in today's universities, but the myths about academic work are enormous:

- People think we take holiday the entire time students aren't at University, or even the whole time when students aren't being given lectures. This is not the case. Although entitled to take significantly longer holidays, for the last three years I've taken between 20 and 22 days off each year, including all statutory holidays. That's not counting the number of weekend days I work, nor all the travel I do on Saturdays and Sundays going to or returning from meetings and conferences abroad.

- The letter in the THES says that lecturers who "only have four hours contact time a week" are slackers and demanding higher pay and interfering with the students god given right to graduate with a degree right on time is disgusting. This ignores the fact that even when I have three to five hours a week of lectures to give each of these lectures takes at least an hour to prepare for, and that's when I've given that material two or three times before. For a new lecture it takes between half a day and a day to prepare. Then there's the time I spend seeing students as a tutor (and I'm Senior Tutor in my School, which means I spend time with other people's tutees with more serious problems, including getting some of them transferred to me as Personal Tutor temporarily or permanently). Students and parents, if they even think about it, seem to believe it takes the same or less time to set an exam as it does to take it. Again, completely untrue. At the level we work, it takes about a day to set each significant exam question, between creating it, creating the mark scheme, checking it against the curriculum, checking it against the overall needs of the exam to distinguish properly between levels of performance, checking that it is exactly correctly worded and not susceptible to misinterpretation by students under exam pressure. Then after all that serious real work, there's the bureaucratic crap of filling in all the forms about how it was done, what it tests etc so that a QAA nspectior who almost certainly has never taught my subject can be convinced that I've "followed good quality assurance practices".

- That direct teaching is all that we do. Like teachers we have a great deal of administration to sort out for every single student. It doesn't even finish when students graduate and leave. Again as Senior Tutor, I've just had to write references for a student who was the Personal Tutee of one of our staff members who has left. The student graduated in 2004. It's part of the job and we do it generally without complaint because we're academics out of a sense of vocation and not just for the money.

When people go on about the poor worth of academics and how their actions are disgusting, I wonder how many demoralised academics this pushes over the edge into leaving the profession. it also makes my blood boil.

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

Thank god for the Guardian - every other bit of (not vey much) press coverage I've seen has been of the "students have life ruined by heartless useless academics " variety..

"useless academics"

[a-cubed.livejournal.com]

I've been trying to train myself out of using the phrase "that's academic" for something that has become a post-hoc analysis with no worth anymore, because I believe this is part of the attitude about academics that re-inforces our lack of worth to society.

One of the big problems, and in fact one of the reasons the only action we can take that has a chance of forcing serious negotiations from the employers is a marking boycott, is the length of time every thing we do takes to come to fruition.

For instance, we started a revised curriculum this year on our Computer Science BSc. We spent a significant amount of time in the 2004-05 academic year discussing the changes that were needed, including talking to people in the IT industry about their changing needs as employers. We then designed a new curriculum and put it into the correct form for teaching this year. The first graduates entering the job market who have done this new revised degree programme will graduate in Summer 2008. The final ones may well not graduate until 2011 (assuming they're on a four year MEng degree with a sandwich year out and have to take a year out of their studies for personal, medical or family reasons). By that time we will have had to revise our degree programme again, because we work in a fast moving field.

Research projects typically take five years at least to work through - at least a year to prepare the proposal and have it rated whether or not it should be funded (up to two or three years with multiple submissions and revision sometimes). Then two years at least, usually three years to carry out the research. Finally another year at least (sometimes two or three years for some journals) for the final papers from the project to be published. That's a minimum of four years and usually closer to five or six before the whole project is completed. along the way, of course, the project changes according to the way the world changes, but that's part of the difficulty of such projects.

So, any withdrawal of labour or reduction in our effectiveness doesn't have a significant impact in most cases until well beyond the next general election. Hence why UK politicians generally don't care about university issues.

If we take a one day strike, the students take a day off. If school teachers take a one day strike, every working parent has to sort out childcare arrangements.

Re: "useless academics"

[surliminal.livejournal.com]

And school teachers aren't accused of destroying their pupils' lives when they go on strike but laided as heros of the suburbs - as if that accusation didn't apply to some extent to thousands of strikers - electricians, nurses, firemen, binmen, etc etc - most of whom are treated as heroic rather than useless whingers. I am so angry about this strike and the responses to it (some of them from my own colleagues.)And if Oxford really has no union presence, then we should all bloody well boycott their conferences and journals and refuse to work with them til they do. I'm actually not behind this strike for the money per se; I want the job I do to be taken seriously and valued.