By Jack Fawbert, UCU member, personal capacity
Nearly 22,000 university lecturers and other staff voted overwhelmingly, through their trade union the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU), for strikes and other industrial action to resist savage and totally unnecessary proposals to cut their pensions. The strike involves all those working in the UK’s university sector except staff at universities that used to be polytechnics before 1992.
The UCU members will be engaging in a rolling programme of industrial action from February 22nd. Staff at 61 universities will be on strike for up to 14 days between then and the 16th March and will be engaging in other industrial action short of strikes.
“So, what are these over-privileged professionals griping about”, you might say. “After all, it’s been much in the news lately about the grossly inflated pay that university Vice-Chancellors (VCs) get.” Well, the remuneration of VCs, effectively the university bosses (Chancellors being honorary positions) who negotiate agreements with the trade unions, are certainly part of the problem.
Universities are bringing in huge amounts of money from the £9,000+ student fees, but rather than use this money to improve the quality of education through better staff/student ratios, more secure and less temporary contracts and better paid and supported administrative staff, VCs have been piling resources into large capital investments and paying huge salaries to themselves and other senior staff.
Unbelievably, at most universities, VCs even sit on the very remuneration committees that have awarded themselves huge salary increases in recent years! Honestly, you couldn’t make it up! Double digit percentage annual increases in pay is now the norm for VCs whose salaries last year, on average, exceeded £277,000. This is more than six times the average of their academic staff working at the ‘chalk-face’. Eleven VCs actually paid themselves more than £400,000 a year. And this is in addition to perks such as free accommodation, expense account lunches, business or first-class travel and so on.
Meanwhile, as a result of inflation, the real value of the pay of staff at the chalk-face has fallen by 14.5% since 2009. And, contrary to popular myth, university lecturers and other academics are not highly paid compared to other professions and even compared to many skilled manual occupations. Yet, university lecturers, like myself, are highly qualified people.
Pay has shrunk in real terms
As salaries have shrunk in real terms, most academics, whilst occasionally taking the odd day of strike action here and there over the last few years, have been extremely reluctant to protest more, clinging to the prospect of a reasonable pension at the end of their careers. Indeed, it has been the thought of damaging their pension entitlements that has partly fuelled this reluctance to support industrial action in the past.
Now, university VCs are planning to scrap the pension entitlements of staff under the Universities Superannuation Scheme (lecturers in post-1992 universities are members of a separate Teachers Pension Scheme) and replace it with a new scheme where pensions will be dependent on the performance of investments. It is an attempt to shift pensions liabilities from institutions to individuals themselves and is part of a wider shift in higher education to embrace market forces and competition. This is in keeping with a now discredited philosophy that regards students as ‘customers’ and staff as a cost to be minimised.
The average loss of pension for someone just starting out on their academic career will be about £208,000! Not surprisingly, VCs are not planning to apply this new scheme to their own pensions! And the employers, the VCs, are refusing point blank to even negotiate over these changes. Academics were left with no alternative.
But industrial action for academics is not so simple. Whilst they do, in theory, have set working hours, very few of them work strictly nine to five. Their work involves not only preparing and delivering lectures but also reading around their subject areas, meeting students for tutorials, organising seminars, attending faculty and departmental meetings, writing courses and course materials and, most crucially, carrying out research, getting their results published and attending conferences to discuss their research with peers. Also, many academics act as external examiners for courses at other universities. Much of this work takes place outside of conventional hours and outside the universities for which they work. So where an academic’s work begins and ends is very much open to interpretation.
Students support the action
Not unreasonably, UCU recommend that on a day that an academic is deemed to be on strike their university should deduct one three hundred and sixty fifth of the academic’s salary. But, in the past some VCs have used this ambiguity in order to punish lecturers for going on strike by saying, for example, that, as actual term time is only 30 weeks, then they should deduct one two hundred and tenth of an academic’s salary for every day that they go on strike. This, of course, ignores the fact that much of an academic’s activity (attending conferences, sitting on exam boards, writing new courses, organising open days etc.) takes place outside term times. This dispute is bound to throw up this and many other secondary disputes because of the hard-line attitude that the overpaid VCs are taking.
In addition, when academics miss teaching for other reasons beyond their control, such as illness, they often make this up by setting other work for students, covering for colleagues or re-organising the dates and times of lectures. However, UCU have quite rightly advised its members to try their best to avoid doing this to compensate for the strike action. As professionals, academics don’t want to harm the progress of their students, so will follow this advice reluctantly, knowing that to do otherwise would simply play into the hands of the employers who have exploited their professionalism for too long.
Academics are also fearful of alienating their students: something else that Vice Chancellor’s have exploited in the past. But this time most students are supporting their lecturers and recognise that they have a common interest. The National Union of Students are fully behind their colleagues in the Universities and Colleges Union and will be supporting them in industrial action. UCU members are angrier than I have ever seen them before in my 30 years of teaching in further and higher education. This is set to be the biggest and most well-supported industrial action by university staff in years. With your support as well, we can win this dispute!
February 21, 2018
