AS IT’S REVEALED THAT A THIRD OF WORKERS AT CARDIFF UNIVERSITY ARE ON PRECARIOUS ‘FIXED TERM CONTRACTS’, UNION MEMBERS REPRESENTING CASUALISED STAFF SAY THEIR FIGHT IS FOR ALL OF CARDIFF’S LOW PAID AND EXPLOITED WORKERS.
By SC Cook, Photo Copyright: Steve Eason
Workers at Cardiff University currently on strike against poor working conditions and soaring pay inequality will march through the city centre on Thursday, and are urging exploited workers from the gig economy to join them.
Speaking after a strike rally on Monday, Rowan Hope Campbell, who jointly heads up the UCU anti-precarity group at Cardiff University, said that their strike was also a fight for all low paid and zero-hours workers in the city, many of whom are current or former students themselves.
“The casualised work we’re seeing in Higher Education is common across all sectors at the moment,” she told us. “And people are expected to kind of give more and receive less in terms of good pay and working conditions.”
“The increase in casualisation and casual work means that we don’t have job security. We don’t know where our income is gonna be coming from, if we’re gonna have a job in a year’s time.”
The march will take place this coming Thursday 05th March, at 11.00am from Cathays Park and will march through the city centre.
Asked what the commonality was between workers in academia who have no job guarantee and those who work on zero hours contracts in the hospitality sector, Rowan responded that they are both “at the beck and call of the employer.”
“For a hospitality shift, say you’re meant to be working Saturday night,” she explained. You turn up at the bar and it’s quiet, they send you home after two hours. It’s similar I think in a lot of ways to a to a university module where they haven’t confirmed student numbers. And so you don’t know if you’re even going to be teaching, you don’t know if you’re gonna have one class, two classes, no classes, and you only find that out at the last minute…the flexibility is in favour of management to decide how much work people get.”
Two of the major issues in the strike are about the growth in casualised labour in universities and the widening gap in pay. Documents released on the UCU website yesterday reveal that a third of staff in Russell Group Universities are on fixed term contracts, where workers sometimes only have guaranteed employment for a matter of months. The figure is the same for Cardiff, which is in the Russell Group. In a separate sign of the huge inequality in UK universities, the Vice Chancellor of Cardiff University is paid £256,798 per annum, whereas many workers in casualised labour complain of living in poverty.
Rowan explained how these workers are often forced to work unpaid when they prepare for lectures or classes.
“When you take into account the hourly pay we get for a lot of these things,” she said, “we’d be lucky to get minimum wage based on the amount of time that we actually put into getting that one hour of work.”
She said this puts them in a similar position to other workers who are paid the minimum wage by the hour.
“I feel like we’re all actually kind of working at the same pay level and so it’s about all of us coming together.”
Asked about the potential for a generalised strike involving different groups of workers from the so called gig economy, Rowan responded:
“I think that’d be really good, especially with the latest stats from ONS that 1 million people are on zero hour contracts.”
The march comes as workers reach the halfway mark of their historic 14 day strike, with staff from 74 universities across Britain scaling up their action in the face of deadlocked talks with management. The dispute has exposed several issues that go to the core of the neoliberal university, which critics say is run like a business at the expense of staff pensions, pay, workload and welfare. On Tuesday however, it appeared that cracks were starting to appear on the management side of the dispute when it was revealed that Russell Group universities were worried about the ‘reputational damage’ caused by the proliferation of unpopular & insecure work within their institutions. This is a sign that the strike is having an effect.
At Cardiff University on Tuesday, students showed solidarity with striking staff by storming into the main lobby with homemade banners.
Urging students to support the strike, they said that “Universities in the UK have been turned into businesses and this has had a disastrous impact on the education we receive. The result has been high workloads, precarious working contracts and wage stagnation, all of which impact the ability of staff to provide a quality education.” They promised to escalate direct action in solidarity with workers.
For details of the march on Thursday, please see the Facebook Page here: https://www.facebook.com/events/214851633045684/
