UK Lecturers Strike -- C/D

I would like the lecturers to get their money. I would also like them to still not mark the second half of the third answer on my second Spanish paper if the dispute is resolved.

Thatcherbabies always get their priorities the wrong way around.

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-- suzy (theartskooldisk...), May 25th, 2006.

See I'ma 80s baby, mastered Reaganomics
School of Hard Knocks, everyday is college

it's a tough balance. it's not the students' fault that new labour (not thatcher) imposed fees and removed grants; a college course *is* now something you pay for to get a better job at the end. or, if you do liberal arts, to get a shitty lecturer job at the other end. i think lecturers should get more obviously, *but* i'm not down with being called a thatcherbaby by people who got their education paid for, because shit has changed irrevocably.

Sadly to a lot of outsiders it can look like trying to have your cake and eat it, because 'action short of a strike' doesn't lose you pay (at the moment) but does arguably more damage - to students not uni bosses - than a series of one day strikes.

I think lecturers should get more money but I don't entirely understand who they measure by when they talk about parity and their salaries not keeping pace with those in equivalent roles. What are the equivalent roles?

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At my university academic and ar staff start on point 3 and the pay spine goes all the way up to point 58 (which is about £78,000 a year and is a senior professorial grade - i.e., next to no-one gets that).

hm, I think 'full-time' may be the operative and misleading word there - very few lecturers are on anything like full-time contracts. But it's a good point about AUT kind of pre-empting the pay claim process of the other HE unions, none of whom are talking about striking. It puts things a bit out of balance.

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As far as I can tell there's a lot of posturing going on in the current dispute. Partly this is because there is a lot of money coming into the system and partly because of the upcoming merger of the largest two academic unions.

ding. most of these guys are, i guess, People Like Me, ie phd candidates, and, as with undergrad study, grants are sparse on the tree, so the lecturing gig is not so much a top-up as a quasi-full-time job. i wouldn't touch it with the proverbial.

and yes indeed indolent, this is a Liberal Arts Problem because there's not much you can *do*, vocationally, with liberal arts, except become a lecturer.

But it's the research that brings in the money so...

(My department has the opposite problem in that we teach languages and EFL and have a strong teaching profile but do bugger all research - unsurprisingly, few people have been given full-time contracts.)

i don't think any of my tutors as an undergrad had 'teaching' experience, and unfortunately i had no 'being tutored' experience either.

Perhaps the pay for research based subjects and non-research based subjects should be organised differently tho.

What I can see is that if they don't award us sensibly then it'll be harder to keep staff and impossible to hire new staff. We have one job that is being interviewed for next week and we have one person to interview because they are not offering enough money for the post.

With regards to the strike, I'm on an academically related grade so anything that the lecturers get I'll get too so they have my full support!

rizzearch brings in $$$ when it has a point, ie not in liberal arts! (which is what i do). but at the same time i still do research, just not in a lab.

Students' here are behind the lecturers (shock) but admittedly I don't think they are really aware of the problem yet as they are worried about exams. I have been involved in drafting the middle way - ie what is actually going to happen regarding exams. Unlike a lot of places, we are going with a hard line of absolutely no compromise on quality. Which means no results until the strike is over. What the Uni's are hoping is the academics are marking the exams and not releasing the results - therefore a quick turnaround can be effected when the dispute is over (a while yet). What students probably don't realise is that it is already too late for them to get their degrees on time.

It will prove a bigger headache for recruitment into MA programmes for Univ's in many ways, plus progression issues on fails. Still, brave new world and all that.

Like to talk about the single pay spine, but since our AUT has been on strike twice this year already we are miles off. The key point on the SPS for non-academics is equalisation of terms and conditions = lots more holiday. Of course being on a lecturers salary myself this does not affect me, I could quite do with the 25% increase they want!

(Note: In London, London Weighting for all staff has been frozen at £2189 for the last twenty years!)

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I can't see this happening, hadn't even heard that this was on the cards, thought the SPS was purely a salary based exercise. Although we are linked to the academic salaries we are not sessional and working in the IT department, traditionally when the students/lecturers are on holiday is when we can do certain pieces of work we couldn't do the rest of the year.

However some instititions are looking at using it as an excuse to equalise (so say 25 for both) pissing off primarily AUT members.

(Incidentally, I gather many union members are still undertaking their external examiner work as that wouldn't be affected by any pay rise in their main job anyway.)

I get the impression striking is having a worse effect at my uni than at many others - we get mentioned on the news every time the story comes up. Lecturers are having their pay docked by 30% (they had threatened 100% at one point).

No I'm a member of Unison (until recent Branch Chair, now treasurer and Health & Safety Steward). As I am not a University Lecturer it seem disingenuous to be in their Union. Especially as they would not let me represent much beyond Non-Academic Rep.

Will feel less weird when it's the UCU, though.

Its a pity unions aren't that agressive about nicking each others members as I think the single pay spine gives Unison a great reason to nab other members. BUT...that would be wrong.

Just been to Academic Board here where there was much shuffling of feet and looking away when the subject of the dispute came up. Could be looking at more than a winter of discontent.

tragically i just brought this post up at a dinner party as an example of things that had made me laugh recently. oh dear.

I can't see the AUT going for 13.1% over three years when they booted out 12.6%. They are trying to push for something similar over two years with an independent funding review. Unlikely to get.

AUT/NAHTFE might take it to their members for a resounding NO, but probably won't.

We can't really affored it here, as the influx in fees will be minimal due to 50% postgrad and large number of international students who won't get the hike. That's the line. But hold up - wait:
50% postgrad = cash cow
Lots of intenational students = cash bull
So what happened to all the monney and cash calves they have been having. Fundamentally HE has not invested in their only proper asset, staff. To whinge about it now the Unions have finally got their act together is to forget that there are twenty years of chronic underfunding. Now this may not be the Univeristies fault, but legions of management have been complicit in this.