Temporary work at £9 an hour. No wonder lecturers are balloting to strike

When Thomas Swann completed his PhD in 2015, he spent three months applying for 40 different jobs in academia. He was lucky to secure a dream position at Leicester University’s School of Business, but the year-long contract meant it wouldn’t be the end of his job hunt. After three further short-term contracts he is now employed more securely at Loughborough.

Swann says his experience of short-term contracts “makes life frantic because as well as trying to do the best job you can, you’re constantly having to apply for other opportunities,” he says. “That’s a huge amount of time I could be spending on developing teaching or research.”

After publication of this article, a university spokesperson described the contract under which Swann has been employed since 2017 as “a permanent ‘open-ended’ contract”.

Swann’s experience is not unusual. The typical academic career involves a sequence of often low-paid, temporary contracts, and according to the University and College Union, many academics now feel at breaking point.

Tomorrow a ballot of UCU members will close, possibly leading to strikes in the new year. Its general secretary, Jo Grady, has warned that feelings are running high.

According to 2016 research from the union, more than half of all academics are on temporary contracts. This has combined with an erosion of pay in real terms (which the union estimates has fallen by 17% since 2009), rising workloads (staff work an average of more than two unpaid days each week) and a gender pay gap of 15.9%.

“People are exhausted by it and really want things to change,” says Swann. “Students are always massively shocked, they assume that during their summer holidays we’re all off on ours but actually, until last week I hadn’t had a day off for two months.”

This chimes with the experience of Hannah Boast, a research fellow at Warwick University. She says her first job – at another university – after finishing her PhD in English literature was paid at 0.7 of a full-time wage, despite her working more than full time – a common setup for early-career lecturers.

According to UCU, the median hourly rate for a lecturer on a 10-hour week contract is £18.70, but if they are working 20 hours a week (the median from its survey), pay falls to a real hourly rate of £9.35. This is despite lecturers having trained for at least seven years.

“Being early in my career and knowing lots of people in part-time, fixed-term jobs you see lots of people working extremely hard, getting exhausted and burned out – then leaving the sector,” says Boast.

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This month’s ballot has the support of the shadow education secretary, Angela Rayner, who has called for universities to work with staff to address the fact that “a combination of falling pay, rising workloads and increasingly insecure employment is making a career in higher education less sustainable”.

Last February, to protest about their pensions, thousands of lecturers and other staff staged a mass walkout in the driving snow, the biggest industrial action ever seen at UK universities. They were largely supported by students, despite stopping teaching and marking for a fortnight.

The union succeeded in forcing employers to drop plans to change pensions at universities established before 1992, from defined benefit schemes to the less favourable defined contribution schemes. It is now looking to challenge the size of staff contributions, which it thinks should be capped at 8% of a lecturer’s salary, rather than the 9.6% currently being paid.

Grady, who has been touring campuses, says the two issues staff have raised most often are casualisation – how financial insecurity stops them enjoying their lives and work – and unsustainable workloads. “People are burning out,” she says. “And it’s getting worse.”

Last year, the union balloted members on strike action over pay but although the majority voted in favour, it didn’t obtain the required 50% voter turnout to move forward. Grady thinks some staff were uncomfortable, given they felt their colleagues in other public sector roles have had a harder time, while others were not aware that the turnout rules meant that not voting was equivalent to voting against, rather than staying neutral.

Grady has been communicating to members the extent of the problems faced by university staff – including mental health problems and even homelessness. “People are staggered that there are colleagues in their departments who are faced with these life circumstances,” she says.

Deborah Alstead, a lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, who represents her local union branch, says she is seeing more staff than ever discussing the ballot. A mandatory 10% workload increase at her university has led to lecturers being signed off for stress, and a “very high” appetite for strike action. She says: “The strength of feeling locally at the moment is strong, people are extremely angry. They’re demotivated, stressed, overworked,” she says. “We’re going to be doing everything in our power to make sure both these ballots are successful.”

The strike action last year was invaluable in building networks between staff, says Kerry Pimblott, a lecturer at the University of Manchester, who took part. She feels it sparked a broader conversation about what staff would like to see from their university.

“Many people are caught in such a culture of overwork and exploitation that they can barely look up from their desk,” she says. “There was a rise to the surface of a new generation of people who can push us in a more progressive direction.”