Workers on Campus

An important part of the work of Socialist Students is linking student campaigns with struggles of workers on campuses. Most universities are big employers, run by highly paid management who act like bosses everywhere – cutting pay, attacking conditions at work and making redundancies. Socialists strive for maximum unity of those affected by these attacks, opposing the ‘divide and rule’ tactics of senior management.

Whilst recognising the need for unity, we must also be sensitive to the different circumstances that various groups of workers on campus face, and how they are organised industrially. There are four broad groups of workers at most universities: academic, academic-related, technical and other.

Academic staff are lecturers and research staff as well as teaching assistants and research assistants. At the ‘old’ universities the relevant union for these staff is the AUT, while at ‘new’ universities it is NATFHE. While NATFHE only organises teaching staff, the AUT allows all workers in higher education to join.

Academic-related staff are clerical workers dealing with exams, timetables and general administration, while other staff can include cleaners and catering workers. Those not in the AUT can be in various unions like UNISON, GMB or the T&G. Technical staff like lab technicians are usually members of AMICUS.

A development that may take place relatively soon is the merger of the two higher education unions AUT and NATFHE. Socialists would support such a merger, which makes sense industrially and could unite workers in what would be the largest higher education union in the world, whilst arguing against attempts by the tops of each union to use the merger to restrict democracy in the new union.

Although the number of students entering higher education has increased massively over the years, the number of permanent academic staff has not increased at anything like the same rate. This has led to increased class sizes, less contact time between students and lecturers, and casualisation of teaching.

Casualisation takes the form of employing graduate students and workers on fixed-term contracts, who currently make up nearly half of all academic and academic-related staff. While it is important for less senior staff to get teaching experience, they are really used as a cheap source of labour. Teaching appointments are often agreed informally without correct procedure and support, and many fixed-term staff are also trying to produce research or finish PhD’s. Others may be working other part-time jobs or trying to support a family.

It is important for all fixed-term staff to be unionised, and to fight to be given adequate resources and support for the teaching they do. Pressure should be put on universities to create more permanent jobs, to give their staff time to carry out research and to give students more time in smaller classes. These demands could form the basis of a united campaign of staff and students, as has begun to happen at several universities.

If casualisation is not checked, there are already indications of the ridiculous lengths universities will go to in cutting their teaching budgets. We could see a situation in a few years where students who have paid over £3000 in fees are given a CD-ROM that marks their work for them!

At the time of writing, Brunel university is being ‘greylisted’ (a form of boycott) by the AUT for sacking 60 staff who, in their opinion, spent too long on teaching compared to research. The campaign to oppose these redundancies must be supported, and should demand not only the reinstatement of sacked workers, but also greater democratic input from students and staff into how universities allocate their resources.

The reason why many universities discriminate against teaching staff is to do with how funding is allocated. In 2008, HEFCE, the body that funds university research in England, will carry out the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) of research departments. How a department is rated makes a big difference to the income it gets, hence the rush to employ staff who will get a good ‘return’ in the RAE.

Needless to say, the whole procedure is very bureaucratic and tends to favour the universities that are already relatively rich. The RAE also creates a climate where universities compete with each other to be more highly ranked, rather than working together to improve research.

Even getting a good RAE score may not be enough to save a department if there is not enough money from teaching. Areas like maths, engineering, physics and chemistry are often top-performers in the RAE, yet may still face closure for failing to attract enough undergraduates. HEFCE has already said that it will not act to save such departments, considering them "19^th century science"!

The ideal department as far as HEFCE is concerned is one teaching thousands of undergraduates on the cheap, with all its permanent staff working solely on the most lucrative areas of research. This market-driven short-sightedness will not only hurt students, but the whole of society – without fundamental research, the more applied research areas currently favoured will soon dry up.

As universities continue to follow private sector trends and ‘outsource’, non-academic staff are increasingly likely to be employed by an outside company paid by the university to provide a service that it used to provide directly. Such companies usually provide a worse service with worse conditions for workers, and often for more money once hidden costs are taken into account.

In the case of catering, this would mean more expensive canteens, serving food prepared with cheaper materials, by staff with less training who work more hours for less pay. The extra money raised by this does not go to the university, but to swell the profits of the private company providing the service.

Privatisation of campus services like this makes it necessary to have united campaigning by workers, who want to protect their pay and conditions, and students, who want better, cheaper services, and may want work on campus themselves. Such campaigns should also aim to win more funding for services run by the university.

AUT – The Association of University Teachers.

NATFHE – National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education.

AMICUS – The engineers’ union.

UNISON – The public-sector union.

T&G, GMB – General unions (any worker can join).

In May 2005 lecturers at London Metropolitan University took strike action for a week – one of the longest strikes in higher education in the UK's history. For a whole week lecturers did not attend the university, instead picketing every entrance to every building of the university. Further action was taken after the strike by refusing to invigilate, not cooperating with recruitment and not marking exams and coursework.

Lecturers were forced to strike by management bullying, including threatening 387 lecturers with the sack (see box). London Met is being run as a tightly centralised and top-down university dominated by management rather than teaching or research. It seems that Vice-Chancellor Brian Roper has long forgotten he is actually in charge of a university and not a business.

The lecturers, staff and students have no input on any assessment changes, coursework submission changes, mitigating circumstances changes and so forth. A situation where the right hand does not know what the left is doing is quickly created.

Unfortunately the treatment of the staff and the disregard for the importance of a good education at this university is reflected around the country. Companies such as Scholerest are allowed to take advantage of the education system providing poor quality (both taste and health wise) and expensive food. While more specifically Vice Chancellors, such as Roper, are allowed to run whole universities into the ground.

A few examples of how the ‘business model’ harms our education:

• New centralised top-down management and administration causes havoc with actual running of courses. For example: unsuitable rooms given for classes (i.e. not big enough for number of students attending), timetabling of classes incorrect, dependency on correct paperwork creates problems easily, timetabling of seminars and workshops incorrect.
• Barriers on the North Campus (also recently created at City Campus) are used to stop students from entering buildings if they have unpaid rent or fees. This is run on a ‘no exception’ rule. For example, if a student is one month behind in rent (and will receive their loan in three days’ time so can confirm payment then) they are unable to borrow library books, enter any university building, sit exams or submit coursework (even if this is a first offence). The same restrictions apply if the administration hasn’t been completed properly even where payment has been received some days or weeks previously.
• Administration of mitigating circumstances run from central management so that lecturers and students are not involved. Thus the system is hard to understand and much more depersonalised.
• Money not spent on supporting the students, i.e. there are exactly six photocopiers available. Students printing from computers get priority on four of these, thus it can take up to an hour just to copy one or two documents/books. This is exacerbated by the fact that there are not enough books, often 10 to 50 students, so many students have to photocopy.

An important issue raised by this scenario is that of the control of the Students' Union. In a situation like this it is vital to let the students know what is happening. This was very hard for the teachers to do without coming against management bullying or taking up too much teaching time. It then transpired that the Students' Union said they were not able to support the lecturers or give out information.

However, once Socialist Students had heard of the situation we set up stalls outside Calcutta House (City Campus) to notify students of what was happening. Leaflets were handed out and signatures were collected to petition the Students' Union to support NATFHE as well as against the university management bullying the lecturers into contractual changes.

It seems that one of the university’s tactics were to ignore the dispute thus getting students and the Students Union involved was important to give more strength to the lecturers. Socialist Students also arranged meetings where students could speak to lecturers and get their side of the story as well as think of new ways to support them.

It was important for the lecturers to see the problems experienced by the students as well as the fact that many students supported the lecturers’ action. Eventually the Students’ Union was able to find a loophole and give its support to NATFHE. It is necessary to learn from this; not only that the Students' Union is often unreasonably controlled by the university but also that the Students' Union is likely to have the ability to somehow break away from the university in order to represent the students if needs be.

However, I feel I should also say that it is not all bad at the university. The Dyslexic department is amazing and very supportive, though I have heard rumours from new students that even here the standards are slipping. Furthermore the hardship application procedure is generally appropriate, yet again not good. In September 2004 as the application forms were not ready students had to apply for different mid-support funding, pay that back and apply for further support once the forms were printed. However, in many cases administration staff directly linked to the university are very helpful.

Many of my lecturers are very capable, helpful and approachable. They are in education because they want to teach and pass on inspiration and information, not to get caught up in disputes. They should not be forced into a position where they seriously have to think about putting the students’ experience behind their jobs as the two priorities should be balanced.

What really angers me is the continual entrapment of further students to the university via false pretences when soon there will be nothing left. While students often have a bad reputation of drinking time wasters many of them work incredibly hard to attain a degree to further their career while Roper just sees each student as a blank cheque. All this makes me very glad I graduate this year before there is nothing left at all and the degree received is not even worth the paper it’s written on. Make an end to the degeneration of our education, make capitalism history.

For more information please go to www.socialiststudents.org.uk .

The University of North London and London Guildhall University merged in 2003 to create London Metropolitan University, one of the biggest universities in the UK. The old UNL site is now North campus & what was Guildhall is now City campus.

Brutal university management at UNL had forced staff there to accept contracts they weren't happy with before the merger. Lecturers at City campus claim that one of the reasons they agreed to the merger was that management promised there would be no changes to the contract.

Yet in 2004 the 387 lecturers on the City campus who were still on Guildhall contracts received letters from management "informing" them that their contracts would change to the UNL contract from 1st August, and that if they refused to accept this they would be sacked.

Lecturers' union NATFHE protested against this but management refused point-blank to negotiate, forcing lecturers to ballot for action three times, each time winning a majority for action on an increased number of votes.

The university used a legal loophole to prevent action the first time, and the second time agreed to negotiate at the last minute in order to prevent the strike. Yet when talks began they refused to discuss the contracts, which were the substance of the dispute.

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