Tomorrow, staff at 74 universities are going on strike. This is the second round of strikes in the 2019/20 academic session, following eight days of industrial action in November, and it comes hot on the heels of a wave of strikes during the last major dispute in 2018 over the USS pension scheme. Dubbed the ‘four fights’ – in addition to pensions, the University Colleges Union (UCU) is now negotiating with the employer, Universities UK, over pay inequality, rising workloads, pay devaluation and, finally, job insecurity, otherwise known as casualisation. 

Until recently casualisation in higher education had barely registered with either UCU or the press more broadly. Though precise categorisations vary from institution to institution, in essence the casualised academic workforce comprises all non-permanent workers engaged on an insecure contract. These are usually hourly or “fractional,” so called because the contract is calculated as a fraction of a full-time equivalent salary. Most universities have been unwilling to disclose the exact figures for those on this form of contract, but casualised workers are known to make up as much as half the teaching workforce at some institutions. 

At the time of the 2018 round of strikes I was not teaching and therefore did not participate but many friends and colleagues teaching in tandem with their PhD research took part. Undertaking strike action is a daunting prospect at the best of times. In the absence of centralised guidelines from UCU’s national executive committee expressly for these workers on the peripheries of the institutional machine or much sensitivity to how strikes exacerbate their vulnerability, during 2018 levels of confusion and anxiety in my constituency were high.

What was the perceived role of casualised workers in the strikes? What kinds of entitlements were there to the strike fund? For casualised workers, whose income is paid at an hourly or daily rate, fear of docked pay was especially real: at what rate would pay be docked on strike days – an entire day? The addition of casualisation to UCU’s 2019/20 lines of attack though tardy is therefore welcome and important. Jo Grady, UCU’s recently-elected general secretary, ran on an anti-casualisation ticket. 

Much ink has already been spilled on what the hike in tuition fees signalled about the marketisation of education: students recast as consumers buying qualifications sufficient to secure the high earning jobs they need to pay off crippling levels of student debt. Casualisation among academic workers is a less well-documented but equally corrosive effect of the Tory government’s sustained imposition of market logics on higher education.

These logics have produced bitter inter-university competition and massive financial inequalities between different universities. Large, Russell Group universities offering STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) have seen their student ranks swell at the expense of small or less prestigious institutions. This has locked these universities into a downward spiral of growing debt, lower student attainment, and the rapid casualisation of the workforce as universities seek to provide expensive education on the cheap.

Casual teaching work is gruelling and takes a heavy toll on mental health. Casualised teachers work long hours with little institutional support and pay set far below the number of hours actually worked. These staff often teach on multiple courses across several institutions, sometimes in different towns and cities. As insecure contracts are complex and technical, there are often issues with pay, and salaries are regularly paid late.

In this maelstrom of preparation, contact hours, pastoral care, and bureaucracy, little time remains for research and publication, work which these contracts do not remunerate but without which securing a permanent position is a near impossibility. Although no-one is insulated from precarisation, it is felt particularly acutely among women and black and minority ethnic academics. A recent report into casualisation by UCU showed that 45% of Asian female academics are on casual contracts as compared to only 28% of white male academics. 

SOAS, where I both teach and am a PhD candidate, is at the sharp end of the stick in this regard. It is a small, highly-specialised London institution with a complement of courses that includes subjects such as Sinhalese and Ethnomusicology, and that has been trailblazing the decolonisation agenda on university campuses.

On 13th January the school’s Executive Board decided that it would be freezing all unfunded research leave for permanent staff. The underlying logic was that it could make significant cuts to the fractional (read casualised) budget. Not all positions will be cut but these moves impact upwards of 300 staff in some way or another. SOAS is not alone in this decision – management at Goldsmiths College have also informed staff that they will be making cuts to their frontline teaching staff. 

Since this announcement, Fractionals for Fair Play, a SOAS campaign of which I am a part, have been fighting to prevent the implementation of these measures. This struggle is a profoundly challenging one that tests the limits of worker solidarity in the university. There is no doubt that it is a brave new economic world for higher education institutions, and that the conditions faced by many are difficult.

A measure such as the one announced at SOAS is not, however, a pragmatic response to challenging financial circumstances. Instead it illustrates the true terminus of casualisation: you progressively loosen the material and symbolic links of casualised academic staff to the institution until they can be severed overnight. 

That even the most fiscally healthy universities have adopted casualisation models, future-proofing themselves against changes to their material circumstances by creating a disposable workforce, testifies to casualisation’s ideological potency. The fissures opening up at SOAS between different categorisations of worker reveal the pernicious effects of austerity messaging.

University managements wield perilous financial circumstances like a sword of damocles to smother resistance to relentless cuts. Ideological gymnastics are also at play in fashioning the laborious frontline teaching undertaken by graduate teaching staff and recent PhD graduates not as work but as privileged training opportunities, despite the fact that without them universities would grind to a halt. 

It is imperative that we demystify the ideologies that shroud questions of casualisation. The academic community is one to whom thought and creativity are sacred. If segments of it retreat into a defensive position that seeks to preserve these values at all costs it will be a pyrrhic victory. Instead, these capacities must be harnessed to begin to imagine a higher education landscape that looks different – a landscape divested of the instrumental logic that currently governs how universities are run and regulated, and a landscape free from the depredations of casualisation and compulsory redundancies. 

This year I will be striking with many of those same friends and colleagues that expressed concerns over their place in the last round of strikes, who largely remain on the same or a similar form of precarious contract. The presence of casualised workers on the picket lines is made all the more poignant by the fact that when we strike, we do so for working conditions within a profession suffering the ravages of such a harsh economic climate that we may be precluded from ever entering it in a permanent way.

Yet we will be there in our multitudes. Why? First, because solidarity across all contract terms and workers is vital to creating better working conditions for all. Second, because these pickets provide a collective space within which to begin the work of imagining a new model for higher education. This work will be hard but it is imperative – our continued existence within the university depends on it.