Cambridge staff to embark on 18 days of strikes
Aoife Petrie
The University and College Union (UCU) has announced dates for industrial action in February and March. Academics at the University of Cambridge will join 70,000 staff from 150 universities who are striking in response to real-terms pay reductions, pension cuts, and poor working conditions.
The UCU’s announcement of upcoming strikes follows the University and Colleges Employers’ Association (UCEA) putting forward a revised pay offer for university employees on 11th January. The UCEA offered most staff a pay increase of between 4 and 5 per cent, with slightly higher increases for those on lower salaries (7% for those earning up to £22,662 a year and 6% for those earning up to £30,502). Previously, the UCEA had offered university staff a 3% pay rise.
The UCEA’s chief executive, Raj Jethwa, stated that he hopes these “proposals will be recognised as a genuine attempt by employers to address cost of living pressures”.
These pay offers still amount to real-terms pay reductions, however, with the consumer price index inflation rate reaching 9.2% last December. According to analysis by the Financial Times, university lecturers have experienced an average real-terms pay reduction of 17.5% since 2011.
In response to the UCEA’s offer, Jo Grady, the general secretary of the UCU, welcomed the progress that has been made, but explained that this is still “not enough”.
Grady stated: “It doesn’t cover last year and it doesn’t do enough to mitigate either the cost-of-living crisis or the years of pay decline our members have suffered.”
Alongside the problem of below-inflation pay rises, staff are also striking over cuts to the University Superannuation Scheme, the principal higher education pension scheme. Introduced in April of last year, these cuts mean that a typical lecturer has lost around 35% of their guaranteed retirement income, according to the UCU. The increasing casualisation of the higher education sector has also been a cause of growing concern.
At Cambridge, the UCU’s Justice4CollegeSupervisors (J4CS) campaign has detailed how many “supervisors are self-employed, which means that [they] have no job security or guaranteed hours” and, on top of this, they “don’t have paid leave, sick leave, parental leave or pension benefits for the supervision work” they do.
During the end of last term, many supervisors engaged in the J4CS campaign took part in a strike action that consisted of adding a statement, outlining their demands for “paid training, fair pay, and a proper contract,” at the end of CamCORS reports. As a consequence of this action, the campaign representative Matthew Lloyd Roberts told TCS that “many supervisors, including myself, have had our scant pay withheld by colleges.”
An Art History PhD student and first-time supervisor, Roberts expressed that he finds supervisors’ pay “genuinely shocking” and described how after “8 hours of face-to-face teaching, feedback on weekly essays, preparing supervision materials and admin, I would confidently say it works out to less than minimum wage, and that’s with no contract, no sick pay, no security of employment.”
As outlined in the campaign’s open letter, Cambridge UCU research records that as many as 66% of supervisors earn less than the minimum wage when marking and preparation time are included.
Despite the severe response by colleges and escalating strike actions, Roberts told TCS of “the energy and the enthusiasm amongst supervisors, the desire to win a just system for everyone,” and expressed hope that “this year will be the year that the colleges and the university are forced to treat us fairly.”
During term time, academics will be striking on the 1st, 9th, 10th, 14th, 15th, 16th, 21st, 22nd, 23rd, 27th, and 28th February, as well as the 1st, 2nd, 16th, and 17th March. This means that February will see more working days with strike action taking place than without. Strike dates have also been set for three dates outside of Cambridge term time: 20th, 21st, and 22nd March.