Since October last year, UCU, and some of our lecturers and other Uni staff members, have been in contact with the fat cats at University management about the shit way in which they are being treated. As pay
rises for the big dogs escalate, pay for lecturers stagnates and does not rise in proportion to inflation.
The new offer from management to UCU is a 12% decrease in pay over the last five years and our lecturers are rightly refusing (well, ours at York are currently in talks with management and the Union about the boycott) to mark our exam papers until they are treated fairly. It must have been pretty galling to see Brian Cantor cruising from one campus to the next in a limousine last year, amid drastic pay cuts.
Our Vice Chancellors, who have made this cop-out offer, have seen their pay rise by an average of 5% this year alone. Raising the pay of a Vice Chancellor doesn’t get us a good VC, people. It gets us a rich one. Is a Vice Chancellor who ignores the pleas of their workers and takes pay rises whilst administering pay cuts, a good one?
Students should stop complaining about this boycott, which will be announced at the beginning of May, as we have a direct interest in supporting those who teach us, those who want to keep our education system and stop Universities becoming a money-making factory for those at the top. The attitude which bloats pay for management whilst cutting it and raising fees (yes, our fees) for the most important people at the University- those doing the learning, the research and the teaching- is the same attitude which lead to trebling our fees. We need to stop this culture of ignoring students and staff.
Around the country, students have supported staff campaigns, with occupations, pickets and even borrowing confidential documents from the University of London to find out about the closure of ULU and how they are liaising with Unison to gag the Justice for Cleaners campaign. From the plight of outsourced cleaners on zero hours contracts to the cut in fees of lecturers, students all over the UK have stood by them and supported their fight. In York, there’s a different picture.
Picket lines are sparse, and crossed, and people are more likely to complain about missing their seminar than the injustice done to those who take them. Students don’t care to learn why the staff are striking, or taking part in a boycott, and are part of the silent ‘apathetic’ majority who allow injustice to take place.
It may be a minor inconvenience to you, if you have to wait longer to get your results, and that is worth sympathizing with, but in the long run, it’s worse if we start having a culture of cutting the pay of and increasing the fees for the people who make the University great.
Don’t aim the anger at those who are striking- they aren’t doing it lightly, as Management has threatened to cut 100% of the pay of those who take part, in order to stop the boycott- aim it at the people who have caused the strike. The people who are turning Universities into a place for the privileged, a place which doesn’t value the people who go there to teach, research and learn and a place which oppresses and silences those who protest.
As stuffy and out-of-touch lecturers may seem sometimes, they are at least ostensibly working for us. They are accessible and can be held accountable, they aren’t stuck on chintz sofas in the ivory tower that is Hes Hall; if you need to have a go at a lecturer for being shit they at least have office hours and ways of contacting them. We can see them doing their job and it is a valuable one – what does Lamberts actually do?
So to conclude, we should be supporting the boycott if it does take place. We should be standing with our lecturers on the picket lines when they strike and we should not cross picket lines.
We should stand against the Management who are lining their own pockets, and cutting the pay for the people without which they would have no Russell Group University to boast of. Our minor conveniences will pale in comparison if this fight is won.