‘Dehumanising’ impact of casualisation of HE staff exposed

Casualised academic staff are being denied academic freedom and are treated as invisible, second-class citizens, prevented from choosing what they will research or teach, unable to plan a professional or home life, and vulnerable to exploitation by permanent staff, according to a new report published by the University and College Union (UCU) in the United Kingdom.

The report says the extensive use of casualised staff without a secure contract is a significant problem for UK higher education. The latest data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) shows that two-thirds of researchers (67%) are on fixed-term contracts and almost half of teaching-only staff (49%) are employed on fixed-term contracts. On top of that there are more than 6,500 academic staff with zero-hours contracts and a further 68,845 academic staff who hold ‘atypical’ contracts.

It says this situation is not an accident of employment and recruitment cycles but has become a business model on which universities depend. It contravenes fundamental documents on higher education widely regarded as authoritative in the UK, including the 1997 UNESCO Recommendation Concerning the Status of Higher Education Teaching Personnel and the Magna Charta Universitatum.

Academics are highly motivated people, drawn into the profession by a sense of wanting to make a difference to the world through research and teaching, but this sense of vocation is being abused by employers who are increasingly switching to a business model offering casualised and precarious work, promising more rewards than there are, the report says.

“Staff are treated not as human beings of equal value to their colleagues, but as second-class academic citizens, mere ‘resources’ to be deployed to further strategic visions of vice-chancellors and governing boards.”

The report, Second Class Academic Citizens: The dehumanising effects of casualisation in higher education, written by Nick Megoran and Olivia Mason of Newcastle University and based on extended interviews with academic staff, argues that the dehumanising effect of casualisation is not a problem of poor practice by certain managers that could be corrected through training or new human resource policies.

“Rather, because casualised staff are used, in part, to ease the workload and further the careers of permanent staff, it is a structural issue in which all academics are implicated.”

Launched at the Houses of Parliament on 20 January, the report calls on the government to insist that universities are honest about the extent of casualisation and instruct the higher education regulator, the Office for Students, to demand comprehensive data about universities’ use of casualised staff. It also calls for individual universities to work with UCU to negotiate the transition of casualised staff onto more secure contracts.

UCU Vice-President Vicky Blake, in the introduction to the report, said: “Casualised workers are stressed, exploited, underpaid and often pushed to the brink by senior management teams relying on goodwill and a culture of fear. Our love of learning is weaponised in order to keep the bottom line cheap, while senior management and vice-chancellors’ pay soars.”

She said the report “delves deep into the worst effects of the marketised model of higher education upon its most vulnerable workers”.

The report says research councils should make it a condition of grants to employ research staff on open-ended contracts and to support greater stability of employment.

“University teachers, researchers and support staff deserve the same secure and decent work we wish for all of the students we work together to educate.”

The report also recommends that national and international charter mark givers, such as Magna Charta Universitatum, should pressure universities to step up to their formal commitments and, if they fail to do this, should suspend their accreditation.

‘Fundamentally dehumanising’

In a foreword to the report, Chi Onwurah, member of parliament for Newcastle Central, said: “Precarious employment can be deeply detrimental to human well-being. This is an issue not just for people who work in the so-called ‘gig economy’, but also increasingly for those who work in higher education. This report highlights that poor employment conditions are not only bad news financially and in terms of mental health, but that they can be fundamentally dehumanising.”

According to the results of UCU’s Counting the Costs of Casualisation in HE (2019), part-time and hourly-paid teachers are doing 45% of their work without pay, almost half of participants held down two or more jobs in education, 71% of respondents reported that they believed their mental health had been damaged by working on insecure contracts, and 83% of respondents agreed that their contractual status made it hard to make long-term financial commitments such as buying a house and planning for a family.

A significant majority of respondents said that they had insufficient paid time to prepare adequately for their classes, complete their marking, give proper feedback, and undertake their own scholarship.

Casualised labour also exacerbates existing inequalities: for example, whereas 28% of white male academics are on fixed-term contracts, the figure for Asian female academics is 45%.

Nor was this a convenient lifestyle choice: 97% of respondents on a fixed-term contract said that they would rather be on a permanent one, while 80% of hourly paid staff said that they would rather be on a contract that guaranteed them hours, even if it meant less flexibility.

Curtailed freedom

The research for the Second Class Academic Citizens report involved long interviews of one and half to four hours with 17 academics.

Workplace accounts provided by casualised staff revealed that they frequently experienced the curtailment of freedom, the denial of agency and the absence of trust as dehumanising.

Examples included incidents of staff not being allowed to choose the subject of their research or their work being skewed towards the career goals of the grant holder who employed them; being told to publish more papers but being denied the time to research and write them; or being forced to lead the teaching of a module which they deemed of dubious quality, taught by staff without the relevant scholarship.

The report noted that permanent jobs are increasingly given to people who can help the institution move up the league tables, particularly those with publications in top-rated journals and those who secure grants. Yet many grants are only awarded to permanent staff, and the time necessary for research, writing and publication is severely constrained on contracts frequently shorter than 12 months long or less than 100% of the time.

“Further, we have seen an increasing switch from ‘temporary lectureships’ (which give an equal amount of research time to temporary staff as to permanent ones) to ‘teaching fellowships’ and the like, where far less research time is given to temporary staff than to the permanent staff they may be filling in for and whom they are working alongside,” the report says.

Change ‘long overdue’

Blake, drawing on personal experience, said the impact of casualisation is “painful and difficult” for many staff to talk about, “even those who have since clawed into an ‘open-ended’ contract”.

“The financial impact of insecurity twines efficiently together with the social and professional impact: the undermining of confidence, the erosion of illusory ‘opportunity’, the daily slog of trying to keep one’s head above water, to pay rent, and to maintain relationships.

“I know this personally, and I hear it daily in my role as vice president of UCU. Speaking out about the very real, very personal impact that casualisation wreaks upon individuals, our families, and our academic communities can feel incredibly dangerous. But to speak out collectively is among our greatest weapons in demanding change.

“This report draws out much of the pain which is felt and internalised by so many in a sector that echoes and reinforces traditional hierarchies and class divides far more than many senior leaders seem willing (or able) to recognise. Change is long overdue.”