'Not A Happy One' |
(A note from your Framework Negotiating Team)
It’s the time of year when academic staff are planning teaching commitments for the following year, while sessional colleagues anxiously wait to see whether they will have work.
Some academics are being asked to take on teaching which has been part of the regular work of their sessional colleagues. Academics end up stressed and overworked; sessionals end up stressed and redundant.
Hourly paid lecturers at Birkbeck can feel isolated and vulnerable, even though Birkbeck’s mostly a friendly and professional place.
There are some departments that are a model of inclusiveness. But good practice isn’t universal. Human Resources rolls out fine policies regarding the employment of sessional lecturers. But in a context of cuts and restructuring, what happens next sometimes isn’t so fine.
Sessionals often fear to speak out. We fear to make a fuss, fear to assert our rights. If we do, we’re apt to find colleagues with whom we’ve worked for years avoiding us (UCU has several reports of this happening). And do we dare challenge such treatment? What about that reference that I need? Or next year’s teaching? So we grit our teeth and carry on.
UCU and the College’s management would be glad if the entire College observed best practice in working with sessional lecturers. So how do things go wrong?
It’s not usually deliberate meanness. However, sessionals are in some ways a threat to the College we’ve served for so long. We don’t mean to be. We want to go on doing our best for Birkbeck students. But we’d like to start doing so for a fair rate of pay, instead of being stuck on rates that were set in 2007.
And there’s the snag. There are so many of us, and the rates of many of us are so low, that, even having let go most of the sessionals without a legal claim to permanent employment, the College is horrified at what paying all of us properly would do to the deficit.
In some cases the integration of FLL’s sessionals into the new schools and departments has gone well. But in others, sessionals have been treated as a threat to be managed and (in extreme cases) got rid of.
UCU is struggling to advance two main concerns in the Framework negotiations for sessionals. In the longer term we need to agree the working hours necessary to deliver our teaching. It will then be clear what our pay ought to be, given that virtually all of us have been graded, even though the announcement of our grading keeps being postponed. In the short term, we’re pressing for a pay increase for those of us on the lowest rates to reinstate the value our pay had in 2007.
We’re grateful to everyone who has already responded to our pleas for information. But we could still do with knowing more about the real hours hourly paid lecturers have to work to deliver each hour of our teaching. The more detail the better.
We also need to know about all the ways in which pay has been eroded: not just by inflation, but by the withdrawal of allowances and anything else that we need to try to claw back. Some of us have been asking whether harmonised contracts are still a reality. Our response is ‘yes’: UCU is working for it and the College’s management has always given a commitment to resolving this since current sessional contracts are not sustainable. But we’re going to have to work together to make a fair new deal a reality.
Please contact us at ucu@bbk.ac.uk putting "FN2" in the subject header
Negotiations with the College on behalf of hourly paid lecturers, teaching assistants, demonstrators and their ilk have been going on for more than three years. Why is it taking so long to implement the National Framework Agreement (NFA) of 2003 for these staff? Read our earlier (April 2011) message at http://www.bbk.ac.uk/ucu/campaigns/SL