Teachers and office staff struck on November 28, 29 and 30 for the first time in a private paid higher education institution in the UK. Members of the Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) at University of Sheffield International College (USIC) have voted to reject an additional 1 per cent increase in salary for just four months by the employer study group.
It was a total of five days of strike action by 80 USIC workers following a poll in October. Eighty-four percent voted to strike after the study group rejected an offer of more than 5 percent. A rate offer was rejected in a vote returned last Friday, after the union suspended its first two days of work. Julie Kelly, a regional officer at the University of California, called calling off the strike just a day before it was due to begin — a “goodwill gesture,” noting that the study group “could do better.”
USIC is associated with the University of Sheffield and uses its own coat of arms, and offers preparatory courses for international students. 50 universities have been contracted to provide online and face-to-face learning and are one of the largest providers of international education to universities in the UK, Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand.
The striking USIC workers denied allegations that their demands of 12 percent of the wages were “unaffordable”. A homemade banner hung on the picket line this week highlighted the massive pay increases for study group managers. The number of senior managers earning salaries of more than £100,000 has nearly tripled in recent years. Director positions are being advertised with a salary of between £120,000 and £130,000. The starting rate for a full-time lecturer at USIC is around £32,000, well below the national average of £38,131, while office and support staff are recruited at full-time rates just above the minimum wage.
The World Socialist Web site Speak to teachers on the picket line who are calling for a reversal of the gap between low wages for staff and spiraling earnings for study groups during the pandemic. Education staff linked their fight to the retroactive effect of commercialization on higher education.
A full-time lecturer explained: “We’re making history now. Last year we only received a 3 per cent pay increase that wasn’t retroactive. It only covered six months. We were told things would be better after the pandemic. The study group made savings – they didn’t have the same costs.” The estate, to hire facilities to teach due to the shift to online learning. There has to be a fight against the level of harm. The proportion of contract workers to those without any secured work is about 35% to 65%. I don’t want to accept that for my colleagues.”
A short-term contract lecturer added: “A lot of our contracts are very short, up to three months, which of course keeps the staff flexible, but means we are stuck in a cycle constantly reapplying for jobs we have previously done and in my case I move around country and I work in different universities.
“We are part of the university that was bred for the study group. We are inside the system but we are not part of the system. We are private but legislated by the university. We exist inside a system where we have to identify assessments that are pedagogically flawed, and that’s an open secret. But here’s the logical conclusion of the market: If you pump out market forces, you get an increasingly weaker education and money gets sucked out of the system.
Students pay a huge amount of money for the courses, up to £22,000 per year. Private business drains money.
This is not just an industrial dispute. We have taken a 25 per cent cut in wages in real terms since 2009, and raided our pensions by 35 per cent from 2020. It is a value extraction which is completely unacceptable.”
After staff rejected the revised offer, UCLA chapter president Sam Moorcroft stated, “Our members have made it clear time and time again that we will not accept a massive pay cut. We’ve kept this college going through the pandemic, supporting and educating international students, and now our payroll is crashing in.” The study group led to the understanding that if they don’t value their employees, they don’t value anything about the college.”
But UCLA officials reinstated “pay cuts on substantial real terms” to justify suspending the strike. The study group’s miserable last-minute offer of an extra 1 per cent retroactive to 1 September 2022, for just four more months, is paired with a one-off payment of £300 for full-time staff making less than £25,000. It doesn’t even cover the larger group of casual faculty.
The study group’s response to Morecroft’s pleas and Kelley’s “goodwill gesture” was such a strikebreaker that office staff were recruited from the Brighton Study Group, 200 miles away, to help enroll students. This confirms that no battle can be fought against the multinational corporation on a local basis.
UCU has not announced any further strike dates, and working to base from December 1 will not seriously affect grading over Christmas and the New Year.
USIC workers have taken a decisive step forward, but they face a fight on two fronts – against a ruthless employer and a UCU bureaucracy that seeks to isolate and weaken their resistance.
USIC’s scheduled five-day strike coincided just with the final day of three days of stoppages by 70,000 UCU members at 150 institutions of higher learning over the past two weeks. UC officials based their “leverage” campaign on pleas to the University of Sheffield to step in as arbitrator, not to the thousands of staff who walked out along with those at Sheffield Hallam University as part of the strike against attacks on wages and pensions and unrest.
Last week, staff of the University of Sheffield English Language Training Center at USIC took part in the national activity on November 24th and 25th. Members of UCU’s USIC chapter were informed that this was not their fight, dividing education workers into the two interconnected facilities who teach the same students.
UCU’s futile track at USIC reflects the national “UCU Rising” campaign of corporate collaboration with the administration and conservative government. UCSD general secretary Joe Grady bragged this week that the national strike had succeeded in getting employers “in the hall” but kept quiet about the content of the “enhanced offer” that was made.
Grady spoke at a rally in London on Wednesday alongside union bureaucrats working to end the national strike. This includes Telecoms Workers Union (CWU) leader Dave Ward agreeing he is seeking to impose it on BT/Openreach’s 40,000 telecoms workers. Rail, Maritime and Transport (RMT) leader Mick Lynch is in talks with the Conservative government to end the National Rail dispute, after declaring victory for ScotRail and Transport for Wales.
USIC workers should take matters into their own hands and form a general strike committee to reach study group workers across the country and internationally and establish direct relationships with university workers. Informal exploitation is pervasive throughout the university sector, with a third of staff working on short-term contracts nationally. A real wage claim must also be put in place to break inflation, to defend academics and support staff from the cost-of-living crisis.
The market transition contracts based on the provision of public education as a basic social and democratic right must be reversed. This requires a political struggle not just against the Conservative Party but against the right-wing, pro-business Labor Party. We urge USIC staff to contact the Socialist Equality Party to discuss the way forward.
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