University teaching staff in Sheffield, and across the country, are currently engaged in the longest period of industrial action in their profession’s history, eighteen days of strike action across February and March.
Fifteen years of unrest, peppered with the occasional skirmish between academics and their employers, has erupted into a full-blown civil war.
In this conflict, there are two fronts, one focused on working conditions and pay, and another on pensions.
You may recognise the former. Over recent months, striking workforces nationwide have been asking for pay increases aimed at easing the consequences of inflation on the cost of living. Academia is no different.
The UCU, the union representing academics, has demanded a rise of 2% above the Retail Price Index, a measure of inflation.
The offer made by University and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA), the representative body for 172 institutions across the UK, fell “well short” according to the University and College Union (UCU). The UCEA’s latest proposal was a 5% minimum pay increase (8% for the lowest paid staff) and was rejected by the UCU.
However, Raj Jethwa, the UCEA’s Chief-Executive, argued that it is “misleading to their members” for the UCU to “ask them to lose 18 days of pay in pursuit of an unrealistic 13.6% (RPI + 2%) pay demand”. He implored UCU leaders to “provide their members with a realistic and fair assessment of what is achievable”.
The UCU is further pressing for a reduction in ‘unmanageable and unsustainable’ workloads and ending the trend of workforce casualisation, pointing to the practice of universities hiring academics on ‘insecure’ and ‘demoralising’ zero-hours or temporary contracts. A UCU statement labelled them “bad for staff, and bad for education”.
The employer’s theory runs that these contracts are a useful recruitment tool for short-term research projects.
Dr Sam Marsh, senior vice-president of the Sheffield UCU branch and teacher in the School of Mathematics and Statistics, said that this is all part of a larger picture, one in which pay has been falling in real terms for over a decade.
He said: “Working conditions have been plummeting. While pay’s been cut, the amount that’s been demanded from staff at universities is ridiculous. People who are leaving aren’t being replaced, more work, new initiatives, more emails to answer, more training to do, and people are just absolutely burnt out.”
The tensions may be higher still in the pensions dispute.
The Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) is the largest private pension fund in the United Kingdom, worth over £80 billion and investing in everything from wind farms to crematoria. It has been in a state of near-constant reform since 2011, with the most recent package of cost-cutting measures deemed necessary by the trustee if the scheme is to pay members what they were promised in their pensions, over the next 30 years. This follows the most recent valuation of the USS in March 2020, which showed a £14 billion deficit.
The USS is a hybrid system. A portion of a member’s income goes into the more popular determined benefit pension scheme (the income builder), which offers a set, guaranteed pension determined by salary and service, with the employer assuming investment risk.
Any income above a threshold is put into a less stable defined contribution scheme (the investment builder), which allows the employee more control over their retirement savings but guarantees nothing, with employees bearing the cost of poor investments. That threshold has been lowered from £60,000 to £40,000.
The rate at which a worker’s pension grows has also reduced as a result, and protection against inflation weakened. Under the UCU’s calculations, the average lecturer has lost out on 35% of their future retirement income. The union is calling for complete restoration of benefits.
The debate can be reasonably reduced to whether the USS is being too cautious with its estimates, and needlessly harming academics.
UCU’s Sheffield branch pensions officer, Dr Matthew Malek, said that the deficit shown in the valuation “is not real”, and that the USS has chosen to base reforms on a particularly bleak fiscal snapshot from March 2020, the beginning of the first pandemic-related lockdown. A more recent, smaller USS monitoring report from June 2022 showed a £1.8 billion surplus – a £15.8 billion increase on the previous estimate.
The Pensions Regulator (TPR, a government body) requires the USS to use ‘prudent assumptions’ in their sums, but Dr Malek accused the fund of “using reckless prudence. Looking back as far as 2008, you can see that we have always massively outperformed USS predictions.”
However, the UUK argue that it is not entirely up to employers. TPR is pushing for increasingly hawkish fiscal rules, and there is little opportunity for debate when they make their position clear. It would point out that academics’ pensions are well above average compared to the rest of the private sector, where the guaranteed defined pension model is verging on extinction, due to long-term trends such as people living longer and falling returns on investments.
Whilst academics may provide a public service, the yearly sum of £9,250 required by most home students for their education demonstrates they are not public sector workers. To this, Dr Malek’s rebuttal is simple: “Give me a private sector salary and pay increases, then I’m ok with a private sector pension.”
If this is a civil war, where do students sit? Simply put, they are collateral damage. 18 days of strikes across February and March. A month’s worth of lost teaching time. Over £1,000 of tuition fees wasted.
For a non-striking lecturer, who wished to remain anonymous: “I just could not strike and further blight the most blighted degree cohort of students I have ever seen”.
They used last year’s third-year students as an example to explain their rationale: “Last year they were finishing their degree. More than any other group I have seen in my career, this one has suffered tremendously. All of their three years were scarred by strikes or by covid, and for two of their three years, both.”
The student experience is under heavy bombardment. Whatever merits the combatant’s arguments may have, it doesn’t mean the shrapnel doesn’t leave scars.