£20 per contact hour for postdoc lecturing. Usual or a piss-take?

[NicolaNineLives]

Job is advertised as 6hpw. Within those six hours, the successful candidate will write and deliver six lectures each week, as well as supervising and marking all student assignments and doing one's own share of course admin.

Seriously?

I think we pay about £25ph (humanities), including all marking. I only discovered recently that exam marking has been included in this (which wasn’t the case a few years ago). However, we don’t allow TA’s to lecture. They do 2 hour tutorials where they follow the topics/ reading provided by lecturers.

Hmmm here it's £16ph but 1.5 x contact time to include marking and 2.5 x contact time to include prep and marking - something like that!

That’s shocking. As a PhD student I was paid double that per hr of lecturing (although I mostly took seminars at about £25 per seminar instead) plus ALL marking paid separately.

Prep time wasn’t paid but there was an additional payment of you were the course convenor.

That is beyond unethical. If you include marking is probably below minimal wage. I guess they have a captive audience desperate for experience and willing to work for shite.
When I hear things like this I despair.
Universities where once bastions individual thinking and the moral compass in society. What have we come too.
Ps not an academic but have a university education - thankfully before these pre corporate times.

This seems wrong. Are you sure there are no "multiplier" when calculating the wages? My uni for instance pays about £15 per hour for a TA but multiplied by 2.5 to include prep and marking.

Definitely no multiples paid. Glad not just me finding it dodgy..

Someone should tip the unions off!

Someone might have

I would not attempt to defend paying for 6 contact hours, instead of the full number of hours required to do the job.

However, one has to be a bit careful before screaming that this is totally exploitative. 20 years ago it would have been common to get a postdoc (in science subjects) to do a few hours teaching on top of their research, and pay them in an ad hoc manner for such teaching. Such a position would not have been advertised. In my subject area, the lectures notes/slides would be given to the postdoc so little preparation would be needed.

Nowadays we are forced to advertise all jobs. It is still the case in my subject area that such part-time teaching jobs would be taken by postdocs on ~30k full-time salaries, for teaching experience and extra salary. There is not a culture in my subject area of early career researchers trying to make a living out of such jobs - the closest would probably be in Oxbridge colleges, where people take several part-time college teaching jobs to make up one full-time job.

This culture seems very different to what people describe happening in humanities, where early career researchers really are scraping a living out of such jobs.

Interesting analysis: thank you. This job is in a newly-opened and teaching-focused department of a RG institution, and seems to operate outwith its institutions usual payscales and HR systems. Barge pole. Not touching.

@user2222, I’m in the Humanities and it’s very much as you describe. It’s awful for those trying to survive by combining a few teaching hours from different institutions—while hoping they land at least a temporary contract.

Outrageous! Our teaching assistants (usually PhDs) get paid 2x for prep and marking separately. It's still not a high wage, but it does take account of more than just the teaching.

The payment should be double that for HEI.

Is it for a HEI? Or an FE?