Anyone else not striking?

[goingpearshaped]

I am not in UCU so not striking. Anyone else? I can sense the divide already between those striking and those not in our dept, I really hate this. Agh, what a mess all round.

Today has been bliss. I've had 20 emails so far and one short meeting. Normally it's around 120 emails a day, that I don't have time to answer because I'm in non-stop meetings. I've managed to get on with some actual work.

It has been nice and quiet on the email front here too. 3 solid hours of data analysis! Feel quite refreshed.

Took the DCs to a play centre with two other academic mums. All of us can't afford to strike for all the days but will use them for school closure days.

Are there any dissenting voices on Twitter regarding the strikes? All I can see are pictures of happy-clappy people on the picket line.

Some of the tweets are also quite cringey, I just saw some of some people complaining that they could not start a family due to the precarity of their contract. I appreciate that this is an issue (it was for me, but is is part and parcel of any career where you are in your late 20s/early 30s before you qualify), but I cannot understand why you'd take on such a precarious contract, knowing what the odds are. I know of one person who's managed to get a lectureship after 3-4 years of precarious lecturing, but that is very much the exception. I advise my PhD students to either take a permanent job, try to get a fellowship, or try their skills outside academia (they have loads of transferable skills in any case).

Also, I am really not sure how the universities could improve this situation.The only thing they realistically can do is redistributing the teaching onto permanent staff, thereby making the precarious staff superfluous. I do not see a scenario where all precarious staff are made permanent, AND all salaries are raised above the offer currently made. It is all a bit unrealistic.

They're occasionally present on Twitter but not getting much airspace (or many likes). But there are dissenting voices aplenty, many of them within the union itself. e.g., ucuagenda.com

I've lost count of the number of currently striking (and, outwardly, compliant) colleagues who have privately voiced despair at the union leadership and denounced the 4 fights as terrible strategy and impossible to win.

You can't simply make all precarious staff permanent. We have a colleague who's been bought out for 2 years to do a big research grant, so we need short-term cover, I think that's reasonable enough to have people on short-term contracts.

This gets back to how stupid they're being about messaging. Because it's clear that universities abuse short-term contracts to avoid hiring people properly, and that should stop, and they would get a lot of people to get behind that. But instead their messaging is something unpractical that will never happen.

The approach to fixed term contracts is absurd. We're

Sorry- that posted mid composition! I asked a (very active in the Union) colleague to be on the panel for a fixed term lectureship last year. He refused because of 'casualisation'. It was a one year post to cover maternity leave.

I did ask him what he thought the alternative was, assuming he didn't want the pregnant colleague to lose her job. Predictably, he didn't have an answer.

Serving on appointment panels is a completely normal (if time-consuming) part of the job. It’s just another example of using the union to back up your moral grandstanding that gets you out of unpleasant tasks, isn’t it?

Ah, the deluge of emails drafted, but not sent, yesterday in 'solidarity'.

Schnitzel thanks for the link, very insightful. There is a lot of grumbling among non-striking colleagues. I've given up on any pretence of supporting the strikes. The never-ending strikes have also adversely affected our Master's programmes, as some key staff on some mandatory modules are always striking. With the postgraduate NSS coming in next year, we might well take a beating as a result, with fewer new students, meaning less income for the department, less money into discretionary funds, and we won't allowed to replace leaving or retiring staff. But at least the strikes 'had an effect'.

Those placards about people delaying children are awful, actually really offensive. Working-class women in the UK on minimum wage, on zero hours, unemployed, working multiple jobs, working manual and physical labour etc. manage to have children. Women all over the world, living in slums and mud huts and surviving on a few quid a day etc. manage to have children. The idea women can only consider having children when they're permanently-employed in cushy, well-paid, middle-class professional jobs doesn't sit well with me. And, as you say, every woman has to contend with difficult decisions about fertility and careers in their 20s/30s - it's shit but not unusual.

I don't think the Union actually has any idea of how to remedy the situations its complaining about. They throw around slogans without actually digging into the end point of those slogans.
I think a lot of this comes from the over-representation of social scientists in UCU and the different role of postdocs and short-term researchers in different disciplines. The most vocal UCU people I don't actually think have a clue about how the sciences are structured and what 'end casualisation' would actually look like in science. I speak as a social scientist with a STEM DP.

On the topic of placards, spotted this yesterday 🙄

I've said this before on MN (maybe on this thread) but these kinds of rhetorics make absolutely no space for accounts of quality. The idea that everyone deserves a permanent post regardless of the quality of their work is absolutely bonkers, and not something you'd see in another sector. Can you image this kind of rhetoric for registrars? "I'm pretty mediocre at surgery, a little bit shaky in my left hand somethings but I deserve a permanent consultant post"

I was tempted to reply to the tweet: How many papers does your daddy have? What's his h-index? How much income has he secured in the last five years? Does he have potential for an impact case study? What are daddy's teaching scores like?

I don't like the fertility placards either. If you decide that personally you don't want to have children until you have a well-paid professional job and a house and all that, then you should go into a career where that is relatively easy to make happen. There are loads of them! Academia is a choice.

I had my DC as a skint PhD student, I wouldn't recommend it really, but women have kids all the time without amazing permanent contracts. They sound so out of touch.

I agree, this is where I departed from my cohort, both as a parent and a mature Phd student. I didn't expect just to be given a permanent job, and I still don't - parent or not. As PP said, there's a role for fixed term positions (fulfilling mat leave) and they can be pragmatically useful in ECR for working out if you want an academic career, developing skills, a track record etc.

I have heard it argued that obtaining the PhD alone is being "qualified" and "experienced" and deserving of a 40 grand salary (someone once moaned to me that a top salary of £36,000 as a tutor is too low when they're so qualified). It's normal in other professions to have an early period of gaining experience in different roles, for lower pay. I've never heard this kind of entitlement from anyone in another profession. It's like just doing a PhD creates a bizarre Freudian relationship with the institution.

The problem is that the precarity argument actually worked at my institution and a significant cohort of new PhDs were offered permanent contracts with a clear promotion track to lecturer positions. So the belief in the obscene injustice of early academic life was entirely confirmed and rewarded for that cohort (and blocked the usual turnover that creates opportunities for others). I know other ECRs who aren't even applying for jobs at the end of their fixed term contracts as they believe that something will be arranged for them, because it "should" (and in the case I'm thinking of, it partly has).

And of course, these ECRs go on to have the same attitudes as they move up the career ladder, which affects dynamics and reward in departments.

The PhD is an unusually lengthy qualification though - I didn't finish mine till I was nearly 30. And until recently there has been no maternity leave AT ALL for PhD students (we have only just got equity with staff. I had a student that had a baby during her PhD and she could only afford to take 3 months off and she had a lot of help from her mum).

Lots of late 20s/early30s move jobs a lot but it's not usually involving a house move and it's not usually because they can't get a longer term contract. Doctors are more or less the exception.

Part of our pay gap issue where I am is due to women not being able to move jobs because they'd have to move house, and they have a husband/kids so they take an admin or temporary job when they are amply qualified for a higher paying or more secure job.

So while yes, lots of lower paid women have children younger and no less secure contracts they are unlikely to have been studying for 10 years post school and they are also unlikely to have to move to the other end of the country to get a professional job (it's all very well saying "just take a non-academic job" but if you are e.g. moving into the civil service or biotech you can't do that after a job at Plymouth/Exeter/Uni of the Highlands and Islands and if you are moving into being a TA or retail locally that's just a slap in the face to a woman with a PhD!)

My point was more that if you want a good stable career before having DC, then don't do a PhD in the first place (or at least, don't do one with the intention to go into academia). For all the reasons you say -- it takes a long time, you might have to move around before getting a permanent job, etc.

If you start a PhD and think you want kids in the next 5-10 years, I think you sort of have to come to terms with the fact that it may be more challenging than with other jobs/studies. There are more risks, that's just the nature of the industry.

I don't see why people should think that just because they have a PhD, they deserve an academic post. There aren't enough posts to go around, for one thing, and not everyone who does a PhD is actually good at teaching and all the other elements.

Part of our pay gap issue where I am is due to women not being able to move jobs because they'd have to move house.

I work in a STEM field where the norm is doing postdocs abroad before getting a permanent post, and the chance of getting a permanent post in academia is low. It certainly impacts on the gender balance of the field but it is something that all PhD students know. Nobody thinks they have a right to a permanent post and those who continue to postdocs usually do so knowing the odds are against them getting a permanent academic post. I guess it is obvious when you work in departments where more than half of the staff are postdocs and each permanent staff member has 2+ students. There obviously aren't enough posts for everyone.

I agree that there are huge systemic issues, absolutely, around pay gaps and inequality.

I don't really believe that going on strike is going to take us anywhere at all towards fixing them.

But all of this leads to men doing science and women not. It's no good saying to young girls "science or babies, can't have both".
I'm also sure the strikes won't prevent precarity but what we have isn't working.

Globally it is the norm in science that researchers do at least a couple of years of postdoc, usually moving between research groups, before getting a permanent post. Yes, this is a barrier for those who can't move (impacting women especially), but UCU striking just isn't going to impact on the global work patterns.

Just got sent the following via UCU stating that:

"This week we asked you to vote on the latest pay offer from employers. Tens of thousands of UCU members voted in an electronic ballot held over four days. A thumping 80.4% supported the union's position of rejecting the employers offer.

Earlier this week UCEA laughably claimed support for strike action was isolated. The only people isolated right now are them.

My message is to employers is very simple: our members have seen through your pleas of poverty as you sit on over £40bn in reserves. Students have seen through your poor attempts to cause division. And even the media have seen through you not having courage to turn up for TV interviews.

Get serious and make a proper offer - or get out of the way.

In solidarity

Jo Grady
UCU general secretary"

See also here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/12775/UCU-members-overwhelmingly-reject-UCEA-pay-offer

See also here for UCEA's view: https://www.ucea.ac.uk/news-releases/3feb23/

UCEA states that UCU encourgaged its members to reject the offer.

Does anybody know what happened after last year's (pointless) set of strikes? Didn't everybody get the 3% offered via UCEA anyway?

Didn't everybody get the 3% offered via UCEA anyway?

Yes, exactly.

“Get out of the way”. ??

Good grief, what on earth is meant by that? Are UCU planning a bank raid to get their hands on the 13%?

😂 I’m just surprised she didn’t say “get in the bin”, which is the kind of Twitter teen speak I’ve come to expect from the GS.