This is my situation as an academic:
I am employed on a 0.5 contract and have been told there is no money for more. So I should be working 2 1/2 days a week. My workload, however, requires a fulltime week.
Letter from Inland Revenue just arrived: my total gross salary for last year, at the age of 54, with 30 years teaching experience and as an internationally recognised authority in my field, was just over £15.000. I cannot live on this. On the other hand, I cannot take a second part-time job as my teaching/research/admin requires a fulltime week.
The university ARE ALREADY DEDUCTING FULL PAY FOR THE DAYS I AM ON STRIKE and fair play to them, naturally they have a right to do that. Nobody's ever disputed it.
What they are now threatening to do is to count every day I work ACCORDING TO MY ACTUAL 0.5 CONTRACT as Action Short of Strike and dock the pay for those days IN ADDITION TO THE PAY ALREADY DOCKED FOR STRIKE DAYS.
So you see: I cannot live on my salary and will be penalised if I try to spend time making up the shortfall elsewhere.
They are also saying we will be penalised for not rescheduling lectures. I HAVE BEEN TRYING ALL SEMESTER TO RESCHEDULE LECTURES that are pedagogically unsuitable and occasioning student complaints: we do not have the capacity! We have all been told we are no longer allowed to put these requests to Timetabling as they cannot deal with them. The only thing we are currently able to do is to request rescheduling for actual errors, as in failing to timetable entire module of mine, or timetabling modules that aren't running.
When a group of my students were double-booked on university activities, I had to cram the entire seminar group (15 students) into a tiny office that happened to be empty: this worked due to great good-humour of students, but it's hardly going to work for 100+ lecture groups. So WE ARE GOING TO BE PENALISED FOR SOMETHING THE UNIVERSITY CANNOT ACTUALLY ENABLE US TO DO.
Sorry for shouting, but I have been so proud of the work I do and it hurts so much to see how little my employers value it. Students, on the other hand, have been amazing, turning up to picket lines with cakes and telling us how much we are appreciated.
We have one of the highest paid VCs in the country, and the highest expenses claim record for senior staff, at the same time as savings are being made through cutting teaching staff by voluntary severance. I stepped in and took a seminar group for the whole of last semester in a different department, completely unpaid and unthanked as far as management were concerned, because there was simply nobody else to do it. And we do that sort of thing, on a regular basis, on the kind of salary I mentioned above.
And now the University are telling me, not only that they have no intention of ever recognising all my extra work, but that they will penalise me if I stop doing it.
My husband and I set out on a similar route, even worked together for a while, but he went into the commercial side and I went into academia, mainly because I really enjoy teaching. He cannot believe how we are being treated.