I’d also be unimaginably pissed if I was a student paying 9K+ a year in fees and my teachers were having to walk out to be paid fairly.
I feel for students. Two years of missing out on the University experience and piss poor education with no refund, now missing out on lectures again due to strikes
> Katherine, who uses the pronouns they/them…
Why is this related to the article?
A major reason for the strike is **working conditions**. They are awful. Seriously.
The level of overwork isn’t just ‘excessive’ or ‘unfair’, it is flat out dangerous. Just in the last few weeks I’ve had colleagues tell me they are:
​
* Working every evening and all weekend.
* Getting up at 5am to work.
* Having breakdowns on campus.
* Working full time through their holidays to catch up because ‘it’s worse if I don’t’.
* Sleeping in their office.
It’s not isolated; the points above were a different colleague every time. People are getting sick. Rather than hire enough staff so that their workforce isn’t stretched beyond breaking point, universities are instead using people on casualised zero-hours contracts to plug the gaps in teaching, then dropping them once the term is over.
Lots of people have an image of workshy lecturers relaxing in an armchair in their ivory tower. If that was ever true, it isn’t now.
4 comments
Fully on the side of the teachers here.
I’d also be unimaginably pissed if I was a student paying 9K+ a year in fees and my teachers were having to walk out to be paid fairly.
I feel for students. Two years of missing out on the University experience and piss poor education with no refund, now missing out on lectures again due to strikes
> Katherine, who uses the pronouns they/them…
Why is this related to the article?
A major reason for the strike is **working conditions**. They are awful. Seriously.
The level of overwork isn’t just ‘excessive’ or ‘unfair’, it is flat out dangerous. Just in the last few weeks I’ve had colleagues tell me they are:
​
* Working every evening and all weekend.
* Getting up at 5am to work.
* Having breakdowns on campus.
* Working full time through their holidays to catch up because ‘it’s worse if I don’t’.
* Sleeping in their office.
It’s not isolated; the points above were a different colleague every time. People are getting sick. Rather than hire enough staff so that their workforce isn’t stretched beyond breaking point, universities are instead using people on casualised zero-hours contracts to plug the gaps in teaching, then dropping them once the term is over.
Lots of people have an image of workshy lecturers relaxing in an armchair in their ivory tower. If that was ever true, it isn’t now.
(x-post with a comment on /r/ukpolitics for info)