The miserly tale of how a university took its staff’s wages – and the public paid the price. Even Scrooge would marvel at Queen Mary’s pay-docking over a marking boycott. No wonder higher education is in turmoil
by Jariiari7
The miserly tale of how a university took its staff’s wages – and the public paid the price. Even Scrooge would marvel at Queen Mary’s pay-docking over a marking boycott. No wonder higher education is in turmoil
by Jariiari7
2 comments
>In this season of quizzing, here’s a real head-scratcher. Can you name the big British employer that punished staff for boycotting a small fraction of their work by taking all of their pay for each day of their boycott? So that even while employees did their other tasks, putting in weeks of work, their pay packets were pilfered, month after month, from high summer until almost the start of advent. Some had to take extra jobs, others drew on hardship funds or stuck essential bills on credit cards. Amid a cost of living crisis and with Christmas looming, the Great Wage Robbery carried on. But who was responsible?
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>Perhaps your imagination has entered some grim distribution hangar, or is hovering above a building site. Or maybe you’re thinking of a care home bullying its migrant workers who are fuzzy on their rights and scared of speaking up. You’re seeing ruthless, rapacious big-C Capital opening its giant, bloody maw wide to chew on some low-paid and underqualified labour. Right?
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>Wrong. Try a charity. To be precise, that branch of charitable enterprise we call a Russell Group university. This is the story of Queen Mary University of London, whose boss, Colin Bailey, is on a package worth £359,000 a year (plus free housing in inner London) , but which bilks its own academics as brazenly as Scrooge did his clerks. If you want a closeup of the turmoil engulfing higher education, or to see how some of our most prestigious white-collar jobs have been so vastly degraded, this is a story for you. Because even Ebenezer would have marvelled at the goings-on at Queen Mary.
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>Continued in link
Well yes, if you don’t do your job then you don’t get paid. If the staff want their wages, then they should do the work that they’re hired to do. You don’t get to pick and choose what parts of your employment contract you fulfil.