Representation of casualised staff
UCU uses the term ‘casualised’ to refer to fixed-term, hourly-paid, part-time, non-employed status, and otherwise insecurely employed workers. Reducing casualisation and improving working conditions is an important part of the union’s work and democratically determined policy. UCU also considers postgraduate researchers (PGRs) to be workers and believes doctoral research should be a staff role with full employment benefits.
Durham UCU has an Anti-casualisation Officer position for representing casualised workers at our university and organising against casualisation. This role generally comes with workloaded paid time, by agreement between the officer and the branch committee. For part-time staff, this workloaded time can be via a separate employment contract.
Committee members also have specific remits for specific casualised staff. In recent years such roles have included:
- Postgraduate Researcher rep
- Fixed-Term rep
- Research staff rep
These roles can also come with workloaded time.
See the Committee page for information about who currently occupies these roles, vacant roles, and how you could get involved.
As well as local representation and campaigns, Durham UCU members have led and actively participated in successful UK-wide campaigning to improve working conditions for casualised university workers. This includes PGRs Against Low Pay, founded by Durham UCU PGR members, which won a large payrise for most of the UK’s funded doctoral researchers in 2022.
2018-2021 successful campaign
In December 2018, Durham UCU submitted a claim to the university on casualisation.
In February 2020, after negotiations strengthened by branch members’ willingness to take industrial action, the union and university issued a joint statement on casualisation.
This agreement has now been enacted in updates to HR’s ‘flexible and casual appointments’ guidance in 2021. UCU reps have advocated since then with HR to ensure that departments adhere to the improved guidance.
These improvements won by Durham UCU members have greatly increased the job security and working conditions of Durham’s fixed-term, hourly-paid, and otherwise casualised staff. For example, more staff now have proper employment contracts which bring entitlement to full sick pay, parental leave, etc. More staff are now entitled to annual payrise increments. Workload models for hourly-paid staff have also improved, although they need to improve further. Importantly, we won an important across-the-board principle that all required work must be paid, and workload models should be flexible to reflect this.
If you are aware of any breach of any principles in either HR’s guidance or the joint statement between UCU and the employer, please contact help@durhamucu.org.uk to advise reps of the issue and seek any needed support.
Student email template (2018)
The Durham Casuals group drafted a template email for students to email to the vice chancellor:
Dear Professor Corbridge,
I am writing to express solidarity with my lecturers and concern for the precarious work situations that drove them to strike. Given the increasing size of the tuition fees paid by students, it is extremely worrying that lecturers’ pay and working conditions at Durham University are becoming worse and worse.
I was shocked to find out that so many of my lecturers are paid on an hourly basis with casual contracts that often do not include adequate payment for preparing classes, writing lectures and marking, all of which – I’m sure you’ll agree – are essential parts of good teaching. What’s more, the widespread use of short-term contracts along with gender and ethnic pay discrimination in academia as a whole only add to my mounting concern for the way this university is managed. Students deserve to be taught by lecturers who are not overworked and underpaid. However, this is far from the case and has led me to conclude that my university experience offers very poor value for money and, moreover, exploits those lecturers depended upon to deliver this experience.
I fail to see how Durham can consider itself world-leading university when it is falling so far behind what is acceptable when it comes to lecturers’ working conditions. I hope that you are able to negotiate a solution to these problems with my lecturers as soon as possible.
Yours sincerely,