Student wants fees refund due to missed lectures
A UNIVERSITY student has called for young people paying tuition fees to be reimbursed as lecturing staff joined yesterday’s mass walkout in a row over pensions and pay.
All universities in Wales were affected by the strike, which coincided with the strikes by teachers, train drivers and civil servants.
Cardiff University first-year student Jake Enea called on universities to reimburse students for lost teaching.
The politics student estimates he will lose around £1,000 worth of lectures and teaching across the 18 UCU-planned strike days and said neither the union nor the university employers in general had done enough to avert the walkout in a row that has been rumbling on for years.
A lecturer, who did not want to be named for fear of reprisals, told the Western Mail UCU members are striking over “dangerously high workloads, job insecurity, unfair and low pay, and the cutting of our pensions”.
Across Britain 70,000 university staff will join the strike, with 18 days of walkouts between yesterday and the end of March.
Jake said his generation were being used as “political pawns” in
a row that should have been settled years ago. He is worried he won’t be able to cover his course properly with the amount of lectures and teaching that will be missed due to the strike.
“I don’t think lecturers should strike but saying so affects relationships with them,” he said. “We are being used as political tools because the union and the universities have not done enough to settle this without a strike. I understand why they are striking and they have a right to strike, but at the same time it’s unfair on students and I don’t support it.
“We have had so much of our education disrupted because of Covid and now we’ve come to university and staff go on strike.
“I think I’ll miss eight or nine lectures on one module as a result of this. I’m paying £9,000 a year for my course and I think we should be reimbursed for missed lectures and teaching.
“We are paying for a service we are not getting and should be reimbursed.”
Explaining the reasons for striking in an email to her students, the lecturer said: “As a member of the University and College Union (UCU), I will be striking for 18 days this February and March along with 70,000 university workers across the UK sector.
“This is an ongoing dispute over dangerously high workloads, job insecurity, unfair and low pay, and the cutting of our pensions.
“We do not want to strike... While this strike is bound to be disruptive, we have been in an ongoing dispute since 2018 and are hoping this escalation of industrial action will bring the university vice-chancellors to the negotiation table.
“Current pay is 20% lower than it was a decade ago, and current planned pay rise is well below inflation. Many university workers (especially your seminar tutors) are on fixed-term or zero-hour contracts, meaning they do not get paid all year around.
“We demand a pay rise to catch with those 10 years, and a minimum wage of £10 for staff.
“Around half of teaching-only staff and 68% of the researchers are on fixed-term contracts that often only cover face-to-face teaching months. The average working week in higher education is now above 50 hours. Pensions has been one of the hardest disputes. The Universities Superannuation Scheme has knowingly misrepresented the state of the sector leading to cuts in retirement income (41% for a typical lecturer).”
The strike will affect 2.5 million students.
Last week university bosses offered staff a 5% pay award. UCU said the offer is “not enough” and expects members to reject it in a consultation which was launched on January 30.
In the pension dispute the UCU said a package of cuts made last year will see the average member lose 35% of their guaranteed future retirement income. For those at the beginning of their career the losses are in the hundreds of thousands of pounds.
UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: “University vice-chancellors have been given multiple opportunities to use the sector’s vast wealth to resolve these disputes. Instead, they have forced staff back to the picket line and brought disruption to students.”
On January 25, Universities UK said it was “disappointed” to see more industrial action and said changes made to pensions in 2022 were necessary to put the scheme on a “more sustainable footing”.