Summer of discontent looms for undervalued uni staff
On paper, the grand Auckland institution seems in rude health, boasting a $133m surplus last year. In the last 10 years it spent $1.5 billion on property development. The boss earns some $280,000 more than the prime minister – an eye-watering $755,000.
Welcome to the University of Auckland, our largest research organisation, home to more than 13,000 staff and postgraduate students who generate ‘‘around $230m in annual research revenue’’, according to the university’s website. These workers include ‘‘33% of the toprated researchers in the whole country’’.
But despite a surge in enrolments and an enviable bottom line, all is not well at New Zealand’s largest research organisation – or any of the country’s seven other universities.
Auckland University members of the Tertiary Education Union went on strike for four hours last month. Their pay was docked, in retaliation. Staff at AUT, the University of Waikato, Massey
University, Victoria University of Wellington, Canterbury University, Lincoln University and the University of Otago also went on strike, protesting about pay that has not kept up with inflation, and is also well behind other employment sectors.
Researchers on short-term contracts are vulnerable to soaring rents and food prices. Tutors and PhD students are paid shockingly low stipends, despite being the worker bees of research labs. The minimum wage, after tax, is about $35,000 a year; university PhD stipends average $27,000, with even the most attractive packages only offering $35k.
‘‘We’re asking for a pay rise,’’ says one Auckland academic, ‘‘that reflects the cost of living, and for the university to be a living wage employer. The university disagrees and its current best offer is to give us a pay cut in real terms.’’ (The living wage is about $40,000 a year after tax.)
Auckland University, having demanded long hours of unpaid extra work during lockdowns, academics say, is clawing back existing conditions – leave and retirement entitlements – despite its affluence. Staff feel exhausted and undervalued. A pay cut in real terms is even harder to take, they say, under the university’s muchderided tide of expensive managerialism.
Before retiring last year, economics professor Tim Hazledine took a serve at university bureaucracy in a piece headed ‘‘Managerialism doesn’t belong in universities’’.
‘‘I have calculated that, in the 20 years since 2000, the number of front-line academics plus support staff at the university has grown a bit less than the rate of students, which increased by 49%,’’ he wrote. ‘‘But the number in other professional and managerial roles nearly doubled and now comfortably exceeds front-line numbers.’’
Psychology professor Quentin
Atkinson, one of Auckland University’s top-rated researchers, who won the Vice-Chancellor’s Research Excellence Medal in 2016, tells me: ‘‘It has become common to work long hours, but this went into overdrive during the pandemic – late nights and weekends reformatting courses at short notice, running classes in person and online to sustain the university. ‘M any staff were also involved in responding to the health crisis itself. After all of this, to be told that we were having our pay docked for a fourhour strike was a real slap in the face.’’
It appals him that, when revenue was threatened, senior academic staff were encouraged to take voluntary redundancy – a process that cost the university $44m. ‘‘Some departments, like philosophy, were gutted, losing world-leading researchers. The next year we have a $133m surplus, and construction of our $320m gymnasium continues unabated.
‘‘The assumption seems to be that property is our greatest asset and staff are our greatest liability – that’s totally backwards.’’
The university likes to point to a lack of academic ‘‘churn’’ as evidence that staff are happy with their lot. But for academics to switch to other jobs in their own speciality, they often need to move overseas. If your partner is an academic, it is even more difficult to move.
Despite the provocations, the TEU and striking workers are taking care not to impact students. ‘‘No-one wants to squeeze students to get the attention of management,’’ tweeted physics professor Richard Easther. ‘‘These actions, those declared so far, will have little real impact on students. But if ‘management’ ignores that, they risk erasing the social contract that makes a university work.’’
If university vice-chancellors are talking to each other, so are workers. Both groups will be looking overseas, where inflation is also forcing university staff to demand pay they can actually live on. At the University of California this week, academic workers are striking in a walkout said to be the largest in US higher education history. University staff are also striking across the UK, where the union movement is making a strong comeback.
Threatening workers’ ability to strike by docking their pay gives the TEU an even firmer grip on the moral high ground.
As the poet Andrea Brady noted recently in a London Review of Books piece about industrial action in universities, ‘‘Trade unions are the last form of collective strength for working people.
‘‘Criminal barristers struck and were immediately offered a 15 per cent rise. The GMB [a UK general trades union] has won increases of as much as 27 per cent for environmental service workers. The summer of discontent looks likely to continue.’’
‘‘The assumption seems to be that property is our greatest asset and staff are our greatest liability – that’s totally backwards.’’