UCU Marking Strikes: Did the cause outweigh the cost?
By Fleur Howe
In April earlier this year UCU members from 145 Universities (including Queen’s University Belfast) voted to reject the insufficient pay and conditions proposals offered by employers. This led to a five month long marking boycott. For the most part, the graduating class affected by this boycott started in 2020 and spent at least half of their degree online – to then return to in person teaching and be faced with mass strikes.
The strikes called for better pay, in line with inflation, and better conditions; which include the eradication of unnecessarily casualised contracts, 35 hour paid weeks, and for the excessive and unpaid workload to be address and rectified. According to The Tab, 69.8% of students support these reasonable requests. The lack of support from employers is damaging to both lecturers and students, with both lecturers and tutors struggling to keep up with students who need more support than they are currently able to receive. The unnecessary and frankly disrespectful casual contracts that label full-time staff as zero hour or fixed term do not account for the excess amount of hours, a continually neglected and dwindling workforce, must labour in order to meet student demands.
While these conditions are more than fair, the impact on the paying students must be considered. The marking boycott over the summer has been the most student-disruptive protest so far. The original announcement of the boycott came with next-to-no information for students, which for the graduating class drew mass anxiety. One student who studied English and History originally received a classification which was then taken away from her as a ‘clerical error’ and that they ‘weren’t guaranteed again’. While half of her peers celebrated unaffected, her second subject remained waiting. She stated:
“The whole process had no specificity, it was just a waiting game”
Amongst this waiting game students had to deal with various conflicting emails and mistakes, raising hopes and dropping them. Once again leaving students ‘stressed and helpless’.
When asked if she regretted doing her degree at this time – impacted both by strikes and the pandemic she replied:
“I enjoyed my time and the friends I made, but I do feel a bit of regret and jealousy that I missed out on so much”
Another student from the same year noted how even in their second and third year with the pandemic restrictions alleviated, many courses ran online lectures – one module only ran three in person lectures over the course of the semester due to strikes and staff sickness. It draws to question whether universities should still charge as much in a post-pandemic society if they are no longer providing as intensive an education as they were in previous years. This issue is both rising because of strikes, but in turn exists because of the conditions that render the strikes necessary.
The call for compensation has been heard since universities first went online in 2020, the marking boycott proved no different. A student confirmed that they were eligible for financial compensation but ‘it’s not enough’. ‘We don’t feel as though we actually graduated’ they stated that:
“The way it was handled ruined graduation for myself and the others affected by the boycott”
Having had no compensation for the first half of their degree, they then lost the most important day of their academic lives. It is without dispute that the suffering of the students outweighed both the cause, and effectiveness of the boycott.
Students affected by the strikes donned gowns and walked across the stage but left empty handed; with many students worried about their future, unable to apply for grad schemes, and still unsure if they got into their postgraduate studies. Queen’s paraded them across the red stage, took photos of their ‘smiles’ and congratulated the non-graduates of the class that they had failed, repeatedly. It is not a lecturer’s responsibility to run an academic institution successfully. They should not be put into a position in which they have to compromise the education of their pupils to fight for better working conditions and reasonable pay rises from a school which earns £400 million a year.
Edited by Laura Ward
- Review: The Marriage Portrait
- The Algae and the Earl: How an Algae Bloom dredged up Lough Neagh’s Past
Leave a Reply