Case study: Casualisation

Welcome to our series on the personal stories of staff members in the department. You can follow this series with the tag 'your stories'. We'll be updating daily with more stories of why we're striking, so make sure you check back regularly.

We asked strikers to tell us about their personal experiences of how the five fights have affected them. Below, we hear from someone affected by casualisation, who fell between the cracks of several different zero-hours contracts. Decisions taken at various levels of the university have made zero-hours contracts the easiest way for departments to employ people teaching on a non-permanent basis, and use of these contracts has soared in recent years. Many of your PGTAs, and some of your lecturers, are employed on such contracts.

I constantly felt like a second class citizen

As a default, someone working at UCL on a zero-hours contract is not entitled to the following:

• a regular paycheque
• sick pay
• parental leave, including maternity leave
• card access to UCL buildings
• access to room-booking systems
• off-site access to library e-resources (e.g. journals, e-books)
• progression up the pay scales or redeployment opportunities
• access to the UCL software database, which allows staff members access to software for which UCL has bought licenses, including software that is crucial for research purposes

Additionally, there are often problems accessing the holiday pay to which they are legally entitled (because each department manages holiday pay for zero-hours workers differently), and the way that UCL manages pensions essentially makes it impossible for someone on an irregular zero-hours contract to qualify to be enrolled in the pension scheme.

In order to make ends meet, I took a few different positions at UCL, each of which was managed through a separate zero-hours contract. Some of these contracts paid monthly, while others paid twice a year. Imagine only receiving a paycheque twice a year! This situation meant that I had to spend many (unpaid) hours each month, just checking that I was getting paid for the work I had done and for the holiday pay to which I was entitled. This task is made more complicated because UCL pays one month in arrears, so I would have to work out at the beginning of, say, May whether I had gotten paid for the work I did in March. Mistakes often happened: when I didn't get paid enough, I had to check the following month that the shortfall had been paid on top of what I would normally have gotten, and when I got paid too much, UCL would claw it back by paying me less the following month. This financial uncertainty meant that I had to put several life decisions on hold, because I didn't know whether I would have the cashflow to, say, move house or attend a friend's wedding. 

Additionally, I constantly felt like a second class citizen. One day, on my way in to teach a lecture, my ID card stopped letting me in to buildings. It turned out that my visitor access had lapsed. This would not have happened to someone on an employment contract. The truth hit me that, despite the fact that I was teaching classes, UCL still considered me only a 'visitor' - not a part of the academic community. I also had problems with library access for the same reasons. The department was able to help me work around these problems, but the problems were a constant reminder that I didn't belong at UCL, and it made me feel that my contributions were not as valued as someone with a non-zero-hours contract. 

The fact is that I shouldn't have to rely on the help of sympathetic faculty, admin, library, finance AND security staff in order to do the job that UCL needs me to do and to get fairly remunerated for it. The fact that I personally was able to find a way around these problems does not mean that the situation is acceptable: people who are less informed about their rights, and less able to push for those rights, are currently being exploited throughout UCL. We need to fight back against the rise in casualisation, and push for an end to zero-hours contracts for teaching staff at universities. That's why I'm striking.