Case study: zero hour/casual contracts

We asked strikers to tell us about their personal experiences of how the themes of the strike have affected them. Below we hear from someone who has first-hand experience of the the consequences of casualization at UCL: 

Trying to rent somewhere in London without a fixed employment contract means not having a job reference when landlords ask for it.

Since I finished my PhD, I have been doing various kinds of casual work across the division, coming down to at least 3 different jobs that are being paid out of about 7 different pots of money. While this requires quite a lot of organisational skills on my side to keep track of how much work I do for which pot of money (colour-coded multi-tab spreadsheets are my best friend at the moment), this also asks a lot of other staff in the building. Not only that: it means that I spend a lot of time and energy chasing people up, while ideally I should be spending this time on teaching and supporting students, or even writing up research from my PhD. 

In a sense, I am lucky to have stayed on after my PhD in the first place, as this means I am still be able to use my previous desk, have access to my email, printing, and the UCL computer systems, and know how things work (and who to ask for help when things stop working). However, my contract is still being sorted out despite its official start date being months ago. For part of the work I do, the wonderful administrative staff have been able to come up with a workaround and have managed to pay me for my work, but despite that I am half a year behind on payment for one of the many jobs I’ve been doing. And heaven forbid I get sick, as zero hour contracts don’t have sick pay. 

Moreover, starting this casual contract coincided with my having to move house. Trying to rent somewhere in London without a fixed employment contract means not having a job reference when landlords ask for it. I can’t commit to a full-year tenancy, because what if I were to find a slightly less precarious job at the other end of the country and would need to upend everything at a few months’ notice?

While I am eternally grateful to the very helpful and supportive departmental and finance staff and administrators who are going over and above to help sort my things out, this is not a workable situation to be in. Just because my specific situation means I have been around long enough to be able to use workarounds for impossible issues, relying on the goodwill of other staff should not be essential for me to be able to do my job.