Academic and academic related staff at many UK universities are to take strike action over pay (and pensions, equalities, casualisation, and workload) from 25 November to 4 December.
Employers’ own research shows that real-terms pay has fallen in universities by 20.8% since 2009.
But digging deeper into the data shows the situation is even worse than this headline figure. By my rough calculations, a newly-minted university lecturer takes home just £10.44 per hour worked.
At my university, a lecturer’s starting salary is £42,433, which sounds pretty good (and is certainly much higher than the UK median of £28,400). My university states that this equates to an hourly rate of £23.25, which implies 1,825 hours being worked per year (42,433/ 23.25), which equates to 35 hours per week spread over 52 weeks (35 x 52 = 1,825). Note that no allowance is made here for annual leave or public holidays.
But what is this lecturer’s actual income? Once we deduct USS pension contributions (which have gone up this year to 8.8%, and will rise further, for no increase in benefits), taxes, and undergraduate student loan repayments, the annual take-home pay is just £28,331.25. And that’s with a generous assumption that the lecturer’s graduate studies were fully funded through a scholarship, meaning that they have no postgraduate loans to repay.
Rather than 35 hours per week, the average lecturer actually works 52.2 hours per week, thanks to chronically excessive workloads. Using the same method to calculate the total hours worked as my employer (i.e. assuming all 52 weeks are working weeks), that’s 2,714.4 hours per year (52.2 x 52). Therefore, the lecturer’s real take-home pay is just £10.44 per hour (£28,331.25/ 2,714.4).
Bear in mind that the average lecturer will have trained for nearly a decade for his or her job (minimum three years undergraduate, one year Masters, four year PhD), will have incurred substantial debt, and is very likely to have worked on inferior, short-term or hourly-paid contracts before landing this lectureship. They are among the best and brightest of their generation, entrusted to educate the next generation. And they earn less than £11 an hour. Go figure.
