University staff face jobs onslaught in midst of Covid pandemic

By Oisin Duncan, Glasgow Socialist Students

The Glasgow Times has recently reported on the news that the University of Glasgow had issued an email to some of their post-graduate staff that they would not receive teaching hours moving forward.

This follows the effective termination of the majority of hospitality staff at the Queen Margaret Union in March, another cost-cutting measure making workers pay for the effects of the coronavirus lockdown.

Citing a decrease in demand (especially from international students, whose fees are drastically higher than UK students), the university informed post-graduate teaching (PT) staff on one-year and two-year contracts in the college of social and political sciences that would not have their contracts extended or not be allocated teaching hours respectively.

The background to this decision is the funding crisis that all UK universities are set to suffer in the aftermath of the coronavirus lockdown. The UCU estimate that as many as 30,000 jobs could be lost as a result of the fall in numbers of international students coming to the UK to study, as well as the 90% fall in output for higher education since the lockdown began.

This threat to jobs comes while the average annual salary of vice-chancellors in the UK is £350,000. Moreover, large vanity projects such as new sports facilities suck up millions of pounds in construction. Yet, due to the endemic marketisation of the university sector, these expenditures are seen as vital investments, because the universities themselves are run like for-profit businesses.

Socialist Students and Socialist Party Scotland disagree; we view the welfare of staff and students on campus as the first priority. We also see education as a public good which benefits society as a whole, not as a commodity to be given only to those few who can pay a fortune for it.

It is exactly this kind of callous dismissal and structural profiteering which the UCU were fighting against earlier this year and towards the end of 2019. The precarious contracting which has become rife in the UK university sector threatens the job security of PT assistants at the best of times.

This is because these PTAs work on rolling contracts, the lengths of which are anywhere from one month to two years. The regular reviews these contracts entail disrupt any security these workers may have and discourage many from entering higher education in the first place.

Now, in the midst of the worst global pandemic since the Spanish Flu, these vulnerable staff are cut off from vital income simply because the financial numbers don’t add up for university management.

In response to the university’s claims, Socialist Party Scotland demand that the books be opened to inspection. That way the staff on campus, in association with elected student reps, can verify the funding crisis for themselves and propose alternative solutions to sacking workers and raising tuition fees. With a recession certain as Scotland and the rest of the UK emerges from lockdown, this is the only way to ensure that working people are not made to pay for the lost profits of the fat-cat capitalists.

Already the state is moving to keep the more profitable aspects of the higher education sector above water; the Scottish Government recently announced a one-off £75 million funding boost for the research programmes of Scottish universities. No such package has been released for university and college workers, and this shows whose side the Scottish government is on. Socialist Party Scotland would propose the full nationalisation of the universities run under the democratic management of the workforce.

While the Labour MSP James Kelly has come out against the sackings and put public pressure on the university to reverse them, it remains a political reality that working people all over the UK and particularly in Scotland do not have a party which represents them and their interests. Labour have haemorrhaged support in Scotland as a result of repeated failures to resist austerity and their out-of-touch position on independence, now finding themselves third behind the SNP and Tories in Scottish polls.

Socialist Party Scotland stands for a conference of trade unionists and socialists to discuss the formation of a new workers’ party. This party would draw its strength from the most militant layers of the labour movement and crucially would stand against a second onslaught of austerity and the rampant exploitation of capitalism.

The global shock of the coronavirus pandemic has exposed the brutal nature of capitalism to millions, and it’s now more important than ever that working people form an independent political voice to fight against the system and its murderous impacts.