Nature spoke to three scientists seeking better pay and working conditions in the largest-ever higher-education strike.
More than 70,000 academics and staff members at 150 UK universities began the largest strike in the history of higher education on 24 November, in protest against poor pay, unsustainable working conditions and pension cuts. Among them are researchers who tellThe industrial action comes after members of the University and College Union voted in favour of the strikes in two national ballots last month.
At King’s, we’ve got a 15% gender pay gap, and a 19% ethnicity pay gap. There’s a real lack of commitment to changing that. How can we possibly have the best and brightest in terms of diversity of perspective and equality of access to universities, if we are not paying people the same? It’s a recipe for bad science and lack of innovation. The fact that we can all be on strike together means that it’s harder to ignore.
My research is primarily fieldwork-based. Excessive workloads have had a massive impact on it. At one point, I was doing twice the university’s maximum teaching allocation. And that translated to about 60 minutes a week for all of my postgraduate supervision, my own research, work publications, reviewing other people’s publications and so on. That’s unacceptable in a modern, research-focused university.At Cardiff University, we don’t have a functional workload model.
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