Hi everyone! Here are some blog posts by members of the casualization group that we drafted up as a summary of what we found during our interviews with tutors at the university. We carried out six semi-structured interviews across departments in the university. We hope these shed some light on the day to day experience of being a tutor here under conditions of casualization.
Introduction: Casualized labor in our university
As a student, I think it’s easy to see lecturers and tutors as the same in many ways. Both are highly-educated academics who are often engaged in scholarly research. Both are employed by the university and are encountered in class a few hours each week to answer questions about essays and course material.
But on the spectrum of employment, tutors and lecturers at this university and many others are miles apart. In fact, tutors have much more in common with the legions of casualized workers in hospitality, retail and food service than with their permanently employed academic counterparts. Working on insecure, short-term contracts, tutors exist in a constant state of precarity, a condition comprising a number of troubling dimensions.
Casualized academic staff are consistently underpaid for the work they do. According to a recent survey conducted by The Student (link in sources) 71% of tutors feel their pay is insufficient. Tutors interviewed for this project emphasized an acute sense of exploitation. In the School of Social and Political Science, tutors are paid each week of term for one hour of in-class tutoring work, one hour of prep and half an hour of administrative work that could include answering emails, printing out materials, etc. The tutors we spoke to told us that they regularly spent anywhere from four hours to 2-3 working days beyond the time for which they are paid prepping for tutorials, dealing with administrative issues and meeting with students outside of class. In the view of one interviewee, “The goodwill of tutors is exploited. And that translates into unpaid work.”
There is the quantifiable injustice of unpaid work, and then there is the qualitative experience of precarity. In one study of casualized academics, respondents described how they felt about the conditions of their employment using language like ‘depressed,’ ‘frustrated,’ ‘worried,’ ‘despondent and hopeless,’ ‘disillusioned,’ ‘demoralized’ and ‘exploited’ (Courtois & O’Keefe, 2015: 58). In our interviews, tutors returned again and again to the psychic and emotional toll of casualized work, which they expressed was characterized overwhelmingly by uncertainty. Moreover, tutors don’t have set working hours or a standardised method for doing their work, which results in expectations of flexibility and perpetual availability.
In speaking to tutors, we found that beyond material precarity and the psychic toll that comes with it, casualization is insidious because, at base, it attempts to quantify that which fundamentally resists quantification—the experience of teaching and learning. The School of Social and Political Science compensates tutors for two minutes of marking per 100 words. In general, the pay allotted for tutors to meet with students to provide support outside of class amounts to half an hour per week. This is the university saying, whatever gets done within those two minutes or that half hour is enough. This is the university saying, learning comes at a cost and that cost is seven pounds per 2500 word essay.
The psychic and emotional toll of academic casualization
When we talk about the conditions of casualization, what is often left out of the conversation are the psychological and emotional consequences for academics who find themselves in this situation. Subsistence on short-term, insecure teaching contracts is exhausting and emotionally draining. Interviewees told us: “You’re confronted constantly by the precariousness of your own situation.” This precariousness is often linked to concerns about insufficient pay. We were told: “It just eats away at you, all that uncertainty. If you don’t know how much you’re gonna have at the end of the month, you don’t know if you’re going to be able to pay your rent.” In The Student’s survey of tutors at the university, one respondent pointed out that given all the uncompensated overtime tutors have to do their hourly rate works out to below the minimum wage.
The stress that casualized academic staff experience is also a result of the vulnerability tutors feel as occupants of the lowest rung on the academic ladder. One way of approaching this issue is to ask why tutors are doing so much overtime work in the first place? Why not just do as much as they’re paid for and stop there? The answer goes beyond the fact that these tutors feel a genuine obligation to give their students quality feedback and support time even if they’re not being paid for it. The deeper issue is that these tutoring jobs are, in a very concrete sense, performances that have the potential to impact young academics’ future career prospects. One interviewee told us that when she does unpaid overtime, she does so with the knowledge that “it’s all a domino in the line in terms of getting funding and getting lecturing work and just being taken seriously and having your projects funded.” She adds, “I have an interest in sustaining good impressions—good working professional relationships” with academic colleagues who “might even have a say in my funding applications.” There was a distinct sense that her future career prospects were dependent on the performance of unpaid work.
When tutoring jobs are framed in terms of ‘professional development,’ the exploitation of early career academics becomes almost inevitable. The short-term, insecure nature of the work itself combined with the sense that doing a good job requires working overtime positions tutors between a rock and a hard place. Either they can choose to work only so much as they are paid and suffer the consequences of looking unprofessional, or they can do hours—sometimes days—of unpaid labor in the hopes that it might advance their career prospects. This is the reality of existing in a space of constant insecurity at the bottom of the academic ladder.
Further up the ladder, things don’t look much better according to some of the tutors we interviewed. One told us, “This is a very toxic job market…I’ve seen personal sacrifices people make of their families or personal circumstances because of the kinds of uncertainties in their careers and it’s terrible.” Insecure academic work exists on a spectrum. On the bottom end is hourly tutoring work and on the top, permanent academic positions. But in between there are those working on fixed-term contracts that could last one or two years, or possibly longer. These academics exist in similar states of precarity. For early career academics like those we interviewed, the prospect of existing in a possibly career-long condition of uncertainty contributes to a sense of disillusionment about a future in academia.
The Quantification of Teaching and Learning
A common issue that tutors have to face is the increasingly quantified nature of their work, which is ill-fitted to their own practices and values. Quantification is intertwined with bureaucratic processes that affect all aspects of tutors’ work: how they conduct their classes, marking, career advancement, and pay. Tutors are expected to keep a record of their hours to claim their salary. Due to the scattered nature of their work, this can prove quite difficult. The lack of common regulations across schools for tutors who work in different departments further complicates this situation. Moreover, tutors have to comply with bureaucratic procedures such a taking attendance, dealing with room bookings, and standardised online marking and uploading of essays.
One of the issues with the quantification phenomenon is that it relies on unpaid administrative work that must be carried out by the tutors themselves. More precisely, tutors are responsible for maintaining a facade of order and regulation that does not reflect the reality of their work. For example, tutors would book rooms that would have an inadequate amount of chairs or are not equipped for the material taught in the class. When completing their payslip, they face a limit to the number of hours they can claim, regardless of the real amount of work they’ve put in. Student feedback is used as a pressure point in tutors’ careers which sometimes leads them to censor themselves in the information they communicate to students about their working conditions. Ironically, some procedures that would benefit from more serious bureaucratic supervision are treated as mere formalities that cover for discriminatory practices: this is notably the case for recruitment processes. A sociology tutor told us that the online submission of a CV and cover letter is merely ‘a tick-box exercise to indicate your interest… [an] impression of formality and rigor which is a veneer.’ Instead, recruitment is highly dependent upon established relationships with senior staff and ‘favouritism’.
The pressure to live up to bureaucratic standards seems particularly absurd when it comes to tutors’ pay. Marking is a good example. Tutors are paid according to a words/minutes ratio which varies across schools. Roughly, they get paid seven pounds for a 2,000 words essay (which they are expected to mark in thirty minutes). According to a survey carried out by The Student, 70% of tutors do unpaid work to give better feedback. This shows that administrative processes do not reflect the reality of tutors’ experiences and actually hinder the quality of the teaching that is being delivered.
More broadly, the tendency towards increased quantification of quality in learning and teaching is embedded in the neoliberalisation of the university’s discourse and policies. In a response to union claims on casualisation, Principal Mathieson emphasised that tutoring should be regarded as an ‘experience’ and that PhD candidates should not expect to be able to rely on university employment to fund their studies. This feeds into wider trends of underpaid short-term employment as seen as professional opportunities rather than reliable sources of income (e.g., the spread of internships). The term ‘experience’ also encompasses the expectation of flexibility and availability, which is one of the main sources of distress for tutors, as it burdens them with a considerable amount of work that remains unaccounted for.
Lastly, the facade of regulation is used as a formal guarantee for students who are treated like customers and who increasingly relate to their own learning in strategic quantified ways. As a law tutor put it: ‘They just want to do the minimal amount of work and walk away with their 2:1.’ The university promotes an environment and a culture that makes students regard their degrees as a commodity. Not only is the quantification system detrimental to the quality of teaching; it also creates an atmosphere that impacts the way students engage with their own studies, and leads them to see their teachers as service-providers, thereby legitimating the university’s neoliberal discourse and the exploitative policies that ensue.
The Scattered Nature of Casualised Labour
During our interviews with tutors, we realised that their precarious conditions had a very strong impact on how they lived and organised their lives. The lack of financial stability, and often of an office from which to conduct their teaching and research activities, as well as expectations of flexibility in their work on the part of the administration means that they are ‘constantly juggling’ between different responsibilities and physical sites of work.
One stark example was that of a tutor whose PhD was owned by a different university and even lived in a different city to Edinburgh. Moreover, his tutoring work was quite unrelated to his academic background. He said that his area of tutoring was a ‘personal interest’ of his. Even though the other tutors we interviewed didn’t experience geographical scattering to this extent, they often didn’t have their own offices and the material they were supposed to teach was very loosely related to their research. This was especially true of tutors teaching pre-honours courses, which resulted in heavy unpaid preparation time.
The lack of standardisation in how teaching expectations are conveyed means that very little training is offered to tutors, who must proactively find the resources they need to run tutorials. New tutors usually gain expertise by talking to other tutors and meeting with lecturers, a form of training for which they don’t get paid. Moreover, most of the teaching expectations are ‘unwritten’, and mainly conveyed through an atmosphere of pushing for a rather undefined ideal of ‘excellence’ measured by student feedback. Therefore, the university is relying on tutors’ goodwill and the pressure that student feedback puts on their careers to make them work overtime. Tutors are put in a position where they are inclined to deal with any of their students’ concerns, care for their mental health and accommodate to potential special circumstances and learning disabilities. One tutor said:
‘I was dealing with the fact that one of my students was recently diagnosed with dyslexia, one of my students has very precarious financial personal circumstances which had really hindered their ability to participate in class and I had to advise the student to speak to their personal tutor and actually give a statement from my side as their tutor corroborating the student’s account of their experiences.’
This means that the type of work tutors are expected to carry out is extremely varied, and they are not adequately prepared for it. In addition, this work is confined to established working hours. When asked to describe the amount of time tutors spent working their job, our interviewees often emphasised that the workload is disseminated throughout the week:
‘Small, innocuous tasks that you’re asked to do that are conveyed as just a small favour but end up taking significant proportions of your time… You’re talking about everyday that you’re doing that work.’ (SPS tutor)
The flexible and encompassing nature of tutoring work makes it difficult for tutors to engage with union activism, as exploitative conditions mean they don’t have the time nor the energy to fight for their rights. In addition, as tutors are on short-term contracts, it is unlikely that the local change they would be pushing for during their time at the university would have an impact on their own labour conditions. Moreover, the fact that each school has different regulations makes it harder to create solidarity around the anti-casualisation campaign. These divisions are also heightened by student complicity in the university’s neoliberal discourse that frames them as consumers: they focus on ‘getting their money’s worth’, instead of promoting a different educational model. The student body itself is not uniform depending on nationality, which again entails a lack of common interests and goals. Scattering and segmentation of situations, work and energy hinders solidarity between staff and students and creates an apathetic atmosphere in the face of fundamental injustice. It constitutes a neoliberal tactic deployed by the university to impeach the formation of a potent movement for the end of casualized work.
External sources:
The Student – article on casualization: http://www.studentnewspaper.org/unpaid-labour-exploitation-of-tutorial-leaders-at-the-university-of-edinburgh/
