#WhyIAmStriking (When I’m back to UK) - a thread #UCUstrikesback #UCUstrike: Casualisation means I’ve been unable to future plan or establish any form of savings. I’m grateful to be permanent now, but continue to see and emphasize with the anxiety and uncertainty of peers

The hoops I had to jump to become permanent as an an early career academic are unsustainable and beyond what many more senior academics were (or even still are) expected to do. My CV is exhausting and has, at times, wrecked my mental health.

I am paid below the sector average for my career level and hired below (at Grade 6) what my university claims is the starting salary for lecturers (Grade 7). There are no mechanisms for renegotiating my salary, even in light of 18.63% gender pay gap at my uni.

As an international member of staff, I also see thousands of pounds of my wages repurposed towards rising visa fees, which aren’t supported by my university. I live mostly paycheck-to-paycheck, while my VC makes over a quarter of a million pounds a year.

I’ve had my precarity and early career status unfairly used as a manipulation tool: told I should take on extra work to help the case for making me permanent or ‘co-authors’ whose names were added by default to my publications despite doing no or little work

In my career I’ve heard wise cracks about taking holidays, been told to work evenings or weekends, and been expected to answer emails at all times of day. It’s not possible to fit my work into 40 hours a week, even though I make every effort to do so.

I’ve seen essential teaching processes like marking and dissertation supervising outsourced to hourly casualised labor, often taken up by early career academics without job security who are desperate for jobs and income.

Student experiences are suffering under these conditions: massified classrooms, stressed staff who don’t know students’ names, and insufficient feedback, all on top of debt-inducing fees that don’t trickle down to their lecturers.

Altogether, I love my job, but I’m unable to be the kind of teacher I want to be in this system. Teaching is such an emotional role that you give so much of yourself to - we just want to work in a sector that recognises that contribution and supports us