A failure to look: Equality and the Zero Hours Contract

One of the maddening things about the UK HE system is its bureaucracy: the forms, the spreadsheets, the surveys, the even more forms and spreadsheets, and the bean counting. This maddening bureaucracy also makes possible one of the things I love. Data. There is all sorts of data, just waiting for someone to make sense of it. If you love trawling through data the UK higher education system is your friend. But you have to give some if you want to get some. 

For example, a survey I was asked to fill out relating to equality issues left me here when I completed it. My curiosity got the better of me and I ended up looking at the Equality in Higher Education: Statistical Report 2012, Part 1 Staff all 222 pages of it. It has 222 pages of tables, graphs, numbers, and a bit of descriptive text. It is a delightful read J. Were it something a student of mine turned in, it would get a comment to the effect of “the presentation is almost wholly descriptive with little or no interpretation or context.” 

I will try to provide some.  

There is much to celebrate in the data. At least if you don't get out very often. As an example, the trend in gender equality is getting inexorably better in Universities, at least as long as you don’t look at support staff or have concerns about trends in individual subject areas. There is no progress in support staff and despite the broad trend toward equal representation in academic positions, the subject areas are well segregated by gender, as are professor roles and higher academic management. 

In a previous post, I discussed some data from an HEI suggesting academic staff represented  somewhere between 17% and 34% of people employed at a particular university. At the time, in order to accept the higher figure (34%) you had to include hourly paid lecturers. 

There is something reassuring about the idea of an hourly paid lecturer, but it hinges on an underlying assumption  that someone appointed to an hourly paid position has a job. This assumption would be false. They have a contract, not a job. They might have a job but then again they might not.

An hourly paid position means you have a contract to do hourly paid work, nothing more.  Many hourly paid lecturers have a "zero-hours contract." This contract gives you a permanent position. It also comes with no obligation on either side – no obligation from the employer to offer any work and no obligation from the contract recipient to do any. For those familiar with the US system, this is very similar to the adjunct system. That system marginalises a whole class of sometimes excellent educators. A recent example, is the story of the death of an adjunct professor who taught at Duquesne University for 25 years and died in squalor. This is of course extreme, however, via my circle of friends and acquaintances I have come across other cases of marginalised educators working adjunct positions.

Much is known about adjuncts in the US. There has been relatively little said about the UK system. It is better in one regard, it comes with access to the National Health Service. Beyond that, anyone reading a recent article in the Guardian will be struck by the similarities: people unable to heat their houses, people unable to repair them, people working hard for a wage that is arguably below the minimum wage. The words marginalised and exploited, appear a lot. These are words associated with inequality. Just the sort of thing a set of statistics on Equality in Higher education would be well placed to address. What do the stats say?

I am sure they would have quite a bit to say about marginalisation, but...

... the data are not there. Some people don’t count. Wonderful as all this data is, like all data sets it is defined by what it leaves out. Some people just don’t rate high enough to be counted. People on hourly contracts don’t count. People on zero hours contracts don’t count. They were excluded. Little is known about this group. They don’t appear in the breakdowns by salary type. They do not appear in salary data. They do not appear in the data on disabilities, or gender, or ethnicity. 

What we have here is a failure to look. A 222 page report on equality in higher education with graphs and figures and occasional descriptive text will be a failure if it does not look at the realities of higher education. The only reference to zero-hours or hourly contracts is on page 13 where it indicates they were excluded. It is worse that they were excluded rather than overlooked. It suggests someone knew they were present but were not considered important enough to be considered equal.  To the credit of Unions, they are the only group trying to get data. UCU (a union) has made freedom of information requests to UK universities. Similarly, Unions have been trying to help Adjunct Professors in the US.  In the meantime if no one collects the data, it is license to discriminate. If ever there was a marginalised pool of workers, this is one.