In the middle of a cost of living crisis, Goldsmiths College has withheld salary payment for two months from scores of casualied teaching staff. This has thrown many members of staff into a state of serious financial disarray for which the college is taking no responsibility. Many of those affected by this non-payment have no recourse to additional funds and this is wreaking havoc on their lives. Legally, this is classed as an unauthorised deduction from wages and is a breach of contract. This should be rectified as soon as the employer is made aware of the issue. Most worryingly, this is not the first year that Goldsmiths has withheld payment of wages from casualised staff.
It is entirely unacceptable that the most precarious teaching staff at Goldsmiths are going without payment and have been thrown into such a vulnerable situation. GUCU condemns in the strongest terms this utterly callous treatment and calls on Goldsmiths management to address this situation as matter of urgency. GUCU has requested that Goldsmiths management contact all staff to alert them to this situation, to provide channels for all staff affected by this non-payment to be paid and compensated and for a public apology for this unacceptable treatment. As yet, Goldsmiths management has failed to respond to these urgent requests.
This treatment shows a complete lack of care for casualised staff. This comes after SMT has confirmed they will not be moving ahead with the full operationalisation of the Assimilation of hourly paid Teaching and Scholarship role profile holders to the Framework Agreement [Assimilation Agreement]. Goldsmiths committed to implementing the Assimilation Agreement “in a consistent and transparent way across all departments in the College” with the oversight of GUCU reps in the resolution to the 2021 local industrial dispute. The full and proper implementation of the Assimilation Agreement has been stalled by the college since the original assimilation of hourly paid lecturers to the college pay structure in 2014 (8 years ago!). Senior Management’s continued refusal to implement one of the only policies covering hourly paid teaching staff demonstrates how little SMT values casualised staff.
The existing model for calculating time paid for seminar preparation, tutorial contact-time, marking and administration on hourly paid fixed term contracts has not been reviewed since 2014 (when it was established). This is the case even though there has been an exponential rise in student numbers and classroom sizes. Paragraph 12 of the Assimilation Agreement states very clearly: “The hourly teaching multiplier, administration and marking calculations will be monitored to ensure equivalence with full-time salaried academic staff. This review will take place no later than two years after assimilation in the first instance.” This has never happened because the Assimilation Agreement has never been fully implemented.
Concretely, this means ALs and GTTs are marking assessment scripts for free, carrying out tutorials in excess of their contracted hours and preparing seminars throughout the week in their free time. But while they try to maintain their pedagogical and professional integrity in the face of these prohibitive conditions, they are fundamentally unable to carry out their teaching duties in the way they aspire to.
Furthermore, we are concerned about information that has been published on Goldsmiths website about the upcoming industrial dispute. Specifically, on the issue of casualisation, which is one of the main issues under dispute, Goldsmiths claims that ‘Three-quarters of our academic staff are permanent’ and that ‘We do not use zero-hours contracts’. We are not aware of any statistical evidence that bears out this claim about permanent academic staff and we would be keen to see this data published. The most up to date Higher Education Statistic Agency figures for the year 20/21 have the percentage of fixed term contract use at Goldsmiths at 40% (and this does not include the number of ‘open-ended’ contracts which are not permanent contracts). Additionally, the university claims not to use zero-hours contracts, but they do in fact use ‘terms of service agreements’ to engage Short Course Tutors which deny rights such as sick leave and which entitle the employer to sack staff with no notice (which Goldsmiths has done in the past).
Outside of these technical points, casualisation does not simply refer to the use of zero hour contracts but refers to an institutional dependency on temporary fixed-term hourly paid teaching staff to carry out the majority of front line teaching. Graduate Trainee Tutors, Associate Lecturers and Lecture Fractionals are an increasingly large segment of teaching staff at Goldsmiths College (we estimate about 50%). They experience employment insecurity and are paid far less than they are worth to the university. The college could not operate without their discounted and discontinuous academic expertise and pedagogical competencies.
If the senior management team is serious about providing the best possible working conditions for academic staff and in turn the highest quality of teaching for its students, it would not have issued such a glib and misleading response to the reality of casualisation. Instead, it would have acknowledged the scale of casualisation and the direct effects this has on the learning conditions of our students.
For all of the reasons listed above and many more we are calling on casual staff to join the picket line in the upcoming national strike and to make their voices heard.
If Goldsmiths management truly wants to provide casualised employees with security, it should begin today by fulfilling the promises of its own policy and its formal agreement with GUCU and prioritise the full implementation of the Assimilation Agreement. Students deserve better teaching conditions and we deserve better working conditions.
Any casualised member of staff facing financial difficulties can claim support from GUCU’s dedicated mutual aid fund: https://opencollective.com/goldsmithsmutualaid