The staff and student unions at the School of Oriental & African Studies (SOAS) in London staged a protest on January 23, Thursday against the university authority’s decision to scrap the research leaves of researchers and the casual job contracts of temporary academic workers. The temporary contract staff, also called fractional staff, engages in teaching and academic work in the university while the full-time researchers are on leave. The decision to cancel academic leave effectively removes the scope for temporary academic work at SOAS.
The protest was organized by the SOAS Students Union, the staff union, University and College Union (UCU) and other activist groups, such as Crisis SOAS and Decolonising Our Minds Society. Hundreds of students, researchers and faculty members gathered at the atrium of SOAS for the protest.
While addressing the gathering, Dr. Feyzi Ismail from the SOAS International Development Studies department said that “the management of universities should get together and tell the government ‘if you could bail out the banks, you can bail out universities’. And if they don’t do it, we will.”
The Socialist Worker reported that the university management announced the cancellation of research leaves last week, which was followed by the scrapping of the fractional workers’ contracts.
Students claim that the management has justified the suspension of research leaves on financial grounds, asserting a need to ‘reduce salary costs’. However, no specific financial rationale has been provided. They also allege that the decision has been imposed without prior consultation with the students and staff unions and with no proper discussion in the Academic Senate.
A statement by the University and College Union (UCU) said, “The frontline work fractional staff do is central to the functioning of the university. By cutting fractional budgets, an exceptionally large teaching workload will be passed on to permanent members of staff, exacerbated by the intake of students from the foundation year and ever-growing targets for student recruitment.
“By suspending research leave, management is effectively extending the working day with no commensurate increase in pay. This will negatively impact staff morale and generate unmanageable workloads for already overstretched staff. The proposed redundancy of insecure staff rather than a pathway towards permanent employment represents the ultimate abuse of a casualized workforce; extending the casualization model to the permanent workforce,” UCU added.
Trade unions, including Unison, also extended solidarity and support to the mobilization on Thursday.
