Mariya Ivancheva, University of Liverpool

The UK higher education sector has seen decades of escalating injustices that academic trade unions need to confront head-on. As one of the biggest, most visible public higher education systems in the world, the UK is ahead of the curve in a global process of commercialization of higher education. The main academic workers’ trade union, University College Union (UCU), has been on strike for 22 days in total over two periods since November 2019 with demands to end casualization, increase pay, and abolish gender and minority pay gaps. Yet, the strike also coincided with the outbreak of coronavirus, which has pushed universities around the world into online teaching. In light of these unfolding development, this article reviews increasingly established injustices in UK higher education and shows the links between casualization, digitalization, and outsourcing of academic labour.

The following also calls for attention and urgent trade union action on these developments. It is written with the Gramscian ‘pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will’ (Gramsci 1977: 188) and informed by 12 years of comparative international studies in higher education sectors. One lesson I learned during those years is that universities are neither how we depict them in our most negative assessment – sites for the reproduction of elites – nor are they what we make of them in our most ambitious dreams – oases of resistance. Instead, higher education is one field of class struggle that defines the balance of power in society (Carnoy and Castells 2001). A second lesson is that academic communities often internalize and are complicit with a dubious hierarchy of value and structural processes of distinction that are nurtured by government policies, funding bodies, and university management. These structural processes remain a blind spot in academic and trade union discussions and are thus especially difficult to uproot.

Casualization and budget restructuring

A key reform in public higher education systems is the dissolution of the block grant to public universities and the split of their budget into core and commercialization bits. The UK is a prime example for this as the universities’ core budget now relies on student fees that have increasing steadily since 1998 and are currently “capped” at £9000 per undergraduate student per year. This ‘income’ pays the teaching and administrative running and is uncapped for foreign MA students, who are sometimes charged over £20,000 per year for a given degree programme (Hillman 2018). In either case, students have to cover living expenses on top of those fees.

Workers and students carry the burden of this system in more than one way. Whereas the UK’s over 160 universities generated a record surplus of £44 billion in the academic year 2017-2018 (Bennett, 2018), student debt rose to £121 billion in the same period (CBDU, 2018). When the academic pensions fund, Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), declared a deficit somewhere between £23 billion and £8 billion, they suggested this could be covered via increased contributions from employees and the employers’ contribution could be lowered (Povey 2018). A new metric for “teaching excellence” promised that those universities awarded “gold” would be able to uncap the already exorbitant student fees (Hale & Vina, 2016).

However, commercialization and escalating inequality reach far beyond the core budget revenue. Research budgets, although predominantly from state funding and, hence, public tax revenue, are not granted to universities but commercialized as well. Individual faculty have for many years applied for external competitive funding. Yet, successful awards are now quantified as markers of excellence and success and define the metrics of individual performance as well as those of departments and universities in international rankings (Lynch 2015). Thus, public resources and human efforts now go into incessant grant application even though these come with tiny chances of success (Academic Anonymous 2014).

Ironically, students apply to top universities with the expectation to be taught by VIP academics; many of who regularly win those prestigious grants and have a high international visibility beyond the academic sphere. To have such ‘world-leaders’ on the payroll will make or break a department’s and a university’s position in global rankings and thus in competitive funding redistribution. As a result, core faculty, who should be engaged in education at least at equal measure as research, are pushed to opt-out of teaching, which is now pitted against research and less valued in promotion committees and when decisions to cut funding or close departments or fire staff are made (Lynch 2015). Meanwhile, students have most hours of direct contact with precarious faculty. The latter not only carry more than 50 per cent of the overall research and teaching load, but also depend on fixed-term contracts that give limited or no access to pensions and other vital securities (UCU2020).

What is more, universities in the UK are now introducing internal review for grant applications. This serves primarily to make sure that permanent faculty are given credit in any application. Except for a few prestigious individual fellowships, only those on contracts for the duration of the entire grant can become Principle Investigators (PIs), or even ‘named authors’ on applications. This credits ideas from non-permanent, precarious faculty to permanent faculty and also applies to grant proposals initiated or developed by postgraduate students and postdocs. Thus, at the expense of their own and their students’ growing indebtedness and insecurity for the future, ever wealthier VIP high-ranking academic and administrative cadres enjoy ever more infrastructures that maintain their privilege and quash upward career mobility across academic ranks (Mahalyfy 2014).

Casualization and performance metrics

Changes in metrics that measure ‘success’ and ‘excellence’ over time are another crucial variable in this increasingly feudal system. In the early 2000s, English-language articles in high-ranking journals or monographs with university presses were the only valid academic currency. Yet, the new push for constant fundraising of grants in the hundreds of thousands or millions a year encourages academics to focus on management skills such as conflict resolution, management of data and human resources, and collaboration with mostly commercially minded ‘stakeholders’. With outputs attached to university affiliation, a new class of PIs are encouraged to build individual careers on the back of subcontracted workers that generate the actual data and analysis, while other precarious staff serve as teaching replacement. To exploit the labour of precarious workers and make them ‘agile’, expendable, and less costly, Human Resources departments have gone on a salary-scales cutting frenzy and withdraw access to vital services, workspaces, benefits and professional recognition from precarious staff. For instance, ever more postdoctoral fellows are replaced by ‘postdoctoral assistants’ or ‘postdoctoral interns’ and, even more frivolously labeled, ‘casual researchers’ (Ivancheva 2015).

Although higher education has been turned into a profitable business with state funds as the foremost source of revenue, the state exchequers received less and less in return (Lynch 2015). A new commercialization benchmark, impact, is increasingly confined to ‘industry-academia collaboration’: a smoke-screen that stands for the use of research students and staff, public research funding, and university infrastructure to deliver high-quality research to private industries at minimal expense to the latter.

To add insult to injury, “Gold Standard” Open Access (GSOA) articles in refereed journals have been introduced as another measurement for ‘impact’. That Golden Open Access is exactly the opposite of what defenders of universally free and globally accessible scientific knowledge have fought for. Commercial publishers own most academic journals and charge very high fees for GSOA. Thus, only faculty members at wealthy universities who have won big grants have funds at their disposal to pay for GSOA. Such “Open” Access increases the inequality within the academic community of scholars and fills the coffers of commercial publishers.

While the surplus from academic labour increasingly benefits big businesses, it also pits against each other two categories of precarious junior scholars. Researchers are turned into data collectors with limited rights over the data they collect, but with some access to publication ‘credit’. Teaching-only staff on precarious contracts experience the opposite effect: their research is rendered invisible and their teaching is not counted as academic ‘impact’. Two conflicting pushes stratify them even further: the push for geographical mobility and that for the flexibilisation of academic work. Digitalization and outsourcing appear as fake solutions and create a growing difficulty for unionisation and resistance.

Casualization, hypermobility and hyperflexibility

An increasingly indebted generation of young scholars nowadays enters the market with minimum income but under maximum pressure for visibility. Periods of un(der)employment and self-funding of research and conference attendance become a privilege of those from wealthier backgrounds (Kendzior 2014). To stay in the academic game after finishing a PhD one is usually required to put up with flexibility or recurrent migration. Under the mantra of “internationalization”, academics are pushed to constantly look for employment outside their area of residency. Many are pressed to curtail their social and professional networks, and change countries every few months or years, if lucky. Those on post-doc or fixed-term teaching contracts are usually pressed to work on their own career development in their own free time. The shorter the time of the contract the higher the probability that they spend every free moment looking for jobs. Many suffer loneliness and depression while others move their families or commute within and across national borders to make ends meet (Zanou 2013; Walters 2010).

With systems of welfare, child- and elderly-care curtailed by privatization, moving becomes a taxing effort. Migrant workers lose their immediate kinship networks providing care out of necessity (Stalford 2008). Those who – often out of necessity –opt out of the game of transnational mobility, fall easily into the trap of hourly paid teaching and precarious research arrangements around their chosen locality (Basen 2014). Both groups remain dependent on local or international clan-like arrangements of loyalty and hierarchy (Afonso 2013).

A high price is often paid not only by individual academics, but impacts on trade unions as well. Facing the dilemma of mobility versus flexibility (Ivancheva et al 2019) as they move between countries, institutions, and contracts, precarious academics have limited or no time for trade union activity. This is aggravated when line managers and PIs – usually the lifeline between the casual staff member and the institution – are trade union members as well so that the interests of casual and permanent faculty are pitted against each other within a single body of union members.

Women are particularly vulnerable, given the imperative to care, both at work and outside of work (Ivancheva et al 2019). To fulfill this double shift, women take the majority of precarious teaching-only contracts (UCU 2020), as they have to opt against geographic mobility and career excellence. Women are also systematically discriminated against by recruitment panels, based on being mothers (González et al 2019) or the improbability of male partners moving location to stay with female spouses (Rivera 2017). Single women with children are more mobile but end up doing more emotional and committee work than male colleagues (Ivancheva et al 2019). Decisions around childbirth and childcare have pressing age limits on women more than on men (Ivancheva et al 2019). Black and minority ethnic (BME) faculty and especially black faculty (Joseph 2019) are still scarcely hired in permanent academic positions. BME female professors form only 1.7% of the academic labour force as opposed to over 69% professorial positions given to white men (Advance HE 2018).

Thus, under opposite pushes of hypermobility and hyperflexibility, dictated by performance metrics, even if the gender pay gap (over 15%, THE 2019) and the race pay gap (26%, BBC 2018) across the sector closes, as UCU demands, this will barely affect significantly women and BME faculty who remain at a great disadvantage in permanent hiring. Meanwhile, academic unions should be on the alert as members of such groups can easily become subject to two other processes happening in higher education, which mostly remain outside the academic and trade union debates.

Casualization, digitalization, and outsourcing

Against this background, the processes of digitalization and outsourcing threaten to provoke further casualization and fragmentation within the academic profession. Initially, radical educators saw digital technologies’ potential to democratize education and widen access (Alevizou 2015). A ‘digital disruption’ or ‘unbundling’ could challenge the pricey and inflexible elite ‘bundle’ of residential degrees (Craig 2015). Shorter, low-cost, flexible unbundled curricular units could be made available online and used by previously ‘atypical’ and systematically disadvantaged students: women, people with caring responsibilities and disabilities, and mature full-time working students. Employers and communities could become more involved with universities, demanding need-based content.

Yet, unbundling has developed mostly as public-private partnership between universities and education technology (edtech) businesses. Increasingly corporations with a huge revenue use top-ranked universities in the English-speaking world for their brand, cheap labour force and infrastructure to target the growing professional middle-class in the Global South. In academic labour terms, this process contributes to ever-increasing casualization, automation, deprofessionalization, and outsourcing of academic work. For a long time now, universities have outsourced marketing, IT, administrative, catering, procurement and maintenance services. Yet, increasingly outsourcing now affects the very education process (Swartz et al 2019).

Many universities in the UK and worldwide now partner with corporations offering online program management (OPM) services. The revenue of these 60+ world players is currently estimated at over $3 billion (out of a 30+ billion edtech market worldwide) and predicted to reach $7.7 billion by 2025 (HolonIQ 2019). Universities increasingly endow such businesses with their financial support and symbolic capital and allow them to manage and co-run online short-courses and full programs. Corporations like Pearson, Kaplan, and Study Group, to name but a few, are now partnering with many top-ranked universities in the UK. For up to 70% of the profit of online programs (Newton 2016b), they put in upfront starting capital, marketing and student enrolment and support services (Newton 2016a). As the share of the tuition they gain from programs determines their profit, OPMs try to push fees up and prioritize less selective and more expensive programs (Newton 2016b). They also profit from the ‘learning analytics’: i.e. the big data collected from the student population that can be used by OPMs and/or sold for further commercial purposes (Young 2019).

While universities often use the work of precarious academics within their own online and blended courses and full programs, some OPM providers also hire academically trained professionals. A growing reserve army of academics now offers student support, supervision or even teaches the core curriculum on courses offered in partnership with universities. Not unlike temp agencies as Unitemps with franchises in countless universities (WAC 2018), OPMs hire hourly paid tutors and lecturers. Online teaching is not only time-intensive, but also requires staff with exceptional capacities to relate to a student population with complex needs, who often are adult learners and often based in the Global South. Women and BME academics, casualized and marginalized on the academic job market, become an easy target for hiring within such flexibilized, invisibilized, and increasingly deprofessionalized online teaching labour force.

Why should trade unions care? In a UCU report from early 2020 casual university workers were reported to experience vulnerability, invisibility, lack of agency and no control over one’s decisions (UCU 2020). Outsourced academic workers are at even higher hazard. They might never meet their university colleagues. They are under different salary, benefit scheme and trade union jurisdiction as in this role they are not, technically speaking, university workers. Solidarity, difficult to build even between precarious researchers and teaching-only faculty, is beyond their reach. Workers in similarly vulnerable position have been used to break strike action in 2018 (WAC 2018). And while the use of lecture capture and course contents uploaded on the learning management systems have been refuted as possible avenues of breaking strike action (Stoke-Walker 2019), the digitalization and outsourcing combined with casualization present a next dangerous frontier of exclusion and alienation in the academic field.

Casualization and Resistance?

The casualization of higher education does not only affect contractual relations. It also means a broader “existential and structural uncertainty” of academics and workers in general (Butler 2009). Precarity becomes more than immediate contractual insecurity. Academic trade unions around the world need deeper understanding and more fine-tuned strategies that take into account the effects of hypermobility, hyperflexibility, digitalization and outsourcing on the precarious academic labour force.

Many trade union bureaucracies and branch offices at universities have not yet fully grasped the new developments described above. They remain focused mostly on demands that predominantly affect permanent academic staff members. The latter are often those who end up exploiting – willingly or under structural pressures – precarious and early-career researchers, teaching–only and outsourced faculty in order to reach established metrics, rather than resist and boycott them.

Even at UCU, which has historically taken seriously and done research on processes of casualization, there is still much more work to be done to flesh out and work through these glaring contradictions. Indeed, ending casualization has become one of the key demands of the 2019-2020 strike. Yet, there has been little discussion of how this process changes the mobilization power and capacity, and the demands, necessities, and liabilities of an increasing number of its current and potential members. Questions around research funding structures and performance metric hierarchies, hypermobility and flexibility, the digitalization and outsourcing of academic labour have not become central to the discussion of academic life or academic union strategy.

And while collegial solidarity within the academic profession is at a breaking point, the processes described in this text invite academic trade union to urgently engage with and include them into their priorities, strategies and tactics.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Spanish in the print version of Libre Pensamento N101 (winter 2020), magazine of the Spanish General Confederation of Labour (Confederación General del Trabajo, C.G.T.).

Mariya Ivancheva (University of Liverpool) is an anthropologist and sociologist of higher education and labour. Her academic work and research-driven advocacy focus on the casualization and digitalization of academic labour, the re/production of intersectional inequalities at universities and labour markets, and on the role of academic communities in processes of social change, especially transitions to/from socialism. She tweets on @mivanche

Keywords: higher education, precarity, UK, trade unions, politics

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Cite as: Ivancheva, Mariya. 2020. “The casualization, digitalization, and outsourcing of academic labour: a wake-up call for trade unions.” FocaalBlog, 20 March. http://www.focaalblog.com/2020/03/20/mariya-ivancheva-the-casualization-digitalization-and-outsourcing-of-academic-labour-a-wake-up-call-for-trade-unions/