In this season of quizzing, here’s a real head-scratcher. Can you name the big British employer that punished staff for boycotting a small fraction of their work by taking all of their pay for each day of their boycott? So that even while employees did their other tasks, putting in weeks of work, their pay packets were pilfered, month after month, from high summer until almost the start of advent. Some had to take extra jobs, others drew on hardship funds or stuck essential bills on credit cards. Amid a cost of living crisis and with Christmas looming, the Great Wage Robbery carried on. But who was responsible?
Perhaps your imagination has entered some grim distribution hangar, or is hovering above a building site. Or maybe you’re thinking of a care home bullying its migrant workers who are fuzzy on their rights and scared of speaking up. You’re seeing ruthless, rapacious big-C Capital opening its giant, bloody maw wide to chew on some low-paid and underqualified labour. Right?
Wrong. Try a charity. To be precise, that branch of charitable enterprise we call a Russell Group university. This is the story of Queen Mary University of London, whose boss, Colin Bailey, is on a package worth £359,000 a year (plus free housing in inner London) , but which bilks its own academics as brazenly as Scrooge did his clerks. If you want a closeup of the turmoil engulfing higher education, or to see how some of our most prestigious white-collar jobs have been so vastly degraded, this is a story for you. Because even Ebenezer would have marvelled at the goings-on at Queen Mary.
This spring, its academics joined a national union boycott of marking exams to protest against the low pay awards that have seen university lecturers’ salaries fall 25% behind inflation since the banking crash, and their deteriorating working conditions. By downing their red pens, tutors were hitting universities where it hurt most – since they rely on student fees. But they kept up the other parts of the academic job: guiding students, doing research and writing papers. That did not pacify the bosses, who decreed that those withholding their marks would lose up to 113 days of pay – one for each day of their boycott.
