by Alan Nemirovski
Illustrated by Mithalina Taib
“The exploitation [of workers on casual contracts] is a feature of LSE’s system, not a failure.”
Casual contracts, including ‘hourly-paid’ contracts, are fixed-term contracts offered by the School to a large proportion of its workforce. They are also a centrepiece of one of the UCU’s four fights. However, behind the initial consequences of casualisation, a legal grey area also creates ambiguity and enables exploitation, which has subsequently permeated across LSE.
In this first article of the ‘Working at LSE’ series, The Beaver investigates the treatment of so-called ‘casual’ workers. This includes teaching assistants and anyone hired on such casual (or hourly-paid) contracts. Most staff with whom students come in contact regularly are these casual workers.
Getting a contract
The investigation into casual contracts and labour casualisation begins with Mikołaj Szafranski, a doctoral candidate at the Law School at LSE. He has spent the last couple of years working as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) in the Law department. Despite this, he is employed on a fixed-term contract that he only signed earlier this academic year. Every year, his contract is renewed “completely at the discretion of the department.” Departments also have the same ‘discretion’ to change the number of hours offered in between contracts offered. This discretion provides power and leverage that submits the employee to the will of the department.
The conversation with Mikołaj led to Magda Muter. For Magda, her experience has been largely similar. She worked as a teaching assistant across the Departments of Methodology and Management and was a PhD representative for the Department of Gender Studies. Between departments, she noted disparate working environments, conditions, and treatment of staff.
According to Magda, when you work in departments outside your own, “you don’t know anything about the contract before you see it.” She says she had agreed to work as a teaching assistant at LSE without knowing the exact terms of her contracts — simply because the contracts were not issued by the time she had to (verbally) accept her job offer. The School issues contracts, as opposed to individual departments, which adds a layer of bureaucracy that prolongs the state of uncertainty. For example, Magda recalls agreeing to work as a teaching assistant in the Management Department in May but only receiving her contract in late August.
At LSE Life, some workers faced the same issue whilst trying to renew their contracts. The Beaver spoke to multiple current and former employees at LSE Life, most of whom preferred to remain anonymous. Some received their contracts more than five weeks late, “at the beginning or middle of October.” However, this delay was more puzzling for them because there was no explicit change to their contracts, aside from a single paragraph confirming that their contracts were being renewed (as opposed to their contracts drafted from scratch). “Then you sign your contract that you were supposed to sign [a while ago],” explains Olivia Nantermoz, a PhD student working at LSE Life.
During this limbo between agreeing to work and getting her contract, Magda didn’t know how many hours she would work. This, too, would not be communicated to her until she received the contract with the working hours already allocated to her by the department she is working for. “To ask [for certain hours in advance] is already an act of bravery,” Magda explains, because working hours are not simply given to her. Additionally, there are lingering anxieties about losing one’s job if one asks too many questions. Indeed, some interviewees preferred to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions by their department.
Time allocations
Once a contract has been received by a new (or returning) teaching assistant, their hours are broken down into class teaching, marking hours, office hours, meetings with the course convenor, and lecture attendance if they haven’t taught the module before.
Still, certain time allocations remain unrealistic. “Effectively, I am placed on a schedule where I mark an essay in 20 minutes, which includes giving feedback,” says Mikołaj. If a teacher needs more than 20 minutes to mark an essay and provide meaningful feedback, they will need to work past their allocated hours — these extra hours are not paid. The result is a gradual decrease in your hourly rate for every additional hour of extra work. Across departments, it’s unclear how many hours you will need to work. In Magda’s experience, “You don’t know how much time things like marking take.”
“And this [how much you are paid for actual hours worked] is the real difference between departments.”
Compensation after working
However, even after working extended hours and potentially being underpaid, some casual workers risk never seeing part of their wages. Bluntly, “Sometimes they [LSE] forget to pay you.” LSE’s Human Resources (HR) department has been described as “dysfunctional” by an interviewee.
Interviewees described a tension between themselves, their managers, and HR where you would not get paid unless you were persistent. Even if a worker finds out they have been underpaid, that money is not always returned right away. “They only pay you [a certain amount] quickly,” and the rest (or all of) the amount gets rolled over to the next month’s paycheque, adding to further delays in receiving compensation. This problem is not confined to any single department either. One interviewee described her experience as a Subwarden working for LSE’s Residential team. Despite receiving a promotion, her pay was not adjusted for months after she started working due to consistent silence and delays from LSE HR.
An LSE spokesperson commented on the actions LSE HR takes in such cases: “In the occasional event that a payment is missed for a casual or hourly worker (for example, if the hours worked are confirmed late during a particular payment period), mechanisms are in place for any oversight to be rectified as quickly as possible (e.g. via BACS payment outside LSE’s usual pay run).”
However, this was not always the fault of LSE HR — sometimes, the problem remained as simple as a manager who forgot to submit a timesheet. One interviewee described how some managers seem resistant to changing their processes to avoid such errors.
Managerial discretion and power
Such managers sometimes make or break the working environment. “At the end of the day, the contract puts us at the mercy of managers,” clarifies Zoe*. When she was working as a GTA in an academic department at LSE, “maybe some people had trouble with their contracts, but they were a lot easier to deal with.”
Conversely, at LSE Life, “there is no professional respect for what we do,” according to an interviewee. Workers are treated differently because of their contracts. Whilst contract reform could help in the short term, “[some workers] aren’t entitled to anything.” This was especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic when workers required funding for equipment to work efficiently from home — funding that LSE Life provided to permanent staff but not to fixed-term staff.
“At the end of the day, these contracts do nothing to protect us — according to HR, they’re budgetary guidelines for the managers, that is all. They don’t guarantee us anything.”
Unspoken rules and uncertainty
From the start of the investigation, Mikołaj mentioned other “unspoken rules that govern GTA contracts.” Silent hierarchies are a constant across departments, but other rules vary. On one end, Mikołaj notes oddities such as: “No grade should end with the last digit being nine” when marking because students are more likely to appeal it.
Magda criticises more consequential rules, such as hourly pay rises only being offered to workers who work consecutive years. Magda taught at LSE in her 1st, 3rd, 5th and 6th year of PhD. Yet, she only got her first incremental increase after year 5. These rules are sparsely communicated and are simply encountered as someone progresses through their employment, usually thanks to informal talks with other class teachers.
Legal ambiguities of hourly-paid contracts
This, and more, remains the direct result of casual contracts. Officially, LSE labels their part-time, temporary contract as “hourly-paid contracts.” While personally trying to investigate her contract structure, Olivia could not find a legal framework for this contract type. Her only conclusion was that “the terms of the contract are, in effect, a zero-hour contract, but LSE refuses to call it that.” However, these are not permanent part-time contracts either. In an email from LSE HR obtained by The Beaver, they referred to hourly-paid contracts as consisting of “variable hours, [where] the hours are not guaranteed and may go up or down.” Any average number of hours “promised” on any hourly-paid contract are merely “an expected average,” as opposed to a guaranteed number of working hours.
This contract type appears similar to the UK government’s definition of a zero-hour contract due to the lack of guaranteed hours and variability “based on the needs from [LSE’s] departments.” Still, when The Beaver submitted a Freedom of Information request to LSE asking for information on zero-hour contract usage at the School, the School refused to provide any information because, technically, they assert their temporary, hourly-paid contracts are not zero-hour contracts.
An LSE spokesperson commented on the use of hourly-paid contracts, stating: “LSE uses hourly-paid contracts for individuals undertaking certain temporary work where the nature of the work can mean that hours can vary regularly. All hourly-paid contracts for individuals are issued terms and conditions of employment and are entitled to the same contractual benefits as salaried members of staff.”
The big picture of casualisation at LSE
Casualisation remains a focal point in labour disputes at LSE. In a student town hall on 28 November, Professor Eric Neumayer, Pro-Director (Planning and Resources), commented on behalf of the LSE Directorate, claiming that there has been a reduction in casualisation at LSE in recent years. He elaborated that this is being done through schemes such as education career tracks, and improved funding of LSE’s PhD studentships. However, statistics published by the UCU paint a completely different picture. The statistics point to LSE as a predominant user of fixed-term or casual labour; in 2020/21, 59% of LSE’s academic staff was on fixed-term (casual/hourly-paid) contracts, up by 12% since 2014/15. This was simultaneously met with an 18% decrease in permanent staff during the same time period.
Nonetheless, these contracts mean students can lose out on the world-class teaching LSE consistently promises to deliver. The result is that “the quality of education will only depend on the best effort of the individual teacher,” says Mikołaj. The quality of education and services delivered by casual workers — teachers, advisors, and more — is, thus, variable at best.
As a result, students will continue to suffer so long as the teachers and workers with whom they regularly interact suffer. This is not to say that most teachers and workers don’t want to help students because most of them thoroughly enjoy their professions. Their positions under these unstable contracts, however, make them prioritise self-survival above all — which means they cannot dedicate their energy to students, no matter how much they’d like to.
Casual contracts are the first in a list of problems with LSE’s working conditions and culture. Further articles of the ‘Working at LSE’ series will explore LSE working policies and the future and sustainability (or lack thereof) of academia.
*Some names in this article have been changed to preserve anonymity.
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Editor’s Note: If you or someone you know would like to share their experiences working at LSE with The Beaver, please contact features.beaver@lsesu.org.
