A TRADE union has launched a campaign at a Scottish university calling for better working conditions for graduate teaching assistants (GTA).
The campaign – titled Secure Pay, Fair Pay, Equal Pay – has been launched by the University College Union (UCU) branch at Glasgow University.
GTAs are typically PhD students who are required to teach as part of their degree. They contribute to a large proportion of the teaching, particularly in the first two years of a degree at pre-honours level.
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They are paid a certain amount of time for their work, yet they typically work much longer hours and the number of hours they are compensated for varies across different schools.
This means that much of the work carried out by GTAs – including lesson preparation, teaching, marking and pastoral care – is unpaid.
‘The future of higher education’
DR Jenny Morrison, a politics and international relations lecturer at Glasgow University, said whilst GTAs make up a huge contribution to the teaching at the university, they remain “underpaid”, “under-recognised” and “undervalued”.
“GTAs carry a huge amount of the teaching, and that teaching is done in less than ideal conditions,” Dr Morrison told the Sunday National.
“It means that a lot of the people who are actually going to be the future of higher education end up with the worst conditions.”
She continued: “It’s not beneficial for their own development as teachers because they’re not appropriately paid.
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“And it's very negative for students because much of the teaching they get is from GTAs, yet GTAs aren’t able to properly prepare in order to teach.”
A recent survey conducted by the UCU branch found that GTAs were doing substantial unpaid work, often spending more time on tasks like preparation and pastoral care than they are paid for.
The union hopes to raise awareness on the issue by attending Glasgow University’s upcoming open day on October 26.
“GTAs should be paid more fairly, which means more pay for the work that they do,” Dr Morrison told the Sunday National.
“Their contracts should also be more secure – they should be told up front how much work they’re going to get, rather than it being dropped on them.”
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The UCU branch has been engaging with management to try and improve conditions for a number of years, but there has been “little progress”.
While there was previously a forum set up between staff and university management to discuss casualisation and unequal pay rates, this was disbanded last year.
The union said they were told it was disbanded because they were “duplicating work” taking place in other forums, yet it warned the move risked cutting the union out of important discussions.
A spokesperson for Glasgow University said: “We have been in active discussions with the campus trade unions in response to their concerns about this area and conducted a review of our approach to Graduate Teaching Assistants during the academic year 2023/24.
“We will continue to engage constructively with all stakeholders to address these matters through appropriate channels.”
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