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Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Christmas. Show all posts

Friday 22 December 2023

Queen Mary University, London and its Christmas Scrooge tale

Even Scrooge would marvel at Queen Mary’s pay-docking over a marking boycott. No wonder higher education is in turmoil writes Aditya Chakrabortty in The Guardian

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.

A similar standoff took place last year, when staff received payslips with a net payment of £0.00. So as not to repeat that furore, the university instead deducted about 21 days from each month’s paycheck. In July, it confiscated almost £176,000 from 82 staff – on average more than £2,000 each.

Even after the University and College Union (UCU) called off the boycott in September and the academics scrambled to give students their marks, their pay kept on getting docked for days they had boycotted. For some, December is their first month on full pay since the start of summer.

What’s it like to open your payslip and find two-thirds of it has disappeared? Even as staff told me, many worried about reprisals from managers. So here is an anonymised sample of their stories:

 A woman whose manager knew she was three months pregnant was told at the end of June that her very next paycheck would be docked. The pregnancy was already judged high risk, and she had to support her 4-year-old child and husband. In July, she duly lost £2,147.

 A man had to take a second job to ensure he could pay his mortgage and his child’s nursery at Queen Mary. He paid his own employer nursery fees, despite it withholding pay for him.

 To look after his sick mum and elderly dad, another man worked a second job.

 A woman relied on her friends letting her stay with them for months. If she had had to pay rent on her reduced salary, she said, “I simply could not have managed.”

These are senior lecturers, responsible for teaching the next generation of teachers, lawyers and doctors while doing research that will help all of us. And they have been treated like dirt.

Listening to all this, I kept hearing another voice – the clipped, precise tones of BBC Radio 4’s Justin Webb. As he and his fellow Today presenters have had to interview medicsbarristers and professors about exactly why they’re on a chilly picket line, there is a distinct puzzlement audible in their questions. Disgruntled factory workers they can understand, but aren’t these meant to be the good jobs?

That’s what those academics also believed, once. Two of the stories you’ve just read came from people who were the first in their family to go to university. They studied hard and overworked, and they lived out the Blairite boast that “we’re all middle class now” – only to find that middle-class jobs are not what they were. They have become more routine, more spied upon (Queen Mary managers encouraged students to submit reports, inevitably nicknamed “snitch forms” , on their own teachers) and relatively worse paid. Yet the facade of tweedy collegiality never drops. As staff log in to the university that took their pay, they are reminded that Queen Mary is “committed to improving social justice”.

Other universities deducted pay for marking boycotts. At Aberdeen, the principal said he wanted to inflict “pain” on dissenting lecturers. But few administrations have been as punitive as Queen Mary’s. Other universities may claim to be in budgetary crisis, from Oxford Brookes to Sheffield Hallam. Not Queen Mary, which is sitting on an annual surplus of £92m. Even so, its boss still threatened a degree programmewith closure after its staff stuck up for their rights. No wonder last year it was crowned “worst university employer in the UK”. In surveys, academics frequently pick out their own bosses as the worst aspect of the entire college. “Senior management does not listen to staff and does not even attempt to show that it is doing so,” is one typical example.

I put these allegations in detail to Queen Mary’s principal and to members of its governing council, along with other questions to get their perspective. Rather than answer directly, the press office issued a short statement that read in part: “We do not withhold pay from staff so long as they deliver all their educational activities. Teaching and assessment are priority contractual activities for university staff, and we withhold pay for staff who do not carry out these core activities due to industrial action.”

You help to pay for this regime. Because charities are meant to serve a benefit to the public and work to higher ends, they are not liable for the same taxes as other businesses. Universities are not overseen by the Charity Commission but by the Office for Students, which has no expertise in charitable regulation. If they did, harder questions might be asked about what is happening inside today’s degree factories.

In the meantime, Queen Mary’s status as a charity means it charges no VAT on its fees or halls of residence and pays no corporation tax on its surplus. A conservative estimate from the local University and College Union puts this public subsidy as worth more than £100m a year.

“Out upon merry Christmas!” grumps Scrooge. “If I could work my will every idiot who goes about with ‘Merry Christmas’ on his lips, should be boiled with his own pudding, and buried with a stake of holly through his heart. He should!” Someone should nominate Ebenezer to run a British university.

Sunday 25 December 2016

Brexit Facts for your Christmas Dinner

Dan Roberts in The Guardian


Avoiding politics at the dinner table may prove harder than ever this Christmas for families on opposite sides of Britain’s intergenerational Brexit divide.

Voters over 65 were more than 50% more likely to vote to leave the European Union than those under 34, and polls suggest opinions have hardened since. Divorce lawyers have already warned that differing views on the subject are also an added source of stress in many marriages.

At Thanksgiving, when American families gathered for the first time after the equally divisive election of Donald Trump, the New York Times was so worried it published a list of “election facts to keep handy for holiday discussions”. In the interest of similarly avoiding a post-truth Christmas in the UK, here is a festive bluffer’s guide to latest twists and turns of the Brexit debate to keep by the crackers:

 Whose Idea was it again?

Six months on from the referendum we know a lot more about the demographics of the electorate. A recent study by NatCen Social Research found the people most likely to vote leave were those without formal educational qualifications (78%), those with a monthly income of less than £1,200 (66%) and those in social housing (68%). Voters against EU membership were also more likely to be white, male, and readers of the Sun or the Daily Express. Anyone brave enough to point this out over Christmas pudding should bear in mind that just 9% of leave voters said they were regular readers of the Guardian. Remainers were also heavily concentrated in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland, but in a minority elsewhere.

Will it ever actually happen?

In private, one European finance minister puts the chances of the Brexit “experiment” being abandoned as high as 25%. Scotland’s first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, has proposed the radical solution of Scotland staying in the single market even if the rest of the UK leaves. In London, it is hard to find anyone in any doubt that the UK government will at least have to give full Brexit a very good try before the next general election. There is always a risk that unforeseen events – another financial crisis or a wider EU unravelling, for example – can intervene, but the likelihood is they won’t. This is happening.

What about that legal challenge?

A supreme court judgment on the government’s right to start divorce proceedings by invoking article 50 without consulting parliament is due in the middle of January. The government is expected to lose, but the impact of the case has been undermined by growing signs that it could easily assemble enough MPs to pass the necessary legislation. An amendment to a Labour motion calling for more transparency in the process saw just 23 Labour MPs vote against their party whip in protest at the very idea of invoking article 50.

Weren’t we meant to be eating baked beans in candlelight by now?


The Guardian’s latest Brexit barometer confirms that many of the more dire economic projections of the impact of a leave vote have yet to come to pass. That does not mean they won’t, though. There are already worrying signs of anxietyabout Britain’s future trading arrangements that can be seen in the slumping value of sterling. EU negotiators are also threatening to extract a £50bn divorce settlement as the price of agreeing a post-membership deal which our ambassador has warned could take a decade. In the meantime, banks and carmakers are warning of an exodus if a transitional arrangement is not agreed to soften the “cliff edge”. Don’t throw out the candles just yet.

So, what’s the plan?


Ah. This is where lunch could get awkward. The truth is we don’t have one yet. Theresa May has said she will give a speech in January setting out the broad aims of Britain’s negotiating position. The Brexit minister, David Davis, has said he will publish a slightly fuller, but not very full, outline for parliament to debate in March. The prime minister also admitted to the Commons liaison committee on Tuesday that leaving the EU without any sort of agreement on the terms of divorce let alone future relations was one of several contingency plans that Whitehall was preparing for. There is now talk of soft Brexit, hard Brexit or “train-crash” Brexit, with the smart money increasingly on something between the last two.

Tuesday 23 December 2014

Christmas is a face-off between people who are spiritual and people who are consumerist


How do you formulate an anti-consumerist worldview that doesn’t involve becoming a killjoy?
Children's toys
'It isn’t my kids' spiritual wellbeing I’m worried about. It’s the volume of plastic tat I have to throw out every year, to make way for the next tranche of plastic tat.' Photograph: Paul Hackett/Reuters

Christmas is a face-off between people who are spiritual and people who are consumerist. The consumerists never call themselves that, they’re just really keen to let you know that they don’t believe in God. The spiritual ones never call themselves spiritual, they are just very anti-consumerist. It’s the dialectic method of identity building: I hate crackers and piped music, ergo I am deep; I hate superstition and unprovable things, ergo I am fun. It’s like a zero-sum game in which the shops helpfully give the spiritualists something to kick against, and the churches, especially with their midnight shenanigans, give the consumerists something to laugh at.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t leave you much room for manoeuvre if you are both anti-consumerist and an atheist. Pretty much everything you say will deliver you into the hands of the wrong ally. Up until now, I have always just succumbed to one side, in order to avoid getting crushed by the competing plates. Between about 1983 and 2013, assuming myself – on the final throw of the dice – to be more of an atheist than an anti-consumerist, I swallowed the shop-fest whole. I remember standing in Marks & Spencer buying a slipper bag for my uncle, crying with laughter at the scope of the needlessness. Who needs a bag to put their slippers in? It’s like having a special wallet for handkerchieves. Probably, if he’d lived a bit longer, I’d have bought him one of those too. None of this ever struck me as at all obscene; it was all at one remove from obscenity, like a cartoon of someone accidentally chopping off their arm.
But having kids has tipped me over the edge. It isn’t their spiritual wellbeing I’m worried about – they have grandparents for that. It’s the volume of plastic tat I have to throw out every year, to make way for the next tranche of plastic tat. It’s like an anxiety dream, this act: shovelling gigantic, brightly coloured items that have detained nobody for one second longer than the time it takes to render them incomplete or no longer working. They are almost new, and completely pointless. I don’t want to blight another household with them, but I can’t face putting them in the bin, so the whole lot from last year spent six months in a sort of staging post, some inconvenient place while I waited for some other person to throw them out for me. If they’re battery powered it’s 10 times worse, because the added complexity is like an accusation. They are all battery powered.
This is when you’re faced with the question that you should have squared up to 20 years ago: how do you formulate an anti-consumerist worldview that doesn’t involve becoming a killjoy? How do you eschew consumption while still maintaining your spiritual hollowness? The people buying the plastic have annexed the space “fun”, while the people with the baby in the manger have appropriated “thought”. I have no ideological home in this season. But I do love the drinking.

Wednesday 17 December 2014

Best quotations from The Simpsons

1. “Marriage is like a coffin and each kid is another nail”

2. “It takes two to lie: one to lie and one to listen”

3.  Bart: "Grandpa, why don't you tell a story?"
     Lisa: "Yeah Grandpa, you lived a long and interesting life."
     Grandpa: "That's a lie and you know it"

4. Marge: "Homer, is this the way you pictured married life?"
    Homer: "Yeah, pretty much, except we drove round in a van solving mysteries"

5. Homer: "We're proud of you, Boy.
    Bart: "Thanks Dad. Part of this d-minus belongs to God"

6. "Life is just one crushing defeat after another until you just wish Flanders was dead"

7. "You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is: Never try”

8. “If you pray to the wrong god, you might just make the right one madder and madder”

9. "When I look at people I don't see colours; I just see crackpot religions"

10 "Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It’s what separates us from the animals         … except the weasel"

11 Marge: "It's Patty who chose a life of celibacy. Selma had celibacy thrust upon her"

12 Vendor: "Hot dogs, get your hot dogs!"
    Homer: "I'll take one"
    Marge: "What, do you follow my husband around to sell him hot dogs?"
    Vendor: "Lady, he's putting my kids through college."

13 "How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive?"

14 "Lisa, you've got the brains and talent to go as far as you want, and when you do I'll be right there to borrow money.”

15 “I'm not normally a praying man, but if you're up there, please save me, Superman!”

16 “Son, if you really want something in this life, you have to work for it. Now quiet! They're about to announce the lottery numbers.”

17 “What’s the point of going out? We’re just gonna wind up back home anyway.”

18 "Cheating is the gift man gives himself."

19 "Books are useless! I only ever read one book, To Kill A Mockingbird, and it gave me absolutely no insight on how to kill mockingbirds!"

20 "It's not easy to juggle a pregnant wife and a troubled child, but somehow I managed to fit in eight hours of TV a day."

21 "To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems."

22 "Oh, loneliness and cheeseburgers are a dangerous mix."

23  Moe: "Homer, lighten up! You're making Happy Hour bitterly ironic."

24 "I don't get mad, I get stabby"

25 "I've been called ugly, pug ugly, fugly, pug fugly, but never ugly ugly."

26 "There's only one fat guy that brings us presents and his name ain't Santa".
      Bart Simpson, son of Father Homer Christmas.

27 "Last night's Itchy & Scratchy was, without a doubt, the worst episode ever. Rest assured I was on the internet within minutes registering my disgust throughout the world."

28 "When will I learn? The answers to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle, they’re on TV!"

 

Wednesday 12 December 2012

On the 12th day of Christmas ... your gift will just be junk


Every year we splurge on pointless, planet-trashing products, most of which are not wanted. Why not just bake them a cake?
daniel pudles
Illustration by Daniel Pudles
 
There's nothing they need, nothing they don't own already, nothing they even want. So you buy them a solar-powered waving queen; a belly-button brush; a silver-plated ice cream tub-holder; a "hilarious" inflatable Zimmer frame; a confection of plastic and electronics called Terry the Swearing Turtle; or – and somehow I find this significant – a Scratch Off World Map.

They seem amusing on the first day of Christmas, daft on the second, embarrassing on the third. By the twelfth they're in landfill. For 30 seconds of dubious entertainment, or a hedonic stimulus that lasts no longer than a nicotine hit, we commission the use of materials whose impacts will ramify for generations.

Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that, of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale. Even the goods we might have expected to hold on to are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (wearing out or breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable).
But many of the products we buy, especially for Christmas, cannot become obsolescent. The term implies a loss of utility, but they had no utility in the first place. An electronic drum-machine T-shirt; a Darth Vader talking piggy bank; an ear-shaped iPhone case; an individual beer can chiller; an electronic wine breather; a sonic screwdriver remote control; bacon toothpaste; a dancing dog. No one is expected to use them, or even look at them, after Christmas day. They are designed to elicit thanks, perhaps a snigger or two, and then be thrown away.

The fatuity of the products is matched by the profundity of the impacts. Rare materials, complex electronics, the energy needed for manufacture and transport are extracted and refined and combined into compounds of utter pointlessness. When you take account of the fossil fuels whose use we commission in other countries, manufacturing and consumption are responsible for more than half of our carbon dioxide production. We are screwing the planet to make solar-powered bath thermometers and desktop crazy golfers.

People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smartphone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility. Forests are felled to make "personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets". Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and by the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.

In 2007, the journalist Adam Welz records, 13 rhinos were killed by poachers in South Africa. This year, so far, 585 have been shot. No one is entirely sure why. But one answer is that very rich people in Vietnam are now sprinkling ground rhino horn on their food, or snorting it like cocaine to display their wealth. It's grotesque, but it scarcely differs from what almost everyone in industrialised nations is doing: trashing the living world through pointless consumption.

This boom has not happened by accident. Our lives have been corralled and shaped in order to encourage it. World trade rules force countries to participate in the festival of junk. Governments cut taxes, deregulate business, manipulate interest rates to stimulate spending. But seldom do the engineers of these policies stop and ask, "spending on what?" When every conceivable want and need has been met (among those who have disposable money), growth depends on selling the utterly useless. The solemnity of the state, its might and majesty, are harnessed to the task of delivering Terry the Swearing Turtle to our doors.

Grown men and women devote their lives to manufacturing and marketing this rubbish, and dissing the idea of living without it. "I always knit my gifts," says a woman in a TV ad for an electronics outlet. "Well you shouldn't," replies the narrator. An ad for a Google tablet shows a father and son camping in the woods. Their enjoyment depends on the Nexus 7's special features. The best things in life are free, but we've found a way of selling them to you.

The growth of inequality that has accompanied the consumer boom ensures that the rising economic tide no longer lifts all boats. In the US in 2010, a remarkable 93% of the growth in incomes accrued to the top 1% of the population. The old excuse, that we must trash the planet to help the poor, simply does not wash. For a few decades of extra enrichment for those who already possess more money than they know how to spend, the prospects of everyone else who will live on this Earth are diminished.

So effectively have governments, the media and advertisers associated consumption with prosperity and happiness that to say these things is to expose yourself to opprobrium and ridicule. Witness last week's edition of Radio 4's The Moral Maze, in which most of the panel lined up to decry the idea of consuming less, and to associate it somehow with authoritarianism. When the world goes mad, those who resist are denounced as lunatics.

Bake them a cake, write them a poem, give them a kiss, tell them a joke, but for God's sake stop trashing the planet to tell someone you care. All it shows is that you don't.

Tuesday 22 November 2011

The billionaire Virgin boss Richard Branson is no radical, he's no entrepreneur, he's just a plain old-fashioned carpetbagger

Last week, you, me and every other taxpayer in Britain each handed £13 to the billionaire Richard Branson. Not that we were told about this national whip-round. Instead, George Osborne claimed the heavily discounted sale of Northern Rock to the Virgin boss and a few of his chums represented "value for money". That's a funny way to describe a deal where taxpayers come out at least £400m poorer, but at least we now have an answer to that perennial pre-Christmas question of what to give the man who has everything.




And what do Team Branson plan to do with the Rock? Listen to Virgin Money chairman David Clementi's talk of creating "a significant banking competitor" and you'd have come away with wholesome impressions of commitment and investment. If you'd leafed through the FT this weekend, though, you'd have read about how the Virgin consortium will raid the business of its own cash to pay for the purchase – and then, as the chief investor, American financier Wilbur Ross, puts it: "We would hope to sell out a few years down the road." In other words, the business plan is to buy it cheap, strip it of assets – then flog it dear.



Hang on, you're probably thinking. Is this the same Branson who had those record shops? Who always pops up in the papers dressed as a woman or riding in a hot air balloon? Sir Richard of the Beard and the Overbite?



And the answer is: yes. Sure, Branson would like you to believe that he's the greatest iconoclast since John Calvin, leading a Reformation of established business. And if you won't buy that, he'll settle for being cast as a public-school Don Quixote for ever tilting at insiders and interest groups. Yes, the entrepreneur screws up – as with cars, cola, cosmetics and all those other discarded Virgins – but he takes risks.



The more prosaic truth is that the Virgin boss keeps himself in homes in Holland Park and Necker Island by taking taxpayer subsidies and operating heavily protected businesses. After all, you don't get much safer than a small mortgage lender that's had all its rubbish assets taken off it by the Treasury, in a market where the big banks are keeping their eyes down and their fingers crossed.



Think about the great Branson triumphs and you'll see what I mean. Virgin Rail? A monopoly on the West Coast main line, complete with initial subsidies worth hundreds of millions. Virgin Radio and Virgin Mobile? Both granted government licences to operate in a heavily restricted market. Virgin Airlines? The beneficiary of regulators' decision to strip British Airways of landing slots between London and New York and award them to the number two player. Again, a closed market where Branson has tried to keep the door shut tight against further competition.



Despite all the awards and the cosy relationships with whoever's in Downing Street, the Virgin boss neither makes anything, nor changes anything. He's no radical. The Northern Rock purchase is typical of his style: he fronts up a deal where the real money tends to come from someone else (in this case, an American and an Abu Dhabi investment firm), slaps the Virgin name everywhere and then cashes out as soon as possible. Branson isn't an entrepreneur; he's a carpetbagger.



Early in Tom Bower's splendid biography of Branson, there is a scene in which he is giving a Millennium Lecture at Oxford University in November 1999. The "lighthouse for enterprise" is asked what his great hope is for the new century, and a hush falls over the audience. What might he say? Were this Bill Gates, a picture would be painted of a software revolution. The head of Nissan might summon up a vision of Africans and Asians gaily pootling about in cheap new hatchbacks. What does the bearded visionary have in mind? "To run the national lottery."



Of course he does: a government-gifted licence to get his brand name plastered everywhere – the sort of thing Branson is always after.



But here's the thing: in his desire for sheltered money-makers, the Virgin boss differs from the rest of British business only in his desire for publicity. Look at our household names: take out retail, banks and commodities and the things you're left with bear names such as Wessex Water or Centrica or Arriva. In other words, they do things the public sector used to do – pump water or pipe gas or lay on public transport. Alternatively, they're outfits such as Serco, or Capita and they're bidding for contracts from the government; or they're engineers bidding for PFI projects. Now look at the big names in America or Germany: there are firms such as Google or Siemens.



Over here much of the private sector isn't adding anything or innovating – indeed, it's tricky to do that when you're running an administrative office or supplying water. They're simply taking contracts and cutting staffing costs.



This is a picture of lazy British business, either seeking business from the state or the protection of sheltered industries. And yet if you listen to the Conservatives, the problem with the economy is that the labour markets are too heavily regulated. No 10 lets it be known that it's taking seriously ideas to scrap laws around unfair dismissal, so that employees can be sacked without explanation.



The implication of all this is that Cameron and Osborne think the workers are to blame for the malaise of the British economy. Look at the Northern Rock deal, however, or flick through the business pages, and the opposite appears to be the case: it's business that needs to be prodded into working harder.