— Christina Paine and Sean Wallis in conversation
Christina: Sean, what would you say are the priorities for UCU in the fight for secure contracts and decent employment conditions right now?
Sean: The first thing is: we have to fight. A union that does not defend its most vulnerable members is not a union – it’s a club.
Christina: I agree with this!
Sean: We have to make the argument patiently, again and again, that “if you don’t secure the casualised, the employer will casualise the secure.” The fight against job insecurity is not just a moral one, but an essential part of defending everyone’s jobs.
This is part of the fight to defend The University: casualised members are as much a part of the university as anyone else. And we have to defend their academic freedom and free speech in the same way.
Take the University of Roehampton, for example. What happened there was awful, and the brave fight the branch put up was unable to stop it. When the university decided to shut down several departments in 2022, they targeted full-time secure staff on proper contracts. They didn’t target the casualised members of staff. But then, having made the secure staff redundant, they replaced them with colleagues on short-term contracts to teach out courses. They ‘offered’ the secure staff the ‘opportunity’ to stay on fixed-term contracts.
But you get my point. Once we accept the idea that casualisation is in any way ‘normal’, we accept the right of an employer to replace secure staff with casualised ones.
I am so sorry to hear that you are going through the same thing at London Met. We need to rally the whole union behind your branch.
Christina: Thank you. We are in shock right now.
On 8th January 2026, London Metropolitan University formally announced proposals to cut up to 120 jobs, alongside a major restructuring. That works out to 20% of the permanent staff. Consultation has taken place under extreme time pressure, and the employer is refusing to pay a voluntary severance scheme. Our branch is also concerned about the disproportionate equality impacts of the proposals, particularly on older members of staff, research staff, disabled staff, women, racialised staff, people from the global majority, and those in casualised roles.
This restructuring is a choice, not a necessity. London Met UCU is standing up to fight this systemic dismantling of a public, inclusive university, a major attack on working-class education and the callous discarding of livelihoods and careers.
This redundancy programme follows the loss of many hourly-paid jobs in the summer of 2025. Management first targeted casualised staff and now they have come for permanent staff. It’s an obvious divide and rule tactic.
We are seeking to bring the two fights together, which in some ways is more persuasive for both groups – exactly what you said – we have to secure the casualised to stop the casualisation of the secure.
The risk with such big redundancy programmes is the employer scares away future students and sets us up for more redundancies in the future.
We believe these proposals are legally questionable, and reflect a wider sectoral crisis driven by short-term financial decision-making that threatens student and staff wellbeing, education quality, and student experience.
Sean: You have my complete solidarity.
As you may remember, when last London Met went through a programme of cuts and redundancies (fifteen years ago!) I got my branch at University College London to ‘twin’ with London Met UCU. As well as trying to build peer-to-peer support, I was keen to overcome the snobbery that exists in our sector and holds us all back.
So whatever we can do to help, I trust my members to deliver. I’m already receiving enquiries from members about what they can do to support yours.
Anyway, the lesson seems to me to be clear. It is essential that in every fight over redundancies, we defend casualised staff in the same way, and with equal priority, as so-called ‘secure’ staff. Ultimately, none of us is secure if we don’t do this. We can’t fall for ‘divide and rule’, because the employer can replace us with casualised labour if we do.
We know it can be done. Dundee and Newcastle branches fought to defend the jobs of both groups of staff last year. These are the examples we have to learn from.
When we say “No Redundancies” we don’t mean “No redundancies of secure staff, but you can attack our sisters and brothers on insecure contracts.” We mean No Redundancies of any kind.
Christina: Yes. I think you are right. But where do you think that leaves self-organisation of casualised members?
Sean: I think practical organising with casualised members to improve their terms and conditions is absolutely essential! Indeed, I have spent my life doing this.
But my wider point was when the chips are down, when the employer is coming to attack staff, the union has to give a lead to say No Redundancies for everyone.
A common reaction when redundancies happen is that people who are not targeted think, “Oh my god, how awful but at least it’s not me.” And people who are targeted hope that they can avoid redundancy because someone else will go instead. The whole experience is horrible and divisive. That’s why the union has to give a lead.
But we must not sit back and wait for redundancies. An incredibly important strand of the kind of self-organisation you mention is the fight to get people on casualised contracts onto proper contracts of employment, and from fixed-term contracts onto permanent ones. In that way, we put them in a situation of equal terms with the so-called ‘core’ staff and fight to overcome division. We are all ‘core’!
We are all ‘academics’ and part of the university. We should proudly reclaim the ‘academic-related’ title for our professional staff.
I can say a bit about what we did at UCL if you like. By a combination of tactics, we got all our teaching fellows from hourly-paid worker contracts onto (mainly permanent) contracts of employment in 2007. Some of our people went from casual contracts to full-time permanent contracts in a single year.
We should not set our sights too low for what is possible. If you had asked me a year or so before that whether this was going to happen, I would have said you must be joking.
Being involved in the London Region UCU and the network of anti-casualisation reps we had was crucial. A small network of reps, FE and HE, pre-92 and post-92, were trying to win the same kinds of contract improvements in their colleges. We shared tactics and we documented the key lessons in a Toolkit. Some reps had legal training, others, like me, were self-taught. We challenged our own employers and learned their weaknesses. We did not all try the same thing, but then we compared notes.
For example, I helped colleagues at Hackney College win some cases by getting them to submit grievances highlighting the Fixed Term Employee Regs rather than the Part Time Workers Regs. (Unlike UCL, they said their HPLs were employees, but I pointed out that these were really annually renegotiated fixed term contracts, and therefore Regulation 3 applied.)
Their HR said it was not fair we were pointing out they were breaking a different law (!), and then they gave in before the case went to the Tribunal.
More recently at UCL, in 2020 we increased rates of pay and got a new agreement out of the national Four Fights dispute – similar to the Open University. Two years later, we got all our postgrad teaching assistants onto contracts of employment.
All of this is good news for members at UCL on so-called ‘teaching only’ contracts, but it is not the end of the fight. I do find it frustrating, as a research staff member myself, that we haven’t been able to make such remarkable improvements for our researchers.
If we have time I could say a bit about that.
Christina: Can you say something about how this impacts on the union’s equality work?
We all know that women and BAME staff are often given the worst types of contract. And they are also fighting in situations where they are already oppressed.
Sean: Absolutely. To me issues of Equality have to run through everything we do.
Take free speech – defending free speech in general is important, but it is meaningless if you can’t defend the free speech of all members of the oppressed and equality strands. Hence the critical test right now is where you stand to defend the freedom of speech on Palestine, or challenging Trump, for example.
Freedom of speech is really hard to exercise if you are always scared of losing your job, so it is a casualisation issue as well.
When it comes to members individually, the vast majority who come to the union for support are women, black, non-UK nationals, or disabled. So for me it is quite hard to think of how questions of Equality don’t play a role in any situation.
But to go back to the question, there are several aspects.
First, insecure contracts of various kinds are often the way that inequality becomes baked in to our institutions.
So at UCL, we know that women and non-British nationals are disproportionately found on the more insecure types of research and teaching contracts, and they tend to be concentrated on the lower grades. Research staff are often employed for 2, 3 maybe 5 years, by which time they might have gone up a grade, but then they lose their job.
I have members who finally succeeded in getting to Grade 9 (just below Professor equivalent) and then when the funding ended, had to accept a Grade 8 post – a demotion. That’s because Grade 9 research posts are rarely advertised but staff are promoted on the basis of expertise in their specialism. This kind of issue does not happen to other staff.
Differential treatment by academic ‘track’ then leads to discrimination by sex and race. Sixty percent of academic lecturers at UCL are male, but the equivalent for researchers or teaching-only lecturers is fifty percent. It’s not night and day, like sex bias in recruitment of doctors and nurses, but it is one of the key obstacles to tackling the gender and race pay gaps in the institution.
Second, discrimination can put members at a disadvantage from the start. This is related to the ‘double burden’ where people are always trying to get established and prove themselves in an environment which seems to be set up to make things harder for anyone who has not had a leg up through the system.
One way this can come out is staff accepting that they do work unpaid – something that we had outlawed years ago, but with the current crisis seems to be coming back.
But it is not all negative. An experience of discrimination can spur some members to get involved in the union and in the process win things for wider staff groups. It’s a question of organisation, and fighting for broad principles and collective rights.
Christina: What about the HE national negotiations over ‘contract types’? Can you say anything about that?
Sean: I think these are very important, but they should not be seen as a reason to wait to campaign locally. That’s for a few obvious reasons.
Firstly, they are likely to take a long time. Many employers see casualised contracts as central to their ‘business model’, and cannot imagine running their ‘business’ any other way. I would never want to say to anyone on a one-year contract, put your faith into national negotiations.
Secondly, they depend entirely on the willingness of the employers’ association (UCEA) to negotiate in good faith. That is about leverage.
UCEA has already said that any improvements in the working groups which have a cost will come out of the pay offer. So we need pressure from below to force their hand.
The imposition of a 1.4% pay offer is obviously bad news, not just in terms of take-home pay to members, but also with regard to the ‘envelope’ of staff budgets the employers plan for. The employers have now got away with a real terms cut in staff costs of about two or three percent in one year, depending on the inflation measure you choose. Those in the union who say we shouldn’t have balloted appear to forget that the employers are not just cutting pay. The entire aim is to squeeze budgets spent on staff costs, and negotiation doesn’t work if you have no leverage.
There are other types of leverage we can discuss, but let’s not imagine that all we have to do is go into a room with the employers, make a nice presentation and persuade the employers to behave better to staff! That’s not going to happen.
In 2023, UCEA resisted even agreeing to their 2020 offer, so that should tell you everything you need to know.
But that’s not a reason to hold back.
For example, alongside our campaign over hidden redundancies, we could have a new national political campaign with lobbies of Parliament which expose the conditions in our sector in the light of the new Employment Rights Act (ERA). At the same time branch reps could take the ERA back into our HR departments, get in the face of our employers, and threaten to name and shame.
Let’s lift some rocks!
Thirdly – and building on this – we have to take the national fight locally. Whatever is agreed at UCEA is only ever going to be ‘recommendations’ to employers.
So we have to build groups of members up to campaign locally and negotiate with HR departments, and back them up regionally and nationally. We need to use the Employment Rights Act to put rocket fuel into our anti-casualisation work!
What kind of change do I mean? Well, consider this.
According to the Government ‘Roadmap’, the Qualifying Period for ordinary Unfair Dismissal claims will fall from two years to six months from 1 January 2027. This two year qualifying period is a legal loophole (increased in April 2012 from one year) that undermines the Fixed Term Employees Regulations because it protects employers who break contracts annually. Reducing the period to six months gives us an open door to organise and defend staff!
Not all employers are in UCEA, especially some of the new providers. But the Employment Rights Act is the law.
When new laws come in it is possible to win more in the early days. A lot of employers won’t know which way that Employment Tribunals might interpret certain provisions, and won’t want to be the one which loses a pivotal case. So they are likely to concede rather than risk it.
Christina: Many of us are aware of the brilliant fight at the Open University to get casualised ‘associate lecturer’ tutors onto proper contracts in 2022. But you mentioned earlier you achieved something similar at UCL in the mid-2000s.
Can you say how you did that?
Sean: In 2006, shortly after we had the Pay Framework negotiations at UCL (2004-5), I was representing a group of four language tutors in what was then called our Language Centre.
They had proper contracts for Terms 1 and 2, full-time for the period, but were then paid on hourly-paid basis for Term 3 if there were a lot of students.
The members said to me they were paid about two-thirds of the same rate for Term 3. How can this be possible?
We then had to forensically go through pay slips, time sheets and so on.
When we started looking at contracts we saw a few things.
First the hours of work they were doing seemed to be an underestimate. But to prove that would require us to get the employer to admit it, and since no-one was clocking in and out, their first response would be to say no and challenge the figures.
But there was another thing that was very suspicious. In the pay slips something called ‘holiday pay’ was accounted for as a separate line in the figures. I worked out this was eight percent of the salary figure, which was added on top.
So I wondered – is this figure correct? Where does this 8% come from?
I always say check the maths. HR are notoriously innumerate. Whenever they do an ad hoc calculation they seem to get it wrong.
In the UCL Pay Framework, which we had just negotiated, we had harmonised contracts to 27 days annual leave and 36.5 hours a week. Plus there were 14 days when the college is closed (including bank holidays). The Part-Time Workers Regulations say part-time staff cannot be paid less than pro-rata – in proportion – to full-time staff.
Armed with a standardised contract this kind of calculation becomes a little easier. But mainly it was in the forefront of my mind having just negotiated it!
The ‘base salary’ is just an hourly rate based on assuming staff work weekdays year-round. But you have to subtract holidays and closure days. When you do that, you have 365 times five-sevenths (260.7), minus 41 days, all of which earns you 41 days worth of leave. That works out at an uplift rate of about 18.65%.
Crucially, it is not eight percent!
Even if you argue that staff are only entitled to pro-rata for annual leave but not closure days (HR tried this once) it still works out as 11.5%. Again, 8% is just far too low.
So I read up on this, and found that the Working Time Regulations and European Court decisions require pro-rata holiday pay to be itemised in pay slips.
We drove this forward primarily by casework. I helped the four staff with a collective grievance, which took a year or so to run. It was hard work. Two of the four dropped out, which was a real shame. But the other two stuck to it.
The two members submitted an ET1 to the Employment Tribunal service (beginning a tribunal claim), which ultimately didn’t go anywhere. The main problem was time limits. But I think it may have got the employer to realise we were not going to give up.
At the first formal stage the HR department drafted a response which denied everything. The funny thing about this was that it was obvious. The Chair of the Panel was not a lawyer, and there was ‘legal advice’ that was laughable.
It was completely wrong on the law on employment status (this was part of the complaint) saying that the contract could not have ‘mutuality of obligation’ because it was an hourly-paid contract. We won’t guarantee future work with this contract therefore you are not entitled to it. But the argument was entirely circular. Employment status claims are all about what actually happens, not what the contract says! I had read up on Kaye Carl’s Sheffield tribunal case, which came out just before. There were other silly mistakes.
The Appeal went our way, the employer was forced to pay compensation for back pay and unpaid holiday pay to the two staff.
The unpaid work element had to be evidenced through time sheets, and negotiations took a few months before we could get to a compensation figure.
But the holiday pay claim did not need evidence. It was trivially easy to demonstrate. Unless the person who set up the contract arranged to pay it, pay slips mostly did not include this itemised line. I think the Language Centre was a (positive) exception, even though the figure was wrong.
If there was no evidence they had been paid holiday pay by separately listing it in the pay slip, hourly-paid staff were entitled to compensation of 18.65% of their hourly-paid salary, potentially going back six years. That could be more than one year’s salary!
I kept asking HR when are you going to compensate those thousands of teaching fellows and post grad teaching assistants for their unpaid holiday pay?
In the summer of 2007, the Director of HR called me up and said, Okay, from the start of term, every teaching fellow will be put on standard contracts of employment (paying annual leave as part of the contract) and we will agree with you a mechanism for itemising holiday pay for other staff. It was that simple.
In one go we had won – not just for those two staff, but for the 2,500 plus teaching fellows UCL employed at the time. Staff got a big pay increase going forward and secure contracts. We let members know they could make back pay claims for holiday pay, although I don’t think many did.
There were some holdout departments. All agreements need enforcement. But this was an important win for a large employer to concede.
Christina: You mentioned the London Region. What role did UCU’s London Region play in all of this? You and I collaborated with FE colleagues to develop the HPL toolkit.
But how else did the London Region help?
Sean: The main thing that I got from attending Region meetings at the time was what I would call the “Ain’t Necessarily So” factor.
For example, UCL had thousands of staff on hourly-paid ‘worker’ contracts. I found out that in most other branches, the employer at least accepted that they were employees. To realise you can at least win employment status for your members is a huge motivation.
Secondly, it put me in touch with other reps in both FE and HE who were engaged in the same type of fight. We could learn from each other, which, of course, we did.
Sean: You have been successful at London Met, though, too. Could you say something about that?
Christina: London Met has been a big challenge. We’ve been fighting crisis after crisis, and that has made organising incredibly challenging.
But we started from a very low bar.
About four years ago, we began a systematic review of how staff job evaluation and workload counting had created a situation where casualised staff called Associate Lecturers (AsLs) were paid a third less than permanent staff who were doing the same teaching. This took about two years to complete and led to an audacious pay claim to address this differential.
Our three claims were to assimilate AsLs onto the spine properly (this should have happened twenty years ago!), with proper job evaluation, and paying for all their working hours. We haven’t won everything yet, and management is trying to play off permanent staff against the most casualised. But we have won some things.
One of the first struggles was simply for hourly-paid and AsL staff to be literally recognised as people, as workers, as employees with rights. Through sustained union organising, we’ve shifted that so that – as far as we can – nothing now goes through without the impact on hourly paid staff being considered. We developed a Charter of Demands, and are building an action network to find and organise casualised staff, and force management to engage with the union and the network.
In 2017, through strike action and an academic boycott, we won an ACAS agreement that delivered notice and compensation rights, ended new zero-hours contracts, and was supposed to give hourly paid staff priority access to permanent jobs, so that whenever there is a permanent vacancy that should go to AsLs before anyone else. The employer is supposed to give staff two months notice if there is no work and compensation where there aren’t enough students and they lose hours.
We’ve also won holiday pay increases, fourteen hours of mandatory paid training and rights to be paid for meetings in 2023, and rights to maternity leave and sick pay for hourly-paid staff. None of that was given – it was all fought for.
Now we’re pushing forward again: building a fixed-term contract campaign, and crucially a joined-up branch fight for ALL jobs, combining the fight for redundancy pay and jobs for hourly paid staff with our defence against compulsory redundancies across the university.
I think defending both permanent and casualised workers together is not optional – it’s essential. That’s the work we’re doing now. It’s a massive job, but it’s the only way we protect equality and defend all workers in London Met. An injury to one is an injury to all.
We also secured a good facility time agreement in 2024 for hourly paid staff – they get a fractional position on the lecturer’s contract once they take up facility time.
Sean: Would you be able to say something about your personal case? What do you think the main lessons are for other colleagues?
Christina: Three years ago I started a tribunal claim which was about casualisation and disability discrimination.
I had lost hours, and the employer was not giving me things that I needed (reasonable adjustments), and that the hourly paid contract I was on at the time was being used as a rationale for not implementing reasonable adjustments.
I went to three preliminary hearings because the case was so complicated.
I never gave up. I had to submit so much evidence and they really try to wear you down. As a disabled person on an hourly paid contract, I was having to spend up to twenty hours a week just on my case. I had never done this before.
In the end the Judge in one of the preliminary hearings said “I recommend we just slim this down and just focus on the disability discrimination,” I had Judicial Mediation and submitted Schedules of Losses, and the employer gave in shortly afterwards. I remember the Friday afternoon when I received a revised Schedule of Loss from London Met which said “and she will get a full-time permanent job.” Which of course was what I really wanted.
It took a while for this to sink in.
The lessons are many, but the first is to have support – have comrades who will support you. To know the law – I really got to know the law – and to have a focused claim. Concentrating on the Equality angle which the Judge suggested, clearly concentrated the employer’s mind.
Sean: So the fact that the Equality Act covers your entire treatment by the employer, including their decision to offer you an hourly-paid contract, actually proved to be the deciding argument in this case?
Christina: Yes. Well, it was not just about the ‘offer’ but the employer’s decision to keep me on that contract all those years.
The things that mattered to me were security and stability. For a disabled person, stability is so important, you have so many other things going on in your life.
They added schedules to the agreement they signed to improve my working conditions. After 21 years I finally got an office with my name on the door!
Christina: You mentioned this before, but what can you say about what we can do for research staff?
Most universities don’t have the number of research staff as UCL (about 4,000), but we do have some. Can you say what you have done to improve their terms and conditions?
What do you think we need to do as a union?
Sean: I think that we need a very big research staff campaign. We need to recruit more researchers into the union at the same time as arguing that they are an integral part of the university.
We’ve done a lot of work over the years, but it feels like pushing rocks up the hill. We won things, and then the rocks roll back down again. The problem is that research-intensive universities are really committed to a hire-and-fire research staff employment model. In 2006, UCL rebranded fixed-term contracts as “open ended contracts with end dates” but did nothing to really make staff more secure.
An important new factor though concerns the way the market in HE student fees has impacted on research. Teaching was initially much more lucrative to universities than research projects.
In 2010, when tuition fees were nine thousand pounds, I worked out that the break-even staff-student ratio for a university equivalent to 80% Full Economic Costing (FEC) on Research Grants was about 1 to 10, i.e. employing one full-time teaching staff member for every ten students. A ratio of 1 to 30 was equivalent to a FEC of 440%!
This created a sudden urge by universities to expand courses and take on more students where they could, especially after 2014, when the cap on student recruitment to most courses was abolished.
Everyone is aware of the competition between universities. But less attention is made to what happened on the inside. The new market for tuition fees created big tensions within universities, especially research intensive and medical universities like UCL. Ironically, Medicine (which is big, and earns a lot of research income) couldn’t expand because medical student numbers are capped.
Over time, driven by managers’ cost-cutting, the employers are pushing researchers to do teaching and marking. This was exposed during the MAB of 2023, when UCL initially threatened to deduct 50% of 70 days pay from researchers who were doing marking. We pointed out that UKRI funding bodies only allowed staff to work for the employer for a maximum of 15% of workload.
But once staff with research contracts carry out regular teaching, they are doing broadly the same work as other academic staff, and for that group at least, there are clear arguments for making staff permanent. At UCL we have seen a significant growth of research staff on permanent (underwritten) contracts, and we need to use that to help recruit and organise.
Research staff typically face two further problems – lack of integration into the university as a whole, and having enough time to develop themselves as independent academics.
Staff who are not in the union are often quite isolated. When researchers are hired they are usually research assistants or junior fellows. Often it may be their first job after their degree. They tend to identify with their academic research group, rather than the university. But if they need to apply for redeployment to keep working, they are much more likely to be successful if they already know the potential new supervisor informally and/or are more involved in the wider university.
The other issue is time. If you are constantly working to deadlines, often working long hours unpaid and then hit the end of contract. But to have the opportunity to develop new projects, develop yourself as an independent researcher and generally develop your research area, you need time to think.
Back in 2007, I drafted a model policy and argumentation for the union, to set out how research in universities could be managed in such a way as to make career paths for research staff genuinely a viable option. This included a “Model Policy on Proactive Redeployment and Career Planning for Research Staff” (Appendix 4) which was put to UCEA in 2009 by the joint unions.
The rationale I wrote in that document still applies. Universities, managers and Principal Investigators have to break the habit of seeing the end of a funding period as triggering an inevitable redundancy.
There is good practice out there. In particular, proactive redeployment means that institutions plan for the date, so that there are opportunities to move staff around and avoid redundancy.
What do I mean? Well, the dominant practice is to treat researchers like they are sitting in a car without a steering wheel! You can’t change lanes. Many leave at the end, frustrated and used, at best their intellectual contribution is taken up by others, at worst it is just forgotten. This neglect also incentivizes staff to apply for jobs in the last year of their contract, so it often means partially unfinished projects.
This is bad for researchers, but it is also incredibly wasteful for science.
Proactive redeployment means giving research staff more autonomy and respect, but also ensuring they have what we might call portability between projects. It means developing networks and collaboration inside the institution, and planning for the end date so that the researcher can avoid a car crash.
I appreciate that improving redeployment in big universities may be easier on paper than in the smallest, although the big institutions are often very conservative. But that’s an argument for potentially having a policy of redeployment between universities. The real question is how do we stop universities treating research staff as permanently disposable while publicly claiming that they are ‘supporting’ research?
I think we really must do better as a union on this question. To me the answer is obvious: we need to treat the conditions of employment of staff as part of a public campaign to defend higher education.
This is what our sister unions, the BMA and NEU, are doing with resident doctors and school teachers. We should be doing the same.
Christina Paine and Sean Wallis are both standing for London and the East (HE). Sean is also standing for Vice President (from HE) in the NEC elections.
