“The general cultural disregard for gig workers rubs off on us too.” (Luke MacGregor/Getty)
“The only way to get a full-time job in this university,” a senior colleague recently told me, tongue not-that-firmly in cheek, “is if somebody quits or dies.” As a new cohort of freshers prepares for the old ritual of seminars and snakebites, one is likely to hear similarly apocalyptic conversations in staff rooms across the land.
The number of universities cutting jobs and slashing courses has long passed 50, with many more tightening belts to gastric-band levels. This week alone has seen the creation of the UK’s first “Super-University”: which, in its blending of cash-strapped Kent with Greenwich, is surely more marketing than Marvel. And worse will probably follow. As the Office for Students found, 42.7% of English institutions are forecast to end 2025-6 in deficit, while the once-reliable cash-cow of overseas students has soured too. Non-UK entrants fell by 7.7% in 2024-5, some 9% below what universities themselves had forecast.
As an hourly lecturer working at an English university, these struggles are deeply personal. Never heard of us? No, of course not — we “Hourlies” are the best-kept secret in the gig economy. Our precarious positions are scarcely mentioned in glossy prospectuses, and we tend not to be invited to take the stage come graduation day, for fear new graduates might cringe at the sight of our tattered, custard-stained gowns. Or, perhaps, it’s because vice chancellors are scared we’ll scream out the grim truth: that we earn less than the average Deliveroo driver, yet are regularly relied upon for over a quarter of all higher-education teaching.
What happened? I’m frequently asked that by ashen-faced boomers, whose comprehension of all things university seems to have stopped at caps, gowns, brandy in wingbacks, and seminars thick with cig smoke.
Is it, perhaps, that these once-great halls of knowledge have, in recent years, been reduced to mere political beach balls, palmed back and forth by warring sides — one saying that everybody should sack off academia and become a plumber instead, the other that every child who shows an aptitude for plumbing should study it to degree level?
Or is it simply that the veil has finally dropped: that Britain’s universities have been flogging impossible debts to unwitting young people, all while degrading the working conditions of their lowest-paid workers? Well, it’s not for this anonymous writer to judge. Of course, I already have. I just cannot say so publicly, for fear, to misquote Scrooge, of “losing my situation”. Either way, take my cowardice as some evidence of the malign power structures now dominating these degraded institutions.
And degraded they are. A Deliveroo driver can make around £29,120 a year. Factor in our own student debts, and training costs to lecture in the first place, and that doesn’t stack up well against my own meager £21,000, especially when you consider that so-called “substantive” lecturers — a weird, widely used term somehow implying we’re in-substantial — earn considerably more, for doing, in my place at least, close to the exact same job. Yes, the driver’s figure is full-time and mine is not: but that is rather the point. Our hours are capped, our summers unpaid, and part-time is not quite part-time if the University is shut half the year. We can’t earn more even if we wanted to, making the unregulated subterranea of a Deliveroo driver seem, at least through our current lens of desperation, somewhat appealing.
Yet if there are perhaps 90,000 of us Hourlies — representing some 36% of all part-time academic staff — no one can say quite how much teaching we actually do deliver: tacitly suggesting that someone would rather it went uncounted. Back in 2018, when the UCU asked institutions to disclose the proportion of teaching hours delivered by hourly-paid staff, almost 100 failed to answer: 36 ignored the request outright, while 60 said that they either did not hold the information, or that digging it out would take too long.
Almost a decade on — and a decade that has, incidentally, run parallel to the rise of the gig economy — we Hourlies have only been leaned upon harder, often way above our job descriptions. I myself am designing curriculums; consulting on course structures; and dealing with pastoral care — all on top of teaching. Now, I’m sure senior management jobs are difficult too. But it’s worth noting here that a vice chancellor earns roughly 12 times what I do, and around six times what a “substantive” lecturer does. It surely begs the question: is it that their talent is so preternatural, so once-in-an-eon, that such a pay-gap is justified in times of fiscal ruin? Or that the ship is sinking and they’re going for the gold? Despite heavy deficits, meanwhile, and with students forever complaining about a lack of contact hours, my institution lately introduced yet another tier of bureaucratic middle management, only adding to its teetering, top-heavy structure.
The general cultural disregard for gig workers rubs off on us too. Some months back, a senior program manager, a professor, greeted me by saying: “Got yourself a full-time job yet?” Though meant half-jokingly, it struck me as somewhat tone-deaf when you consider the pay and power disparity between us, let alone the fact that the road to promotion, with or without a PhD, no longer really exists. The fumes we were living off — fumes of a once-respected profession — have now totally evaporated.
All this is heightened by the job’s seasonality. Unlike the Deliveroo driver’s incessant pedaling come rain or shine, we Hourlies are hemmed into short, money-making windows before lengthy stretches of unpaid “vacation” or ever-extended study leave, which even students are starting to see as a waste of their heady loans. In practice, the consequences here can be absurd. One close colleague — a fine tutor with a PhD — is regularly maxing out credit cards just to pay the rent. Come the long, dry summers, they take shifts in a coffee shop to make ends meet.
Bottlenecked periods of potential teaching hours turns the whole thing into a feeding frenzy come term time. It’s a stark contrast with our Deliveroo comrades, whose working culture is fairly linear: order comes in on the app; restaurant prepares and dispatches; driver delivers. In the working culture of the hourly lecturer, however, this process is far more convoluted, leaving ample scope for machinations.
Almost all of my hours are dictated by individual line managers, whose preferences, timetables, and yes, personal taste — bias, both conscious and unconscious — play a significant part in who gets work and when. For these reasons, cronyism abounds: I know at least two colleagues whose partners or relatives were employed shortly after they were. Naturally, paranoia and conspiracy are rife. At times, my place can feel more like The Sopranos than Stanford.
Superiors must be, on some level, aware that they’ve got us up against a wall. I’ve therefore learned that it’s prudent to forgo any kind of professional critique, dissent or healthy debate for fear of putting noses out of joint. Much of my time, I’ve noticed, is spent stunting my own intellectual instincts to avoid embarrassing some bewildered superior, overworked and as fearful as the rest of us of being ousted come the next cull. It increasingly feels, anyway, that what modern universities really want from their staff is not curiosity or dynamism or enthusiasm — but to act as wadding for a holey timetable. After this, it’s pretense they’re after, followed by submission, just as I imagine Deliveroo drivers are hardly encouraged to question the culinary skill of the kebab house they’re collecting from. For both driver and lecturer, it’s a case of turn up, pick up, fuck off.
So, might anything change? Sadly, in my experience, Britain’s universities — left to fester in stale pipe-smoke and hubris for decades now — still seem to be concerned only with status games and paychecks.
On the humiliations go. A while back, a colleague, at the start of the year, opened their laptop to find their hours had been decimated overnight, their financial security annihilated in a single click of the calendar. The word in the staff canteen was that the cut had been timed to land weeks before the beginning of term. Naturally, if they’d been informed any earlier, said colleague may well have had time to source work elsewhere. Yet with two weeks to go, they were once again up against a wall, with nowhere else to turn. Then, just recently, the same exact thing happened to me. Cue a frantic few days spent clawing back hours from gatekeepers, in what’s now become a yearly ritual of self-preservation. And though redundancies of full-time staff are, of course, happening — with some predicting around 10,000 job cuts a year if trends persist — it’s us Hourlies who’ll be the first to go, becoming, as the grim jargon would have it, “financial shock absorbers”.
Are there any alternatives? One solution — which dovetails well with the rise of AI in the education sector — would be to return to the values of communication, intellectual curiosity, and pastoral presence in higher education: as opposed to seeing higher education as mere content delivery. And don’t take this old crone’s word for it: it’s what I hear from my students daily. What they want are challenging, engaging tutors, not calcified ones who’ve barely left their desk in decades. There’s even a world where a different kind of Hourly could provide just that, not least given most of us juggle regular jobs alongside our teaching commitments. Just please respect our contribution, secure our roles, or else pay us more. After all, even Deliveroo gives you a chance to tip the driver.