The news that the University is to become an accredited Living Wage employer has been controversial to absolutely no one. Not even Oxford University Conservative Association have taken a break from port-sipping to mutter about financial irresponsibility. Presumably this is because for the country’s richest university, paying our staff £7.85 an hour is easy.
You’d have to be a particularly hard-hearted individual to support poverty wages. Not even a university administration that has supported effective pay cuts every year since 2008 will keep them below the breadline much longer. But the treatment of support staff in the University is still appalling. Cherwell’s own investigation told of hall staff reduced to tears and scouts treated with no respect, before we even delve into the details of their access to sick pay, paid holidays, ease of joining a trade union, and other working conditions of our University’s most exploited members.
While the Living Wage undoubtedly improves pay for some staff, the fundamental problem is not the lack of accreditation, or even simply ‘pay inequality’ in a vague sense. It is that the wealth and prestige of Oxford, including Hamilton’s grossly-inflated £424,000 a year salary, would be impossible without the exploitation of scouts, many of whom are migrants. It’s the whole method of intellectual production our University uses. Some people call it marketisation of education: I’d prefer if we just called it business.
There are a few new directions our Living Wage Campaign could explore. I think ‘celebrating’ the news that the University isn’t going to be paying poverty wages in Wellington Square with a Pro Vice-Chancellor was doing the PR work of the administration for them. The focus should be on moving forward, unionising scouts, and running campaigns against those who are exploiting them rather than celebrating on their behalf.
Outsourced cleaners at the University of London ran a series of three-day strikes for equal sick pay, holidays and pensions with in-house workers. It’s that kind of worker-led, militant action that gets workers the respect and power in universities that they deserve. Students asking nicely on the scouts’ behalf will only get you so far: we’ve now reached that point.
