My university plans to lose 500 casual staff – so I'm refusing to mark exams

What happens if many of the half a million international students who study in the UK decide instead to stay in their home countries this autumn? If university senior managers get their way, thousands of precarious academics like me will be laid off to pay for the anticipated higher education funding crisis caused by coronavirus. But mass sackings would be callous, self-defeating and unnecessary, and we casualised lecturers are building a campaign to save our jobs.

Higher education is second only to hospitality as the most casualised sector of the UK economy, and a large and growing proportion of the university workforce is made up of lecturers and researchers on insecure and often poorly paid temporary contracts. In the challenging current circumstances, university senior management teams see us as low-hanging fruit: rather than effectively sack permanent academics and risk legal (as well as trade union) challenges, managers calculate that they can simply allow hundreds of temporary contracts to expire.

This is precisely what is happening at Goldsmiths, University of London, as management plans to effectively lay off nearly 500 precarious academics. But we are fighting back. I am one of about 100 casualised lecturers who are refusing to grade student essays until Goldsmiths meets our three key demands: for contract extensions at least until October, for clarity on our futures and for negotiation over the future of the university. We are aware that by doing this we risk recriminations from senior management, given that our action isn’t sanctioned by a trade union, but we felt we had no other choice: due to the onerous anti-union laws, we would not have been able to call an official strike until after most of our contracts had ended.

We acknowledge that there are financial problems at Goldsmiths, as there are at other universities, but our proposal takes account of these: keep us on until the autumn, and then student numbers will show whether or not there are the funds and the student demand to renew our contracts in the longer term. University admissions figures are promising, and suggest students may turn up to university in October after all.

The situation at Goldsmiths has been ultimately created by the funding regime introduced by the coalition government’s 2010 reforms to the higher education sector. The crisis is the result of what Amelia Horgan calls “a decade of marketisation”. The reforms of 2010 made universities much more reliant on fees, particularly the higher fees that can be charged to international students. Such a business model cannot absorb the short-term but severe shock of a temporary collapse in international student numbers. At the same time, our marking boycott has shown how universities’ scandalous exploitation of precarious academic labour is equally unsustainable.

Our “wildcat” (ie unofficial) marking boycott is being driven by the most precarious and vulnerable academics, many of whom were near breaking point long before the planned job cuts were announced. At Goldsmiths, we have estimated that casualised lecturers do approximately 39% of the teaching work for only 7% of the wages. The patterns we have observed suggest that a disproportionate number of us are black or people of colour, and the majority are women. In the art department, five of the six non-white academics in the department are on temporary contracts and, therefore, face their contracts not being renewed. In sociology, all of the lecturers who won’t be returning are women of colour.

One casualised lecturer told Goldsmiths management she had been on “nine contracts over the past seven years, and countless hourly-paid contracts before that. It goes without saying that [she] can’t plan [her] life.” Having two part-time contracts at two different universities (a common experience for casualised academics) means she works for “12-14 hours a day most days”. Beyond these headline measures of job insecurity, overwork and low wages, many of us feel we lack respect and power within our institutions. Early-career academics often feel compelled to accept any work offered: mark 50 essays at the last minute, take on teaching a module well outside one’s areas of expertise, support your line manager’s pet projects, report for work despite physical or mental illness. If we complain, refuse or make a fuss, we fear we will be overlooked for more secure positions in future.

A spokesperson for Goldsmiths told Times Higher Education that the university was facing “new financial pressures and difficult decisions due to the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic”, that the university “has not terminated any associate lecturer contracts early”, and that the “vast majority of associate lecturers would not normally be employed by us over the summer period”.

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But we’ve decided enough is enough. Despite our precarity, we are now setting the agenda and forcing the university’s senior managers to respond to our demands. We recently organised a virtual picket (Covid-19 meant a physical one was impossible) to amplify our demands. Using #saveourjobs, thousands of supporters bombarded Goldsmiths with tweets questioning how a supposedly “progressive” institution could justify sacking 500 precarious academics. We trended on Twitter in London, and now the combined pressure of the marking boycott and our social media operation has finally brought management to the negotiating table.

To move beyond the UK’s exploitative, market-driven system, we have to empower and listen to the growing mass of casualised academics and imagine a more collaborative university sector that values all of its workers equally. Goldsmiths, long thought of as a bastion of radical politics, should take the lead in outlining these visions of a better future. Sadly, senior management has yet to rise to this challenge. By contrast, we precarious Goldsmiths academics are politicising the scandal of casualisation through bold and imaginative collective actions. With support from both casualised and permanent academics at universities across the country, we can and we will save our jobs and end casualisation.

• The author is a lecturer on a temporary contract at Goldsmiths, University of London