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Some interesting results from a BPPA survey here. What do readers make of this? Signed comments strongly preferred, though grad students may post anonymously as long as they used a valid e-mail address (which will not appear).
The main cause for complaint seems to be time spent preparing for each hour that is paid as teaching. If there is no payment for preparation time, it is possible for the effective rate of pay (which the survey calls the real pay) to fall below the minimum wage. On the one hand, this gives an incentive to prepare efficiently. On the other hand, it may give an incentive to prepare inadequately.
It looks as though preparation time would fall within what the regulations call unmeasured work. Payment for this can be made under an agreement as to the likely average number of hours of unmeasured work. But absent such an agreement, one needs to count the hours of unmeasured work in order to ensure that the minimum wage is paid overall.
It is the regulations that are authoritative, but a convenient starting point is the guidance that is provided on this page and on the pages to which it links:
http://www.hmrc.gov.uk/paye/payroll/day-to-day/nmw.htm
I do not know whether universities have reached some agreement with the authorities to cover this point, or alternatively, whether there is some relevant exemption. The following two pages mention and describe work experience, which may be exempt from minimum wage rules, but I do not know whether the exemption could cover postgraduate teaching assistants.
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/TheNationalMinimumWage/DG_175114
http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/Employees/TheNationalMinimumWage/DG_198089
I'm an associate tutor in philosophy at one of the universities mentioned in the study, although I'd prefer to remain anonymous.
The big problem is the wild disparity between the amount of preparation hours you are paid for, and the amount you actually need to undertake if you're to be a decent tutor. I get paid roughly £14 for a one-hour seminar, with a multiplier of 3 which accounts for 1 hour of preparation time and 1 hour of marking.
If I ACTUALLY prepared for only one hour, or took one hour to mark 25 essays – which is to say, if I worked to my contract – I would be an awful tutor. There's just no way I could, or would, take so little time to prepare. As a matter of fact, I probably take 1-2 days to prepare for a seminar, depending on how well I already know the material, and god knows how long to mark. This reduces my effective pay to way, way below minimum wage – perhaps a couple of pounds an hour.
I'm less concerned for myself here – I have funding – than with my fellow ATs, some of whom are in much worse financial situations than myself. One good thing to report is that the union (UCU) on campus seems to be really starting to make this a campaigning issue. There have been a couple of meetings about this, but it's too soon to tell how it's all going to proceed.
It strikes me as extremely difficult to assess preparation time. Obviously it varies between individuals, but there are two particular problems, as I see it:
i) There is a significant difference between preparing to teach a course/topic for the first time and preparing to do so a second or subsequent time. It would, I think, be problematic for a university to pay first-time TAs more than those who had already taught the course before. (I don't know whether anywhere does do this – I'd be interested if anywhere does.)
ii) Preparation time is usually spread over teaching hours. One student may have one hour of teaching a week and another four hours a week, but their preparation time may be much the same. Again, I don't know whether some universities – by paying 'preparation time' separately – account for this.
These two considerations, I think, would make it very difficult for a university to take preparation time into account in setting a wage. If one wanted to ensure that all graduate TAs earned at least minimum wage then one would presumably have to pay such that even someone teaching one hour a week, for the first time (and perhaps who was very conscientious) still earned minimum wage – which would mean a final year PhD student teaching five or six hours a week, at the same rate, could earn significantly more.
I think it's worth pointing out that in some of the institutions mentioned in the article, postgraduate teaching assistants are paid for an hour of preparation per hour of teaching (I know since I am in this situation). In a standard lecture course this is obviously absurd since merely attending a one-hour lecture each week eats up that hour, even before reading the assigned material, working out what to focus on in a seminar and so on.
In lecture-heavy courses this effect is exacerbated. I recently took exercise classes for a logic course with three hours of lectures each week, but was only paid for an hour of preparation per hour of teaching. In addition to this I needed to read a 120-page set of notes and work through sufficient examples from the problem sheets and past exam papers that I could effectively conduct the classes. Total preparation time for each hour of teaching was thus at least six or seven hours. Perhaps if the course remains broadly similar and I taught it again next year I could cut that down to five hours, but neither of these conditions are guaranteed to hold, so the additional cost this year may not be amortised across multiple teachings of the same course.
These considerations lead me to conclude that Richard Baron's suggestion that this situation may give an incentive to prepare efficiently is—even if strictly correct—somewhat misleading, since even those who prepare efficiently will fall foul of the problem of preparing for considerably more hours than they are paid for. The alternative he suggests—that there is an incentive to prepare inadequately—is certainly true, but in my experience postgraduate teaching assistants are in general conscientious and hard-working. They want to do a good job and teach undergraduates as well as they can, despite the constraints they operate under. In other words, they resist the incentive to teach poorly, at a high cost to their own work which naturally suffers due to the decreased time they have to do it in.
Ultimately this means that these universities are subsidised by their postgraduate teaching staff. They display a lack of commitment to the undergraduate teaching they are supposed to carry out by failing to pay wages adequate to the jobs being done. However, the cost is in general not borne by undergraduates who are badly taught, but by the postgrads who teach well despite not being adequately compensated for doing so.
I convene part I philosophy at Lancaster, one of the intitutions picked out by the BPPA as paying less than minimum wage in real terms, and I therefore manage the excellent group of teaching assistants who are being paid so badly. I have several responses to this survey:
1) I agree that GTAs are underpaid and generally undervalued, and I’m pleased to have some extra ammunition for arguing that case with the people who set wages and conditions at Lancaster. I hope the UCU and other unions will also do some pushing here.
2) I find the results worrying in a different way. Working backwards from a real pay less than £6.08/hr and our official rate of pay and hours (2 hours of prep for every hour in the classroom), a GTA doing 3 seminars/week would have to be doing about 6 hours of prep and marking per seminar, per week, to be getting less than minimum wage. Someone doing 6 hours per group per week is not working efficiently, and needs training and mentoring. I’m unhappy that my GTAs are overworking to this extent, and while I do not believe that amount of preparation is necessary for the teaching we ask them to do, I clearly need to do more here.
3) There’s a tension in how we understand GTA work. Traditionally in UK universities, it’s a valuable apprenticeship in university teaching offered as part of postgraduate training, on the assumption that our students plan an academic career. Pay isn’t the central point, and we rely on our GTAs to be enthusiastic amateurs who do the work for its own sake and for career-development purposes, not just to put food on the table. But UK universities increasingly rely on professional adjuncts including GTAs to deliver first-year and other undergraduate teaching, and adjunct teaching is turning into a career, or a substitute for one. The UK is following a path already taken by the US in this, of course. If that’s what being a GTA is, then it ought to be paid and supported far better, and be far less precarious, than it is. But I’m not convinced that the way to make that case is to advocate increasing hourly pay, or adding an extra hour or two of prep. Why shouldn’t being a GTA be a proper part-time job with a salary?
Addendum: It’s been pointed out to me by one of Lancaster's GTAs, Sarah Hitchin, that prep time includes marking every 5 weeks, so my claim in (2) in my first comment, that an average 6 hours of prep per week per seminar is inefficient work, isn’t fair. What I intended as the main point of (2) – that I and probably others who manage GTAs need to do more to monitor and help them to avoid overwork, as well as to push for better pay – stands, though.
It depresses me that the discussion of GTA pay revolves around bringing their real wages up to the legally mandated *minimum* wage – as though, not breaking labor laws would discharge a universities moral responsibility to its most junior teaching staff, which is what they are. GTAs, typically advanced PhD students with undergraduate and postgraduate specialist qualifications in what they're being hired to do, teach their subject, deserve substantially more than minimum wage – they should receive the equivalent of what an entry level professional in the public sector earns an hour (though, naturally, they will be working fewer hours). Treating them as if an unskilled, temporary work force (or, even one so marginalized that it can be paid below minimum wage) is hugely devaluing and degrading to people who are ostensibly the future colleagues (or even current colleagues) of the faculties. The fact that GTAs have already invested a huge amount of time, effort, personal struggle and vast amounts of money in universities as undergrads and masters students makes the fact that universities take such a casual attitude to exploiting them even more disdainful. All the while, universities also promote the idea that students and faculty all belong to a grand community that they should in some way be loyal to (and donate as alumni as soon as possible!).
The idea that GTAs apprentices, for whom their teaching and grading is not actually work but vocational training, seems to me to be wishful and self-serving thinking. Departments rely on GTAs to teach and grade their undergrads; GTAs perform roles created to fulfill actual teaching needs, not just for the educational benefit for grad students. If GTAs were really just an educational experience for the GTA, one where universities are serving them rather than the other way around, then you would expect them to be a net drain on university resources rather than freeing up university resources, and if GTAs worked poorly or quit, you'd expect it to harm mainly themselves rather than harming undergraduates while freeing up time for them to work on their dissertations…
My (totally unsolicited!) suggestions following:
1. Universities shouldn't employ GTAs that they cannot pay a decent professional wage, not a minimum wage, and certainly not a sub-minimum wage.
2. Using GTAs for positions that could be filled by full time faculty directly undercuts the full time faculty job market by decreasing demand for full time faculty by meeting teaching demand more cheaply. This in turn, directly undermines the interests of GTAs who themselves are preparing to seek full time academic employment.
3. Graduate students should decline any work for their universities that comes with a disrespectfully low wage, and instead offer their services as private tutors, arrange to lead/teach uncompensated, volunteer/non-credit seminars or tutorials to undergrads of their own choosing (thus expanding their teaching and curricular development competence without doing work that could be done by a full time faculty member).
I am soon to be interviewed for a GTA at a UK institution not on this list. I was attracted to this opportunity by several features of the role, but money is close to top of the list as a factor. The GTA pay at this institution is comprised of a wage, a complete UK fee waiver, and a stipend. Together, it comes to the equivalent amount that full AHRC scholarships offer (that is, the wage and stipend combined – not including the fee waiver). That should come to around £14,000 and free fees. For me, this is extremely attractive; it will be the most money I've ever had at university (providing I impress at the interview, of course), and, I think, will make me feel valued as a teacher, not just a student.
My current university, at which I am studying a taught master's, is on the list of 11 mentioned in the study. One of the administrators there remarked to me, when I told him about my GTA opportunity and its payout, that he thought his institution really needed to get on top of such schemes; that they were behind the times, in that respect. I'm inclined to agree. If I get this GTA-ship, my PhD will be viable (it's worth 3 years in length, providing my performance is up to standard). Accordingly, I will give it my absolute all, and am unlikely to feel hard done by.
There is a lot to be said for giving GTAs decent financial incentives.
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