Lecturers at Gateshead College staged a highly successful strike on Wednesday of last week. The UCU union members are fighting management attempts to impose unacceptable changes to their working conditions.
Management have issued workers with 90 day notices to force the changes through. They want staff to have direct student contact for 36 of their 37 hours.
This would mean working beyond the 48 hours set by the European working time directive. In addition many lecturers face being downgraded to “facilitators” with a potential pay cut of nearly £10,000.
Richie Bathgate is chair of the UCU at the college. He told Socialist Worker, “The new contracts would be intolerable and would have a massive detrimental effect on teaching standards.”
Yunus Bakhsh
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