Casual contracts lead to unpaid wages, unspoken rules, and legal loopholes

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Getting a contract

The investigation into casual contracts and labour casualisation begins with Miko ł aj Szafranski, a doctoral candidate at the Law School at LSE. He has spent the last couple of years working as a graduate teaching assistant (GTA) in the Law department. Despite this, he is employed on a fixed-term contract that he only signed her job offer. The School issues contracts, as opposed to individual departments, which adds a layer of bureaucracy that prolongs the state of uncertainty. For example, Magda recalls agreeing to work as a teaching assistant in the Management Department in May but only receiving her contract in late August.

At LSE Life, some workers faced the same issue whilst trying to renew their contracts. The Beaver spoke to multiple current and former employees at LSE Life, to remain anonymous for fear of repercussions by their department.

Time allocations

Once a contract has been received by a new (or returning) teaching assistant, their hours are broken down into class teaching, marking hours, office hours, meetings with the course convenor, and lecture attendance if they haven’t taught the module before.

earlier this academic year. Every year, his contract is renewed “completely at the discretion of the department.” Departments also have the same ‘discretion’ to change the number of hours offered in between contracts. This discretion provides power and leverage that submits the employee to the will of the department.

The conversation with Miko ł aj led to Magda Muter. For Magda, her experience has been largely similar. She worked as a teaching assistant across the Departments of Methodology and Management and was a PhD representative for the Department of Gender Studies. Between departments, she noted disparate working environments, conditions, and treatment of staff.

According to Magda, when you work in departments outside your own, “you don’t know anything about the contract before you see it.”

She says she had agreed to work as a teaching assistant at LSE without knowing the exact terms of her contracts — simply because the contracts were not issued by the time she had to (verbally) accept most of whom preferred to remain anonymous. Some received their contracts more than five weeks late, “at the beginning or middle of October.” However, this delay was more puzzling for them because there was no explicit change to their contracts, aside from a single paragraph confirming that their contracts were being renewed (as opposed to their contracts drafted from scratch). “Then you sign your contract that you were supposed to sign [a while ago],” explains Olivia Nantermoz, a PhD student working at LSE Life.

During this limbo between agreeing to work and getting her contract, Magda didn’t know how many hours she would work. This, too, would not be communicated to her until she received the contract with the working hours already allocated to her by the department she is working for. “To ask [for certain hours in advance] is already an act of bravery,” Magda explains, because working hours are not simply given to her. Additionally, there are lingering anxieties about losing one’s job if one asks too many questions. Indeed, some interviewees preferred

Still, certain time allocations remain unrealistic. “Effectively, I am placed on a schedule where I mark an essay in 20 minutes, which includes giving feedback,” says Miko ł aj. If a teacher needs more than 20 minutes to mark an essay and provide meaningful feedback, they will need to work past their allocated hours — these extra hours are not paid. The result is a gradual decrease in your hourly rate for every additional hour of extra work. Across departments, it’s unclear how many hours you will need to work. In Magda’s experience, “You don’t know how much time things like marking take.”

“And this [how much you are paid for actual hours worked] is the real difference between departments.”

Compensation after working

However, even after working extended hours and potentially being underpaid, some casual workers risk never seeing part of their wages. Bluntly, “Sometimes they [LSE] forget to pay you.” LSE’s Human Resources (HR) department has been described as “dysfunctional” by an interviewee.

Interviewees described a tension between themselves, their managers, and HR where you would not get paid unless you were persistent. Even if a worker finds out they have been underpaid, that money is not always returned right away. “They only pay you [a certain amount] quickly,” and the rest (or all of) the amount gets rolled over to the next month’s paycheque, adding to further delays in receiving compensation. This problem is not confined to any single department either. One interviewee described her experience as a Subwarden working for LSE’s Residential team. Despite receiving a promotion, her pay was not adjusted for months after she started working due to consistent silence and delays from LSE HR.

An LSE spokesperson commented on the actions LSE HR takes in such cases: “In the occasional event that a payment is missed for a casual or hourly worker (for example, if the hours worked are confirmed late during a particular payment period), mechanisms are in place for any oversight to be rectified as quickly as possible (e.g. via BACS payment outside LSE’s usual pay run).”

However, this was not always the fault of LSE HR — sometimes, the problem remained as simple as a manager who forgot to submit a timesheet. One interviewee described how some managers seem resistant to changing their processes to avoid such errors.

Managerial discretion and power

Such managers sometimes make or break the working environment. “At the end of the day, the contract puts us at the mercy of managers,” clarifies Zoe*. When she was working as a GTA in an academic department at LSE, “maybe some people had trouble with their contracts, but they were a lot easier to deal with.”

Conversely, at LSE Life, “there is no professional respect for what we do,” according to an interviewee. Workers are treated differently because of their contracts. Whilst contract reform could help in the short term, “[some workers] aren’t entitled to anything.” This was especially prevalent during the COVID-19 pandemic when workers required funding for equipment to work efficiently from home — funding that LSE Life provided to permanent staff but not to fixed-term staff.

“At the end of the day, these contracts do nothing to protect us — according to HR, they’re budgetary guidelines for the managers, that is all. They don’t guarantee us

Unspoken rules and uncertainty

From the start of the investigation, Miko ł aj mentioned other “unspoken rules that govern GTA contracts.” Silent hierarchies are a constant across departments, but other rules vary. On one end, Miko ł aj notes oddities such as: “No grade should end with the last digit being nine” when marking because students are more likely to appeal it.

Magda criticises more consequential rules, such as hourly pay rises only being offered to workers who work consecutive years. Magda taught at LSE in her 1st, 3rd, 5th and 6th year of PhD. Yet, she only got her first incremental increase after year 5. These rules are sparsely communicated and are simply encountered as someone progresses through their employment, usually thanks to informal talks with other class teachers.

Legal ambiguities of hourly-paid contracts

This, and more, remains the direct result of casual

“ contracts. Officially, LSE labels their part-time, temporary contract as “hourly-paid contracts.” While personally trying to investigate her contract structure, Olivia could not find a legal framework for this contract type. Her only conclusion was that “the terms of the contract are, in effect, a zero-hour contract, but LSE refuses to call it that.” However, these are not permanent part-time contracts either. In an email from LSE HR obtained by The Beaver, they referred to hourly-paid contracts as consisting of “variable hours, [where] the hours are not guaranteed and may go up or down.” Any average number of hours “promised” on any hourly-paid contract are merely “an expected average,” as opposed to a guaranteed number of working hours.

This contract type appears similar to the UK government’s definition of a zero-hour contract due to the lack of guaranteed hours and variability “based on the needs from [LSE’s] departments.” Still, when The Beaver submitted a Freedom of Information request to LSE asking for information on zero-hour contract usage at the School, the School refused to provide any information because, technically, they assert their temporary, hourly-paid contracts are not zero-hour contracts.

An LSE spokesperson commented on the use of hourly-paid contracts, stating: “LSE uses hourlypaid contracts for individuals undertaking certain temporary work where the nature of the work can mean that hours can vary regularly. All hourly-paid contracts for individuals are issued terms and conditions of employment and are entitled to the same contractual benefits as salaried members of staff.”

The big picture of casualisation at LSE

Casualisation remains a focal point in labour disputes at LSE. In a student town hall on 28 November, Professor Eric Neumayer, Pro-Director (Planning and Resources), commented on behalf of the LSE Directorate, claiming that there has been a reduction in casualisation at LSE in recent years. He elaborated that this is being done through schemes such as education career tracks, and improved funding of LSE’s PhD studentships. However, statistics published by the UCU paint a completely different picture. The statistics point to LSE as a predominant user of fixed-term or casual labour; in 2020/21, 59% of LSE’s academic staff was on fixed-term (casual/hourlypaid) contracts, up by 12% since 2014/15. This was simultaneously met with an 18% decrease in permanent staff during the same time period.

Nonetheless, these contracts mean students can lose out on the world-class teaching LSE consistently promises to deliver. The result is that “the quality of education will only depend on the best effort of the individual teacher,” says Miko ł aj. The quality of education and services delivered by casual workers — teachers, advisors, and more — is, thus, variable at best.

As a result, students will continue to suffer so long as the teachers and workers with whom they regularly interact suffer. This is not to say that most teachers and workers don’t want to help students and enjoy their professions because most of them thoroughly enjoy their professions. Their positions under these unstable contracts, however, make them prioritise self-survival above all — which means they cannot dedicate their energy to students, no matter how much they’d like to.

Casual contracts are the first in a list of problems with LSE’s working conditions and culture. Further articles of the ‘Working at LSE’ series

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Vanessa Huang Staff Writer

Illustrated by Lamisa Chowdhury

Despite the estimated 2.2 million people in the UK that have long Covid, it is, in many ways, a hidden illness. ere are the people who don’t know they have it, continuing to struggle with energy and cognitive function but never associating these with long Covid. ere are the people that minimise their symptoms due to stigma and misinformation. en there are the people that cannot hide it – those with symptoms so debilitating they are themselves hidden from society, disappearing from work, school, and social events.

And when we don’t see long Covid, it’s easy to forget about it. I spoke to two students and Covid long-haulers, as they describe themselves, who feel they’ve been le behind and let down in every possible way.

Alice*, who is currently completing a masters in Philosophy, contracted Covid in January of this year, thinking at rst that it was a bad sinus infection. She already had asthma, but it was never bad enough that she needed an inhaler. She was now “using this reliever inhaler ten times every four hours” and couldn’t speak or swallow either. is “horrendous su ering” eased a er a week or two and she started experiencing more signi cant improvements a er a month. But then new symptoms started appearing, di erent from the ones she initially had.

Maya* recently graduated with a Masters in Economics. She contracted Covid at a similar time, in mid-December 2021. She had a mild infection: chills, a stu y nose, and a strange feeling in her head. She wasn’t worried – it seemed like everyone around her was coming down with Covid then. She was also vaccinated, t and healthy. Her symptoms cleared within four days and she was out of self-isolation in time to celebrate christmas. “Little did i know this infection would soon turn my whole life upside down,” she says. Like Alice, symptoms began popping up again. She was ying home to see her family a er January exams when she was hit by a spell of chest pain, dizziness, and nausea. She’s had symptoms ever since.

Post-Covid syndrome, also known as “long Covid”, o cially refers to the existence of Covid symptoms more than four weeks a er infection. ere’s an enormous list of common symptoms: fatigue, shortness of breath, loss of smell, muscle weakness, brain fog, chest pain, heart palpitations, and more. Alice and maya have each experienced most, if not all of these.

Fatigue is one of the particularly misunderstood symptoms. It’s a term so broad that it can be mistakenly applied to normal variations in functioning. Unlike the tiredness that’s alleviated with a nap or a good night’s sleep, the fatigue longhaulers experience doesn’t go away even when they’re resting or sleeping more than usual. Fatigue also doesn’t just mean cutting out the most energyintensive activities in your life. Speaking, watching tv, breathing, and eating – these all require energy.

But perhaps the most punitive of symptoms is post-exertional malaise. Conventional wisdom suggests the more you practice something, the easier it gets. Long Covid throws all that out the window. With postexertional malaise, increased exertion doesn’t just fail to bring about any improvements in symptoms – it exacerbates them. As Alice puts it: “the more you ght against it, the worse you get.” ese “crashes” can last days, weeks, or even months. Sometimes, the e ects are permanent.

Alice experienced postexertional malaise for herself when she attended a conference in Oxford. “I was doing too much: walking, climbing stairs, using my cognitive function,” she says. “I just did so much that on the second day i felt awful. I couldn’t stand. I didn’t know where i was going.”

Out of the more than two million in the UK that have long Covid, only 23,273 have a formal diagnosis. Maya received hers a er two months; Alice hasn’t had any kind of medical acknowledgement yet. e biggest challenge she’s faced is getting doctors to believe her. “ e routine exams that we get done don’t show that something is wrong, so a couple did come out abnormal but most came out normal,” she says. “And it was just doctors gaslighting me, saying, ‘oh, the exams don’t show anything.’” e lack of an established physical biomarker for long Covid means doctors look at patients’ descriptions of their symptoms and conduct tests to rule out other potential illnesses. But symptoms that are di cult to observe from the outside are also easily psychologised, blamed on stress or anxiety.

Alice has seen cardiologists, neurologists, psychiatrists, and pulmonologists. None of them have given her any answers.

On the other hand, having a diagnosis doesn’t necessarily eliminate any uncertainty.

“I’ve seen so many doctors and specialists, but none of them have been able to help me,” Maya explains. “All they keep on saying is that i need to rest and be patient until we have some kind of treatment.”

Research indeed hasn’t yet determined any viable treatments. e NHS has invested £90 million to establish long covid clinics, designed to serve as “one stop shops” for long-haulers. But these clinics are plagued by long waiting times and treatment tends to consist of suggestions to try cognitive behavioural therapy. Some doctors are also still keen to suggest increasing levels of exercise, blaming any loss of function on “deconditioning.”

In the absence of comprehensive medical support, long-haulers have to adapt to recovery that’s non-linear, with symptoms that o en shi and uctuate. Both Alice and Maya moved back home a er nding it impossible to manage on their own. Maya pushed through the remainder of her degree, completing it in june. She spent her days at home, trying to balance watching online lectures with resting. She also received extra time in her summer exams, something she credits with mitigating the e ects of her brain fog. is additional exertion, however, took its toll: “I felt really ill the whole time and my health de nitely further deteriorated due to not being able to rest, so looking back it wasn’t a good thing for my health and i’m not sure i’d do it again that way.”

Alice, too, completed her teaching in lent term. But submitting her assessments in the summer was inconceivable and she deferred them all to January 2023. She returned to London in September – her condition had improved and she was feeling optimistic. We had a Zoom call at the start of term where she was tired but altogether doing better than she had in a long time. By November she had relapsed, badly. Even looking at a screen was too taxing – the little energy she had was just enough to send me ten minutes of voice messages.

Alice is now hoping to defer her assessments again. She doesn’t know if her request will be approved – they’re assessed on a case-by-case basis and the success of her rst request doesn’t mean anything for her second. What she does know is that if this deferral is granted, it’s the last one she’ll get. LSE policy sets a maximum period of registration for all taught degrees: for a Masters degree, it’s two years. If she can’t complete her assessments before the prescribed deadlines, with another deferral or otherwise, she’ll be leaving LSE a er more than a year of pushing herself to the limit, with neither a degree nor the possibility of returning to complete it. She’s trying to do as much work as she can, but the more she pushes herself the more function she loses. “I’m scared of not being able to sit up, not being able to eat, not being able to shower,” she says. “ at’s what’s at stake.”

Long-haulers navigating these challenges without any support are going through an incredibly solitary experience. “It’s really hard to keep your friends and make new friends,” Alice tells me. When she meets new people, they rarely seem to understand what long Covid is, making comments like “what’s that? Have you got Covid right now? Stay away from me.” She believes there’s also an excessive focus on mortality in conversations about Covid. Mortality rates have fallen and the general sentiment has accordingly shi ed: Covid is, decidedly, a thing of the past. She points out how there seems to be this illusion of infallibility when it comes to Covid – we never imagine we could be the ones su ering from a “disabling illness that can render [us] ill for months to years.”

Faced with these constant frustrations, long-haulers have built their own support networks, where community and self-advocacy are central. Support groups have become critical sources of information, not just for their members, but for a wider scienti c community that’s still coming to terms with this newly-developing illness. One in particular, ‘longcovidsos’, presented information to the World Health Organisation, while the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention in the US based its guidelines on longhaulers’ rsthand experiences. is is far from the rst time a chronic illness has been maligned, and it’s unlikely to be the last. But there will always be a collective of long-haulers, surviving through sheer resilience, using what little energy they have to further our understanding and make things a little easier for people newly disabled by Covid. It’s time we

Alice founded a long Covid support group here at LSE. eir rst meeting was poorly advertised, shared just the night before, yet still attracted seven attendees. ey got together and shared their knowledge, suggesting di erent specialists and talking about meditations they’ve found helpful for stress. “ ese were the only people that got me,” alice says.

SU jobs: what are they like?

Javier Romero Staff Writer

With in ation at a decades-long high of 11.1%, and London currently being the 15th most expensive city to live in, many students are turning to parttime work. Getting a job is o en easier said than done, however, especially for those with little experience. Moreover, not all jobs are equal and with the cost of living increasing at its fastest rate in 40 years, students can hardly be blamed for balking at the notion of juggling long hours with little pay alongside university.

Where, then should cashstrapped LSE students look for that rare thing: an accessible job that is well-paid without being too demanding? A good place to start may be no further than campus itself, with the Students’ Union o ering a wide range of jobs, from bartenders to receptionists. To see what it is like to work, e Beaver decided to interview the students with SU jobs to nd out.

All the interviewees, holding di erent positions, reported being paid a ‘London Living Wage’, which is currently at £11.95 an hour, almost three pounds higher than minimum wage. Considering the average UK salary for full time employees is £16.37, the pay is good. Luzia Kirschbaum, a third-year Politics and International Relations Student working on the fourth oor of the SU building described it as “a generous amount.”

Granted, it may not spell the end of all nancial woes, but it does help, says Carmen Lau, a third-year student who works the SU reception on the third oor. She explained, “this is just a little bit extra, just for the cost of going out and paying the groceries and paying o one, two odd utility bills and stu , which does cover it.” More importantly, all SU jobs possess a exibility many students prize as highly as the pay.

As Luzia elaborated: “At the start of every month they ask us ok, tell us what dates you want to work at, and then they book you in if you’re rst basically. So [it’s] super exible… if you can’t make it. It’s a zero-hour contract, so if you can’t make it, you get less money but you don’t get penalised for it.” is rst-come, rstserved approach may cause competition for shi s, but it also allows students to manage the workload on their own terms. Indeed, a supportive attitude from management seemed to be a recurring theme in the interviews. Harriet Sparling, who works as a Sports and Recreation Assistant at the Marshall building and has since become an AU exec explains: “they get that you’re students as well, so obviously they expect a certain level of standards but of course, they understand that stu comes up like deadlines and are very understanding.” e convenience factor of working an SU job also stretches beyond being able to set your own hours. Firstly, the fact that students’ workplaces are located on campus means the commute to study and to work is one and the same, something students like So a Moran, who lives at home and works at the LSE Merchandise Shop, really appreciates. “Coming into campus for a one-hour class is kind of sad and pointless, so I nd if I’m able to do a two hour shi as well on top of that, that’s just another bene t.”

Furthermore, getting on with university work during the quiet hours—speci cally in reception jobs—is widespread and allowed by management, whereas, as Carmen admitted “other jobs might not provide that luxury.”

At its best, an SU job o ers a relaxed, friendly environment in which to work, one that may even be fun. is was best described by Defne Atadan, who works at LSE’s student bar, e ree Tuns. Speaking on the chances she gets to talk to her coworkers behind the bar, Defne remarked, “I think Tuns people work much closer together to each other maybe because of that, like they’re actually my friends now, I didn’t know any of them before.”

Student Union jobs, however, are certainly not easy. e application process is competitive and most that get jobs apply early, usually the summer before term starts. Students spoke of the slow vehour shi s as much as they did of the fun or busy ones and regardless of exibility, juggling student life with work takes real commitment.

Yet overall, SU jobs really do seem to possess a variety of factors that make them appealing to students, especially compared to others, as students with previous work experience—like Harriet— can attest: “I think this is a lot less stressful than a typical job, there’s not half as much pressure.”

So what advice can we o er to would-be student workers? A fresh twist on an old classic— there’s no place like campus.