Academic researchers on Fixed Term Contracts (FTCs): human investment versus neoliberal precarity

OU speakers will reflect on how they have pursued better job security and career development for research staff on Fixed Term Contracts (FTCs).  In engaging OU procedures, their efforts have faced a conflict between two employment models: human investment versus neoliberal precarity.  

The human investment model has encountered many obstacles, most fundamentally an institutionalised ignorance; this concept helps analyse how institutions strategically neglect, obscure or forget knowledge that may disturb their agendas.  To find ways forwards, the speakers have been elaborating Participatory Action Research, whereby a group process learns from experience so that joint action can more effectively achieve common aims.

Questions to discuss

• What drives the neoliberal precarity model?  
• What impedes the human investment model? How do those barriers persist?   
• What have been the efforts to highlight and overcome them?   
• How effective have been these efforts?  What would be more effective means? 
• What roles have been played by specific OU bodies?  e.g. the UCU branch, the RDC Steering Group, Faculties, Finance, and People Services. 

Organized by the OU UCU Research-Focused Working Group

Speakers  

Dr Les Levidow, Senior Research Fellow, Development Policy and Practice (DPP), School of Social and Global Studies (SSGS).  Member of OU Research Committee since 2019. Member of Researcher Development Concordat Steering Group (RDCSG), 2019-2023.

Peter Wood, OU UCU Acting Branch President, previously Co-Chair of UCU’s National Anti-Casualisation Committee. Member of the OU RDCSG, 2021-2023. Currently a part-time Research Fellow at Aberystwyth University.

Dr Iman Naja has been a Research Associate at the Knowledge Media Institute (KMi) since September 2022. She has the lived experience of the effects of FTCs, especially as a migrant worker.  She has recently been offered her 6th FTC since starting a full-time post as a postdoctoral researcher in January 2020.

Other staff on research-only FTCs will have an opportunity to describe their experiences.

Conflicts around FTCs for research staff

For several decades, academic staff on research-only contracts have faced employment instability (aka precarity) of various kinds, which have changed over time.  In the 1990s universities often renewed researchers’ Fixed Term Contracts (FTCs) several times, even for a decade or more.  In 2002 UK legislation sought to limit such renewals;  employers had to show an ‘objective justification’ for keeping an employee on a FTC, particularly after 4 continuous years. 

 In parallel a human investment model promoted better career development for such staff to gain publications, and to help in preparing research bids, e.g. through training courses and mentoring.  This effort would generate a basis to extend their contracts, towards better employment stability, towards developing academic research as a profession in its own right.  This model has been promoted by the Researcher Development Concordat (RDC), a national framework adopted by UK universities.

Nevertheless universities often perpetuate employment instability by various means.  Consequently, they throw researchers into greater competition, keep them insecure, subordinate them to management dictates, and limit their academic career development.  This pattern can be understood as a neoliberal precarity model.

Efforts towards improvement have encountered several barriers, in particular:

Under UK employment law, a FTC requires an ‘objective reason’ not to be made permanent.  Many universities cite ‘external funding’ as a stand-alone rationale, thus disqualifying most research-only staff.

• Churning:  A university often ensures that precarious staff leave before 4 years, so that they cannot even make a case for permanency.  This generates ‘churning’, a regular flow of new researchers on FTCs. 
• Deceptive indicator: For a long time, the OU’s main indicator has been the number of researchers on a research-only FTC for 4+ years, whose reduction would supposedly indicate greater employment stability.  Although some gain permanent contracts by 4 years, many more leave before then; the deceptive indicator disguises this precarity as success.  A more informative indicator is the number on their first FTC, which would gradually decline if employment stability improves. Does it? Fortunately these figures have been provided by People Services for several years.
• Discursive: Although few people advocate shifting all FTCs into permanent ones, straw-man arguments emphasise the difficulties of potentially doing so, thus evading the above issues.

The human investment model faces all those barriers. How to overcome them?