eggs, baskets, difficult decisions

kunekune

First up, please know that I know that I'm lucky. OK, I'm brainy and that helps, LOL, but I've also had a fair bit of good luck along the way (and some bad, but I deal with that later). I earn good money, though of course I have to work hard to earn it.

My current income comes from 3 sources.

First, I have a full time lectureship in a 'real' university. I earn around 43K. I'm at the top of the scale and desperately want to get to senior lecturer (it's a final salary pension still, and anyway, I have ambition), but promotion is iffy, given the financial environment. There isn't a promotion round this year at all. In order to meet the official criteria I need to take on more admin tasks, but they don't come with a realistic 'workload allowance' and will likely involve working longer hours. Without any guarantee that meeting the criteria will result in promotion. I already spend a minimum of 40 hours a week on the 'day job', some times of year it is well over 50. I also have two side-jobs. One pays around 3K and the other ... I don't know yet, because it's not well organised, but my guess is 2-3K. I do them at home, in my 'own time' but need access to my employer's library system to do them well. This is ok, by the way, we have a right to do consultancy work. Also, it's useful 'outreach' work for the less lucky members of my profession. But it means that I go months without a single day off, let alone a whole weekend.

Second, at the moment, we are financially comfortable. I don't need to work all these hours. BUT at some point in the future, it will change as OH has Parkinsons. His hours have already come down from full time to 25 a week. We've been lucky enough to be able to take the financial hit. Though I wouldn't call someone with a disabled child and husband with neurodegenerative disease lucky ... Loved and loving but not lucky.

As you might guess I'm seriously overloaded. My health is suffering and I'm on medication for anxiety and high blood pressure. So what do I do?

The obvious option is that I stick to the day job and abandon the side jobs. However, there is a distinct possibility that my department will be chopped in the HE cuts to come. I'm nearly 50. The chances of getting any other job paying above the minimum wage - at best, I'm not sure anyone would employ me at all - are small. DLA is at risk. We could be in a really really bad financial situation in the medium term future.

My employer has asked for applications for voluntary redundancy. No thanks. But it has also said that applications to go to reduced hours will be well-received. I am seriously considering cutting my hours in the day job in order to continue a diversified income stream. Especially as it can be for a fixed period rather than permanent.

I would really like some input on this.

teabelly

Reducing your hours is the most sensible thing to do. With higher rate tax being what it is it might actually mean you don't actually lose as much as you'd think as 43k is the higher rate tax level so all your extra work is taxed at 40%. Have the uni done any calculations on the number of FTEs that are needed in your department and how far adrift they are?

If you do the extra admin and get senior lecturer the normal thing to do is to drop those admin tasks as soon as you get the senior lecturer position Seen it happen quite a few times.

You will never be able to do everything. Just do what is important and forget everything else. Be ruthless about cutting out anything which won't get you senior lecturer or keep you ticking over at work. You'll get more time this way. Also make sure you try and keep out interruptions as much as possible as they sap your time more than anything. Quite often there is a minority of tasks that get you the majority of recognition. Concentrate on those more.

Unfortunately being stressed and overworked is normal for HE now. Are there any jobs within the uni that you could do if the worst came to the worst? If you get redeployed they usually protect your salary for a few years.

What subject area do you lecture in?

nikki_angel

I just wanted to say thanks for your post as I find it really inspirational. It just goes to show what you can achieve through hard work.

I second reducing your hours if you can. Better to have made the decision yourself than have something forced upon you I always think.

x

Spirit_2

I would advise you to stay with your present contract... but reign in your ambitions for a while.

Your main income is contractual includes pension, sickness and redundancy rights..your other income streams do not, and are at the 'whim' of the buyers. If you reduce your contract you reduce these benefits too.

I am also 50, have major health issues, am the main earner, earn a lot and want to move to PT working. I am in a sector that will suffer major cuts in the next year and so my plan to move to part-time working is on hold whilst I see how the land lies.

Good luck

kunekune

Some really useful points so far.

Nikki-angel, thanks. I really have been lucky, because I had to drop out of my PhD because of my son's disabilities, and because of an accident of where I was career-wise I survived.

Spirit, absolutely ... the other jobs are always iffy, although they are meeting a need that might be increasing rather than dropping off (legal executives). The only reason I am considering this cutback in hours is that the deal is that you can reduce temporarily rather than permanently. Horribly, since I oppose the move politically, I think they are counting on things being better in 2 years when higher fees kick in. So they are looking for temporary cutbacks. I was reckoning on waiting until autumn, when the second/third employers send out contracts for the year to make any decision. I have already signalled that I'll maybe drop back a bit during my son's transition from mainstream primary to special ed secondary. The trouble is that I think our uni might not recover as well as they think, because our students are 60% muslim and muslim students won't borrow money ...

The terribly scary thing is that if I didn't have this job, I'd be unlikely to get anything else paying more than minimum wage. And actually, as an employer, I wouldn't employ a stroppy 50-ish woman who was used to earning a lot more money, couldn't drive, was cr*ap on the phone, and was used to working extremely independently.

Teabelly, it is really hard to work out what is going on. The uni says we're safe. My boss doesn't trust them. Trouble is we're a small and new department with recruitment issues. Part of that is to do with location and there's not much we can do. Our students do OK once they arrive, better than others in the faculty, and our retention rates aren't bad. And law is a subject that is popular in a downturn.

teabelly

Can you make your course more appealing to overseas students? They are already happy to pay more. If location is a problem is there a way of partnering with local landlords to provide accommodation that might make it easier for potential students to feel ok about living there?

The university doesn't have to charge the higher fees. The lower ones could be kept to maintain or increase recruitment as if you were cheaper than alternatives then issues with location might become less important. Also lending institutions are starting to do Sharia friendly loans ie ones that don't charge interest so again there is an opportunity to do something to get round the issue of higher fees.

Your boss is right not to trust them. University senior management often have two faces....

The one risk with dropping hours is that you then get made redundant anyway and you lose out on some redundancy pay. But if they only offer statutory it may make no difference as it is capped at some low level so anyone earning a reasonable wage isn't going to get full money ie their actual week's salary anyway.

one_bill_at_a_time

Hiya - really feel for you - my parents both work in HE and it's got really tough for them both the last few years.

Based on their workloads I'm not convinced that taking the reduced workload would actually reduce the hours you work and stress levels - I've seen similar scenarios in HE and in private companies where individuals, especially those with ambition, still put in as many hours and as much effort but just don't get the pay. If you do decide to reduce your hours I'd strongly recommend getting a sensible and documented plan of how that'd work i.e. what work you would no longer be responsible for (be it a module / exam marking etc).

Your obviously worried about your financial future - are you doing all the saving you can to prepare for that? Maybe by making adjustments to spending and seeing your savings build you'll feel a little less stressed by it all?

Tough choices all round I think. Best of luck with it.

kunekune

We're doing all kinds of things to increase income, but overseas recruitment is tricky as it's a professional subject. And trust me, our location is a huge problem, it's been in the news quite a bit and if I was a mum in the south east I'd be asking whether my child would be safe here. One of my students was a victim in a serious assault in which someone was murdered earlier this year. Another student here has turned out to be a mass murderer. Most of our students are local (same postcode as the department!).

And the extra sources of income are so far from the core of what we do (deliver courses to nightclub bouncers? of course we will!) that it is no less depressing to think of that future than of the alternative. I'm an active researcher with an interest in some non-commercial but socially important areas. I'm just waiting with baited breath for them to say, "oh, we don't do research in this department any more, so you can do more teaching and hey, why would you need library databases which are academic articles? students don't read those!".

onebillatatime: yes, we're cutting back, have done a lot already given OH's reduced income. It's not easy to spend money on anything other than food & drink when you're working 7 day weeks anyway. I'm about to make a decent sized extra mortgage payment. However, each cut to income takes a while to get used to. We now earn £15k less than we did two years ago, and it's no longer noticed, except that I suppose that money might have been saved. We still have to use before and after school club most days and holiday club almost all the holidays, as OH uses a lot of his leave on appointments for himself and the boy, and sickness, and I don't get to take time off during the teaching/examining periods.

And I totally agree that dropping hours may be pointless (and could overload my much-respected colleagues), in which case it'll be my extra jobs that have to go (and thus I end up with all the eggs in this basket). I'll be asking some pointed questions when HR come to see us about the 'managing staff reduction' process on Monday.

This is not fun. I try not to read the newspaper if I can.

se999

Only advice I can give is probably to do nothing until you know what is happening in your main job, my main concern would be that if you reduced hours and then were made redundant anyway at a later date, you could end up with redundancy payments based on the reduced hours.

kunekune

That is one of the things I'm asking at the meeting with HR, as the right to request reduced hours for a limited period is part of the managing staff reduction process. If they don't provide actual workload reductions and future protection, they are basically asking people to sacrifice themselves for the good of others. Yeah right.

But the redundancy package is pretty rubbish anyway because I've only been there 4 years (I gave up a safe job in another country ...) - I'd get 12 weeks pay plus the statutory payment. That sounds better than what's on offer in other sectors of the economy, but I have to factor in that (a) there will be no jobs at my level anywhere in the country and (b) even if there were, almost all universities recruit to a single annual start date of 1 September. So if you got offered a job in October, it would be for a September start, same as if you got a job in May. So someone who took redundancy in September and wanted to stay as an academic would almost certainly have a year to wait as an absolute minimum. And if they had no job they'd have no library and within a year or two they'd no longer be 'current' or employable ... That's why my academic friends would prefer to jobshare, rather than lose some completely.

kunekune

Oh, and also if I continue on full-time hours, I will still lose the £5000 a year 'consultancy' income because I am making myself ill with overdoing it at the moment, so a pay drop of some kind is inevitable. The issue is more whether it is better to stick with one more-than-full-time-and-slightly-insecure job or to have a 'portfolio'.