You’ll dae whit yer telt

In a joint piece for this week's In Common, Rory and Megan reflect on what it means to work constantly and still struggle to get ahead. From cuts to university teaching positions to the reality of working multiple jobs after graduation, they ask what happened to the promise that education and hard work would lead to a secure future.

Between us, Rory and Megan, we each work at least two jobs. One in policy and/or research; the other in retail or hospitality. Between them, we each work seven days a week. We each have a master’s degree, ample experience, and are doing work that we care about. We are also still broke, or getting by just enough.

The strange thing about working two jobs is the constant switching between two versions of yourself. One day, you can be writing about politics, sitting in meetings and thinking about policy. The next, on a shop floor serving customers or behind the bar pouring drinks. Neither job is less real than the other, but moving between them can feel like living two completely separate lives. And the cost isn't just money. It is time.

For Rory, when I started my PhD, I was juggling Common Weal, my research and a bar job. I loved working in a bar, but the time commitment, physical nature of being on your feet and late finishes do not make ideal conditions for thinking about issues of social and political inequality.

Eventually, you start turning things down not because you don't want to go, but because you have to work, or you have worked twice and lack the energy. It is possible to have two incomes and still have very little of either the money or the time that employment is supposed to provide. Yes, there are two incomes, but almost every day of the week belongs to someone else.

This is the scenario some of my colleagues at the University might now find themselves in following the recent cuts to Tutor positions at Glasgow. I was lucky to have good employers. But not everyone will be.

What happens if you need to schedule an interview with research participants and the times don't work between jobs, or the locations are inconvenient? What happens when a researcher experiences workplace harassment, discrimination or exploitation in their “night” job, while trying to maintain their “day” job at the university?

For postgraduate researchers, teaching is part of career progression. GTA positions provide opportunities to teach seminars, mark papers and develop the skills that an academic career requires. In Education, ATs are often practising teachers supporting knowledge exchange with the next generation of teachers and community development workers.

But teaching plays another role. GTAs can be a more accessible first point of contact for students than senior academic staff, particularly when students are reluctant to approach a lecturer with what they see as a “little” problem. I know one now-ex-GTA who played a critical role in identifying a safeguarding issue involving a student experiencing harassment verging on domestic abuse.

“It is possible to have two incomes and still have very little of either the money or the time that employment is supposed to provide.”

When GTA positions are reduced, that work does not simply disappear. Workloads are pushed back onto core staff who are already stretched across teaching, administration and research. All of this is intense intellectual labour. Meanwhile, students lose another layer of support, and universities lose people who are gaining experience at the very point they are supposed to be building an academic career.

There is a strange paradox in this. PGRs are doing exactly what we tell young people to do. Now, they are another group absorbing the consequences of a crisis they did not create.

For Megan, my experience was slightly different. I worked throughout university to pay for an ordinary life. I worked through my master’s to pay for tuition, partly because I saw the degree as an investment in what would come afterwards. The assumption was straightforward: get the qualifications, get the experience, then move into a career with some degree of stability.

But I finished the degree. And I am still paying my dues. The problem isn't that young people don't want to work. Many of us are working constantly. Indeed, many of us want to work, but our jobs are cut.

And this seems to be the wider pattern. In universities, early-career researchers lose the teaching positions that were supposed to help them build an academic career. Outside universities, graduates spend years moving between insecure work despite having the qualifications they were told would guarantee a future.

Somewhere along the way, the promise changed. Education was supposed to be an investment. Experience was supposed to open doors. Work was supposed to lead to better work, then some measure of security.

Instead, the first rung of the ladder increasingly seems to be where people are expected to remain. And if you cannot get from the first rung to the second, it is worth asking whether we still have a career ladder at all.

It really is a joy to teach, but this joy has been wrenched from us by a management class at the University that would rather see us as numbers on a spreadsheet and our interactions with students as quantifiable units.