Media round up: The Birmingham Post, Times Higher Education
Students at the University of Birmingham took action today to highlight the large discrepancy in pay between the institution’s senior management and lowest paid staff. David Eastwood, the University of Birmingham’s Vice Chancellor, was awarded a pay rise of £10,000 last year bringing his salary up to £410,000 per annum, the highest basic salary of the any Vice Chancellor in the country [1]. At the same time, academics nationally were involved in a pay dispute after being offered a pay rise of only 1% – a cut in real terms [2].
Today marks the point in the calendar year where if it is assumed that the Vice-Chancellor and the member of staff on the lowest salary at the university worked the same number of hours, David Eastwood would already have earnt what the lowest paid worker earns in an entire year – in just 13 days – and has been dubbed his “pay day”. Students at Birmingham attempted to present him with a giant fake cheque from the “Bank of Fat Cats”. However, when the group knocked at his office door, the Vice Chancellor did not come out to receive it and instead the office door was locked. After chanting outside his office, students settled for sliding the cheque under the door.
Rachel O’Brien, Community Action Officer at the University of Birmingham Guild of Students, said “We’re at a time when our lecturers are fighting to stop their pensions being decimated, when our university is still not a Living Wage employer and when they continually justify not listening to students due to a lack of funding, yet the university management clearly have enough money to pay the Vice Chancellor more than any other in the country.”
First year student Rhiannon Storer said, “I don’t think it’s fair that university bosses should be paid so much when other staff are seeing their pay fall in real terms and in many cases are struggling to make ends meet. They don’t have their priorities right and I don’t want my tuition fees going straight into their pockets.”
The protest in Birmingham is part of series of actions at universities and colleges across the UK criticising the pay disparity between management and staff . Called for by the National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts [3], Oxford was the first to mark their Vice Chancellor’s “pay day” yesterday, with Sheffield’s and Warwick’s taking place over the next two days and more planned throughout January.
[2] http://www.ucu.org.uk/hepay
[3] http://anticuts.com/2015/01/02/management-pay-day-take-action-on-your-campus-this-month/
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