Hanging tough - Comments

Interesting that the 'its a hard time' and 'we are all in this together' hasn't resulted in lazy management winding in the slack or taking pay cuts, instead expecting people with no spare cash above subsistance to do it instead. The BS is blinding.

Yup, how hard can it be to "hang tough" on a professor's salary?

Here's some stats - a cleaner earns circa £10K a year - a senior admin/registrar earns circa £50K a year - number of cleaners losing their jobs where I work, around 20 full and part-time - saving circa £150K (part time causing the gap). Number of new senior admin positions created last year 5, costing nearly £250K. Number of people they promoted to work in nne psitions beneath them? 18. Cost £400K. New cleaning management team promoting new structures (now stairs cleaned bi MONTHLY and corridors once a week) - cost £50K. Do those figures add up to anything but gravy-training?

What would be interesting would be whether all the cleaners are the sole breadwinners - in my place many men in manual work have lost their jobs and female cleaners are main breadwinners. This means that sacking cleaners in the example above will send 20 families into poverty. Someone on £50K plus a year (in the top 5% of earnings) will not be dropped into poverty and surprisingly is often the second earner in a household where the household income is over £100K a year - putting them in the top 1% of households in terms of income. When a person on £50K a year drops their salary to £40K a year, they are keeping themselves in the top 10% of earnings, keeping their job and makeing sure that cleaners and junior staff don't get thrown back on a subsistence/poverty heap. When we are 'all in it together' shouldn't this be the attitude rather than raking in more for myself. As I've said before, perfomance management is activlely resisted in HE because managers are often lazy - they work a lot but ineffectively, but still take home salaries at a level that would demand far greater performance and effectiveness in industry.