It may be useful to collect information on the following areas:
- A comparison of the hourly pay of HPLs and that of your Main Grade Lecturers. Select like for like comparisons, eg: staff with similar experience and qualifications
- A comparison of other terms and conditions of HPLs and that of your MGLs, for example holiday entitlement.
- A comparison of the duties carried out by HPLs and Main Grade Lecturers.
- An explicit itemisation of exactly what is included in the hourly pay and the proportions of the different work. For example, the proportion of the pay which is holiday pay, planning and teaching / lecturing.
- The total number of teaching / lecturing staff and the percentage that are Hourly Paid.
- A breakdown of the employment of HPLs in terms of Gender, BME, Disability and other equality strands compared to employee averages (disaggregated data). If, for example HPLs have a higher concentration of women than MGLs, then the institution could be challenged with indirect sex discrimination.
- Any discrepancies between different departments’ use of HPLs.
- The interpretation of the contract that the institution uses – importantly, do they consider ‘hourly paid’ staff to be employees or merely ‘workers’ (see Legal status of contracts)?
- Information about how comparable institutions employ HPLs, especially local institutions with better practices.
Your SMT should conduct regular Equality Impact Assessments. When asked, they should provide disaggregated equality data with respect to their employment practices.
Finally: share information with your region! Many successes have been made by presenting comparative data between institutions to management – “College X has put its staff on fractional contracts, why can’t we?” and so on.
UCU London Region 