Work at the University has been a bit of a rollercoaster ride! I arrived as a postdoc, and then got some really short contracts, became permanent, and then within no time had that permanence be seriously questioned. Then the moment came our Head of School told us our jobs are not on the line after all. And then the University sent out an announcement saying they haven't managed to make all the savings they needed to, so redundancies were an option again. And they were quite confrontational about it! They stressed that in the previous round, voluntary redundancy had been open to most, and the conditions were favourable. They said next time, this option may not be available. It sounded rather menacing. If you haven't volunteered to leave by late February, the only way of leaving would be with a big boot print on your rear end!
I don't know how many redundancies this will mean in practice. And I don't know if any are required in our school. But the uncertainty is back! I don't like that. I am, after all, still trying to recover from the injury the first months of the lockdown had caused. Seeing your livelihood threatened while you are still suffering from a work-related injury is unsettling. And it's now already happened twice! We'll see how this pans out.
We also got a message that we are only expected to work at home until the end of June. It sounds like they expect University life to get back to something resembling what it was before in the next academic year. I hope that also means they don't expect any more Covid-related financial hits from then on. It would be nice to get a period of calm!
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