CIT industrial action is about downgrading of staff not proposed university status

CIT lecturers are taking industrial action to oppose the downgrading of staff and knock-on effects on their students’ education, writes Dr Tom O’Connor

Next week, on Wednesday February 3, there will be a one-day strike at Cork Institute of Technology.

This looks set to escalate into longer stoppage periods and possibly full-scale, protracted strike action by lecturing staff, unless the situation is resolved by meaningful discussion.

On December 15, 2015, in a Teachers Union of Ireland ballot, 92% of Institute of Technology lecturers from across the country voted for industrial action, including strike action.

The stated reasons were lecturers’ beliefs that cutbacks to the sector are harming the delivery of quality education for their students, and impacting also on their ability to do their job effectively.

From 2008 to 2015, lecturers and students have borne the effect of a cut of 35% (€190 million) in institute of technology funding nationally, combined with a rise of 32% (21,411) in student numbers, alongside a fall in lecturer numbers by 9.5% over the period.

Cork Institute of Technology, which has increased its enrolment by more than 500 students in the current academic year, has been suffering, according to lecturers and students, from cramped classrooms, less access to libraries and labs, falls in student support services, and huge pressure on its infrastructure in general.

Management at the Institute will point out, with some justification, that this situation is beyond its control. The impact of austerity, with reduced core funding available to it from the Department of Education, alongside the need to respond more effectively to training needs, in the context of the knowledge economy and the competition for jobs, has necessitated the increase in student numbers.

Staff and management have been bearing this and working well together. However, this partnership has been significantly fractured in recent months by the proposed merger of CIT and Tralee IT, towards the setting up of a Munster Technological University (MTU), and the Technological Universities Bill giving effect to this, which is currently before the Dáil.

The TUI lodged a dispute with the Workplace Relations Commission in February 2015, but no progress has been made. This was done on the basis of a ballot where 92% of CIT lecturers and 84% in Tralee IT had voted for industrial action in opposition to the merger, up to and including strike action.

The obvious question is, why are the lecturers opposing the Cork and Tralee institutes merging, in the hope of being made a university? The answer of course is that the lecturers are not opposed to the university at all. The lecturers’ union, the Cork Colleges Branch of TUI (CIT), has said there is no reason why there shouldn’t be a Munster Technological University, given the excellence of CIT in providing highly desirable qualifications, where technical apprentice education for trades sits alongside educational courses for well-paid, highly sought-after job areas up to Doctorate level.

This is true. The biggest growth areas are in well-paid jobs in biopharma, IT and biomedical, engineering and others, in which CIT courses are market leaders, and where graduates are commanding high salaries here and abroad.

Lecturers now perceive that the conditions for the merger (not the possible university designation) will dramatically hurt this success.

The Government’s basis for the merger of Tralee and CIT is based primarily on cost savings and rationalisation, another manifestation of continued austerity. This is proven in the blueprint document, which formed the basis for the merger, the National Strategy for Higher Education to 2030, also known as the Hunt report.

This report, alongside the Bord Snip Nua report which preceded it, demands ‘rationalisation’ of the Institutes of Technology. It also demands ‘elimination of unnecessary duplication of provision’ and states its ‘preferred option’ that ‘higher education providers within a region (and, where appropriate, nationally) will proactively come together to examine the scope for rationalisation of programmes’.

This means that with Tralee and CIT merging, some courses which happen in both Cork and Tralee will be axed in one of the locations. In other words, a course serving two separate populations in Cork and Kerry is now viewed as ‘duplication’. Students will then have to travel from Cork to Tralee and vice versa for the same course. This will result in hundreds of lecturer redundancies to change something that has been working excellently well right up to now.

This merger is a condition to apply to be a university, which may or may not happen. However, the merger will have to happen one way or the other, because the prime driver is cost-cutting and rationalisation, not university status.

Alongside, rationalisation, the bill contains sweeping changes to lecturers’ (and other CIT staff) contracts, alongside likely changes in terms and conditions of employment. Section 27 (2) of the bill does not guarantee lecturers’ rights to continued collective bargaining on pay agreements. There are also risks to lecturers’ pensions.

A hammer-blow to students, also originating in from the Hunt report, is the prospect of student loans which may take many years to repay.

Under the draft report, Funding Irish Higher Education: A Virtuous Circle of Investment, Quality and Verification (Dec 2015), students will be expected to take on loans and pay back college fees over a 15-year period after they leave college, once they start earning.

Management in CIT might argue that they too are pawns in the game of a cost-cutting policy agenda, driven by the Dept of Public Expenditure and elsewhere.

However, what lecturers and unions find unhelpful, is that management is portraying a one-dimensional picture of the opportunities of well-earned university designation to the public and politicians, while simply denying lecturers’ — and, ultimately, students’ — verifiable fears for what is likely to happen, if changes are not made to the Technological University Bill and the Hunt rationalisation agenda for education.

Dr Tom O’Connor lectures in Economics and Social Policy at CIT and is a member of the TUI