Homeless University Lecturer

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Purple

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The Irish Times carries an article in todays edition about a lady in Galway who is a University Lecturer who is homeless.
While it is very sad for her and her 20 year old son she is earning around €23,000 a year and so would never be able to afford to rent a home without significant State support.
The starting salary for a lecturer is €50,646. Therefore it appears that she is a part time lecturer in a sector which enjoys long holidays. While she may well be doing things the rest of the time which benefit the community or her family I think that it may be more prudent for her to fill her time with other paid employment. There may well be very valid reasons why she cannot do so but it strikes me as rather disingenuous for the Irish Times to present her plight in the manner in which it has done. While harsh it would be equally valid to present her as an unemployed screenwriter and actor with a part time gig lecturing in film. None of this is a criticism of the unfortunate woman who is in a very difficult position, rather it is a criticism of the emotive framing of the story by the Irish Times.
 
The Irish Times loves a sob story like this...

Garda wife: 'There are weeks I can't put food on the table'

Is there anyone else following this story in the IT [broken link removed] Something doesn't quite add up here. I ran the figures presented through one of the tax calculators and it indicates that even after pension, usc etc.. are taken out that the net pay is 3600 euro per month. Yes, the...
www.askaboutmoney.com
 
She does. The article mentions that she also works as a freelance screenwriter.

I wouldn't put too much weight on the "long holidays" bit. She's likely a contract lecturer, paid to deliver a specific course or courses. The amount she is paid will be based on the time committment of delivering the lectures, plus a certain number of contact hours with students above that. She will not be paid for the time involved in creating the course or preparing the lectures or, I think, for the time involved in reading and grading coursework, or in marking the exam.

It's a pretty exploitative gig, often given as a form of financial support to PhD students, or to people who have recently finished postgraduate study and hope to make a career in academia. The "long holidays" are when you actually prepare and document your courses and write your lectures. They're also when you pursue your PhD studies, if that's what you're doing, or when you research, write, publish and make grant applications, if you have any ambitions to be appointed to a regular lecturer position.

You can only take extra, non-academic work, if you're not pursuing a PhD and have no aspirations to be appointed as a regular lecturer. That's this lady's situation, and that's why she has the scope to do freelance scriptwriting.

There are questions to be asked about whether it's a good idea for universities to have a career structure with entry-level positions like this, but that's not the point of this article. The point is that here we have a middle-aged lady working in a middle-class occupation, and she's homeless. That's not the stereotype of homelessness, and it's an indicator that the housing market has reached such a level of disfunction that the phenomenon of homelessness is impacting social sectors and groups who, in the past, would have been seen as not being at risk of homelessness.

Two or three generations ago, a middle-class, middle-aged woman on her own might well have found herself in a very perilous economic position, including the prospect of homelessness The situation usually arose through unexpected widowhood. A great many women in this situation did not qualify for social insurance widows pensions (because their husbands had been self-employed, or public servants, or otherwise outside the social insurance net) and, even if they did, it was very modest. They themselves typically had a very limited earning capacity — no qualifications, no experience, and women's work was badly paid anyway. My own grandmother, as the wife of a fairly senior civil servant, lived in a grand (but rented) house in Ballsbridge. A few years later, as the widow of a fairly senior civil servant, she lived in a third-floor bedsit in Ranelagh and worked as a shop assistant.

I'm not suggesting that the middle classes have a God-given right to be insulated from the risk of economic misfortune. But social and economic progress is not much use if it doesn't. over time, give people a reasonable assurance that they can aspire to some modest degree of economic security. And, for the group of which this woman is a representative, progress seems to have been negative in recent years, largely because of the housing crisis.
 
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The irony is that 15-16 years ago, the academic class clamoured for builders, developers and bankers to be punished for creating the 2008 collapse, and prevented from ever doing so again.

They got their wish and ordinary people have been suffering the consequences of that foolishness for almost as long.

Now it's hitting even them. Will their folly dawn on them, even now?
 
TomEdison said:
She does. The article mentions that she also works as a freelance screenwriter.
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It would appear that she is not being paid for that work.
If I was broke and I spend my spare time painting or writing, having found out that there is no market for my art or prose, then it would be unwise of me to to do so an the expense of paid employment.
I find it very hard to believe that university lecturers spend the 4 months of the summer fully engaged in such activities. I am friends with a lecturer in UCD and he spends his summer, in his own words, "bumming around France and surrounding countries".
So it's not a job for a person in their late 50's who is not building a career.
Yes, there is a snobbery around homelessness and indeed around education. Nobody should be paid based on their qualification. They should be paid on the market value of their labour. In this case a person whose labour has a low market value is choosing to work part time. She would get paid significantly more working fulltime in a coffee shop.
Yes, retained wealth has changed the relationship between labour and capital (in this case work and the cost of housing) but that's a discussion for a different thread.
I agree, but for their part they must remember that they have the overwhelming responsibility of their own economic fortunes.
TomEdison said:
And, for the group of which this woman is a representative, progress seems to have been negative in recent years, largely because of the housing crisis.
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I consider the creation of an expectation that the State will provide a living for people who choose to engage in activities which have little or no economic value very regressive. If the people, through their government, decide that artistic endeavours produce a social good and fund them accordingly that's a different matter.
 
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I read the full article.
She was given a years notice. But hoped that she’d be able to stay on as a tenant in situ if the council bought the property. It was unfortunate for her that didn’t work out.
Overholding for 8 months. That’s a lot for the landlord to carry.

It does seem that her earnings fall between enough to support herself and her son and qualifying for assistance. That’s a hard place to find yourself in. She now qualifies for assistance but there’s nothing available,

And market turns, a spot of bad luck, a company closing up… any of us could end up there.

Not everyone is willing or able to get a weekend job driving an uber or making coffee to boost their income. You’d like to think that there were more lucrative professional opportunities available to her but maybe not. I’m sure she’s been looking,

She has a 20 year old son at college, hopefully he can start work soon and contribute to the rent.
 
Yes, very difficult position for the landlord.
Ending up there is one thing. Getting out of there is another.
Annieindublin said:
Not everyone is willing or able to get a weekend job driving an uber or making coffee to boost their income.
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If you're not willing to work hard enough to make ends meet then you may well find yourself unable to make ends meet.
Annieindublin said:
You’d like to think that there were more lucrative professional opportunities available to her but maybe not. I’m sure she’s been looking,
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Perhaps she should look for better paid work in an area outside her current field.
 
At 58 it might be hard to change track but yes I think if you see the writing on the wall then get a wiggle on and make changes.

My niece realised that she wouldn’t be self supporting if she remained working with ore school kids, she is working on getting her masters to qualify as a teacher. Took her a year to realise that early education was fabulous and what she wanted to do but it would be grand as a second household income and that wasn’t her life plan.

Not sure I’d want to work as an uber driver etc but I’d prefer that to being homeless
 
Purple said:
In this case a person whose labour has a low market value is choosing to work part time. She would get paid significantly more working fulltime in a coffee shop.
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I think we can challenge an economic setup that incentivises more coffee-shop assistant and fewer teachers, writers, and creators. Is this really going to maximise the happiness and welfare of our society?

[Hint: the answer is "no".]

The article isn't arguing that the state should provide a living for her; it's that a housing market that leaves someone like her homeless is not doing what a housing market should.

Unless you want to argue that society doesn't need university lecturers, then either (a) it has to pay university lecturers more (e.g. by not making them all start with the exploitative gig I discussed) or (b) one way or another, make housing affordable to university lecturers with the current earning structure.
 
There is no hint that she has unrealistic ideas about where she wants to live, no mention of her expecting to find a 4 bedroom mansion while working part time.
It would seem that there simply isn’t anyway in her price.
 
The reality is that a large number of Irish people do not want to work. They do enough hours to keep below limits to stay in low tax rates and avail of social supports. The govt actively supports this so that it can point to low unemployment figures as proof of a successful economy. And then turn round and say we need to bring more people into the country to fill employment gaps.
This gravy train will run out of steam soon.
 

They need minimum wage immigrants to maintain the manufacture of tinfoil hats.
 
TomEdison said:
I think we can challenge an economic setup that incentivises more coffee-shop assistant and fewer teachers, writers, and creators.
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I challenge the proposition that such is the case.
If a coffee shop assistant working 20 hours a week for around 30 weeks of the year who could not afford to find a place to live asked me for advice on how to extract themselves from their predicament would you consider it unreasonable if I advised them to work 39 hours a week for 48 weeks of the year and then see how the land lay?
TomEdison said:
Is this really going to maximise the happiness and welfare of our society?

[Hint: the answer is "no".]
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I know many creative people who work full time and use their spare time to indulge their non commercially viable hobbies. They include musicians and artists. In some cases they have a relatively successful side gig playing music/singing and selling their art. None of them would dream of giving up their day job and expect their neighbour to pay their way in order to indulge their creative urges.
TomEdison said:
The article isn't arguing that the state should provide a living for her; it's that a housing market that leaves someone like her homeless is not doing what a housing market should.
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It absolutely is. At no time in the history of the State could someone on her relative income afford to buy a home or even rent one without significant State support.
That's a serious false dichotomy. The average income for a fulltime university lecturer in Ireland is more than three times hers.
 
See if you'd just stopped there....
 
So in summary a single parent working part time can’t afford a home.

It’s not really a surprise, most families need one decent income plus a bit from a second one, or 2 low incomes etc…. Or benefits to help make up the difference.


She had 2 part time gigs and one ceased. Hence the part time salary.
 
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Annieindublin said:
So in summary a single parent working part time can’t afford a home.
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A single parent of an adult child.
I was a single parent for over aa decade and I had to work full time to afford a home. Life is hard, the sky is blue etc.

Annieindublin said:
She had 2 part time gigs and one ceased. Hence the part time salary.
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Hence the advice to get a second paying gig. 30 hours a week in a minimum wage job would double her income.
 
Yes as I mentioned above, child is 20 now and hopefully can help out.

she’s been renting the same place for 20 years so has probably been able to manage due to small rent increases. My cousin is the same, kiddo is 19, they moved in when he was a toddler and basically minimum rent increases. She wanted to move but got a fright when she realised what the real rental market was like. Must have been ignoring the news for a few years.
 
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