Rage against the system

At some point this summer I got an email from the university directing me to go to Blackboard to tell them whether I'd be paying my tuition this year as a single pound of flesh at the beginning or as a few ounces taken every so often. Once I'd done that, they told me to sit tight and they'd send out an invoice with a schedule for payment and directions on how to pay at the beginning of term.

The invoice that was foretold turned up in my email inbox this Monday. The payment was due on Tuesday. 

I'd known ahead of time roughly how much it would be, but it was still a bit of a pain in the butt to drop my actual work and go shuffle the contents of bank accounts in two countries. And once I'd done that I found that their online payment option wasn't working, so I got to shuffle my butt onto campus to give them the money in person. It was irritating as hell and cut a big chunk out of a day that I'd meant to spend chained to my desk working on an article, but I figured it was worth it because not paying on time meant fines, and I live in fear of screwing up enough to get kicked out. 

On its own it would have been a typical interaction with the UEA bureaucracy. Except when I got back from school and sat down to try and get work done there was another email waiting for me.

Associate tutors are contract employees, so every term we work we have to sign a new contract, even if the terms are the same as before. That's supposed to happen before the term starts. This term, that hasn't happened. We're nearly halfway through the semester and none of the tutors I know have gotten paid, and won't get paid until the end of November; most of them haven't seen a contract yet. All of them are still teaching, because they all need the money regardless of when it turns up and refusing to teach your seminar because you're not technically employed to do it comes off more as screwing over your students than anything else. 

So when I saw that my contract for dissertation supervision had finally turned up I was hopeful for a moment that the powers that be had finally gotten their collective act together. And then I read the contract. The contract which turns out to pay for exactly 3/4 of the meetings that the module outline dictates dissertations students must have. The module outline that I had to get from my supervisor the day before the first meeting because the person running the module didn't send me any information ahead of time. So I asked what gives, and the answer I got was that, basically, "that's what we pay, now sign the contract or we won't pay you." 

What can I do about it? Besides rant on the internet, pretty much zilch.