The agency security guard had been hired to help me protect the biggest building on campus: the one with 150 rooms.

He looked tense. He’d never been on site before and had only got one hour’s sleep after working on a pub door the previous night. His bosses had phoned him after he’d got into bed at 2am and told him to head to the campus – and be ready to work a 12-hour shift.

I reassured him that I had coffee in my bag, then checked my watch. Our duty was due to begin in seven minutes. I needed to get my new shift-mate awake enough to help me respond to whatever might confront us: fire alarms, medical incidents, drunken fights or a student in acute distress after losing one of their earbuds.

The agency guard was one of many new faces we’ve worked alongside since the security department was downsized earlier this year and a block was placed on in-house overtime. The news that temporary staff would be plugging the gap didn’t exactly come as a surprise: UK universities have been  their more modestly-paid positions for several years, and with security starting on minimum wage and possibly being viewed as less skilled and more disposable than other staff, I guessed we’d be right at the front of the queue.

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I’m still puzzled by the economics of it though. When we asked our directors, we were told it was cheaper to use temps than to employ guards full-time. When we asked how that was possible given that the temps receive higher hourly pay than we do, we were told the funding came out of a different pot. I’m not sure how that works.

And while I can understand the need to be cost-effective given the  that UK universities are currently experiencing, it’s difficult to get my head around the need to shave off a few pence per hour from staff like us when vice-chancellors’ median total pay has risen by nearly £40,000 over the past three years to nearly £341,000.

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There was always a certain sense of them-and-us on campus, given the vast range of salaries being earned. The median basic vice-chancellor’s salary of £283,000 in 2023-24 is more than seven-and-a-half times the in 2023-24 (£37,430) – and nearly 10 times the £28,500 that minimum-wage earners obtained if they worked the legal maximum of 48 hours per week.

But the divide seems to have deepened since Covid, with many of the higher-paid staff able to work from home, while the rest of us are still required to be on site full-time. And as more staff are or employed by subsidiary companies on poorer terms than colleagues, I worry that the divide will widen further. Throwing temporary staff into the mix feels like another step down in our working conditions.

To be fair, we’ve been lucky so far with most of the agency guards we’ve been sent. A lot have been solid and done their best to learn the layout of our 50-building site as best they can. But giving master access cards and keys to someone you’ve just met and whose character you don’t know – and who doesn’t have to come back next week – carries inherent risks.

One agency guard’s eyes lit up, for instance, when we told him it was our job to issue parking fines on site. We later discovered he’d been sticking tickets on female drivers’ windscreens, then taking their telephone numbers when they complained and giving them a personal assurance that he would text them with information on how to cancel the charge.

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The messages he sent, though, couldn’t be described as professional. His bosses at the agency were made aware.

I shudder to think what my first boss in the job would have made of it. While walking the patrol routes, he drummed into us how he needed reliable guards of good character, who would never take advantage of vulnerable students. Although there are plenty of temporary security staff who fit that bill, they’re not often on site long enough for anyone to witness a demonstration – or even to remember their face.

And recognition does make the campus wheels run smoother. We’ve already had a demonstration of what happens when academics who are used to being handed their keys or their flat white every morning without question are suddenly asked for their credentials instead (which, of course, they don’t have with them). A drama lecturer lived up to their job title, shouting louder and louder until we pointed out that an entrance foyer wasn’t the right place for a spontaneous monologue.

Recently, when our in-house receptionist announced their job was being abolished, an academic support worker told us about the “”. This is apparently an economist’s warning that a strategy focused on cost-cutting can be self-defeating, noting how things can spiral if you replace the steady pair of hands at the front of your business with an automatic door-opening mechanism.

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I like doing my job and will be gutted if I’m let go and replaced with someone on a zero-hours contract. But at least it will be a human replacing me – I won’t be losing my position to a machine, a worry that at least one academic has confessed to us as artificial intelligence rapidly gets ever more sophisticated.

Hopefully it will be some time yet before someone invents a drone that can stop a gang of teenagers from getting stoned in a disabled toilet.

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George Bass is a security guard at a UK university.