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Today, many staff members at British universities have walked out on strike for another 14 days of industrial action, spread across the next four weeks. These strikes come after eight days of industrial action just before Christmas, but are connected also to the 14 days of strikes in 2018. For many striking staff, this industrial action has been experienced as one continuous two-year process: two years of ballots, offers and counter-offers, heated arguments, and then, seemingly inevitably, strike days, with rainy picket lines powered by sugar and caffeine.
Staff at 74 universities – not only lecturers, but staff in administration, libraries, estates management and IT – are striking under the broad remit of “pay and conditions”. The industrial action in 2018 was called in response to a fierce battle over the USS pension scheme, of which many staff at pre-92 universities are members, and the proposal by Universities UK (UUK) to replace the defined benefit scheme with a defined contribution scheme. The strikes in 2019 and 2020 have added to this the “four fights” campaign, addressing pay, workload, equality and the casualisation of academic jobs.
Even if the 2018 strike was ostensibly about pensions, many of us believed that we were taking action for much broader reasons. Of course, there was anger about the contentious pension fund valuation and the seeming incompetence or maliciousness of UUK. But the placards also frequently referenced wider concerns: the extension of the hostile environment to campuses (“Education has no borders!”), or issues lsuch as gender pay inequality (“WE mind the gap!”, held by women wearing stick-on moustaches). And there was also much talk on the picket line of sector-wide concerns: short-term or zero-hour teaching contracts, unmanageable workloads, stress, anxiety, depression.
University staff are angry at the attacks on the sector from outside – the constant devaluing of the arts and the humanities, the hostility to international staff and students, the imposition of bureaucratic evaluations such as the Research Excellence Framework and the Teaching Excellence Framework – but we are also fed up with the failings of our own sector and our own institutions.
It is upsetting to see so many brilliant students being recruited to write their PhDs, and then graduating into a sector with almost no job openings at all. At the same time, people with jobs find it impossible to manage their workloads, with demands to write and publish more, teach more students and turn around marking ever more quickly. There is plenty of work, in universities, to justify hiring more staff. There is even plenty of money– but institutions are far keener to spend it on shiny new buildings on campus (or, indeed, far-flung campuses in places with questionable human rights records) than on teaching.
Staff at British universities are demoralised and exhausted. It is horrifying to see people who have trained for years employed on zero-hour or casual part-time contracts to teach undergraduates, never knowing if their positions will be renewed each year, with vanishing hope of permanent full-time employment. It is infuriating to know that women are systemically paid less than men in our sector, and that people of colour are underpaid, under-represented and exploited. And it cannot be right that students pay more in fees than they ever have, but that they are being crammed into overcrowded lecture theatres, taught by staff who have seen a real-term decline in their pay in the last decade.
We hate to cancel classes; we hate the impact this is having on our students; we hate to put down our books and walk out of our offices and labs. We’re nerds, at heart: we like our jobs, and we think the work we do is meaningful and even sometimes important. But the sector can’t go on like this. Something has to give.
• Charlotte Lydia Riley is a lecturer at the University of Southampton
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