Opinion: Why I’m Striking
By Dr. Will Pooley, Senior Lecturer in Modern History
On Thursday 24th November 2022, university staff across the United Kingdom will take the first of three days of strike action (the next two days are on Friday 25th and Wednesday 30th November). Many of the historians who teach students at the University of Bristol will be among the UCU (University and Colleges Union) staff walking out.
We hate doing this.
It is incredibly disruptive for students and can cause serious problems for the courses we teach. We believe passionately in the teaching we do. Interrupting it hurts. Much of this teaching is prepared in advance, so by going on strike we effectively lose pay for a lot of work we have already done.
And I’ll be honest: losing the pay hurts pretty badly, too. It has never been more expensive to just pay the rent, pay the bills, and eat than it is in late 2022. All the signs are that things are going to get a lot worse in the coming years.
Yet despite all that, I will still be walking out. Why?
Staff at universities have two disputes with our employers. The ins and outs of the issues are complicated, but the first dispute is over pensions, and the second concerns pay and working conditions. In both cases, the basic facts cannot be denied: on every measure working in universities has gotten worse.
In the last decade or more, pay for university staff has not kept up with inflation, meaning that, for instance, a lecturer doing the same job in 2022 is paid a salary that is worth 25% less when it comes to paying the bills.
During the same period, university leaders have repeatedly undermined the pension scheme that most academic staff pay into, the USS (University Superannuation Scheme). The twists and turns of this sorry story are complicated, but the outcome is just as brutal as pay stagnation has been. In the latest round of changes this year, the value of a typical pension from the scheme shrunk by 20%. Financial commentators and pensions experts remain baffled by how the scheme is being run.
At the same time, working in universities has become harder, and more exploitative. University bosses continue to shift more and more of their staff onto insecure contracts. Instead of offering a lecturer or a librarian an open-ended job that they might be in for 5, 10 or 30 years, universities employ greater and greater numbers of staff on fixed-term contracts. Every summer, many of the staff running the university behind the scenes are still in the dark as to whether they will be coming back the next year. The same is true of many lecturers. Some are even paid by the hour.
Across the UK, 42% of university staff on casual contracts like this reported that they struggled to pay household bills. Is it any wonder that half of the university staff shows signs of depression? The next time you hear someone sounding off about the selfishness of wealthy university professors going on strike, remember that we are on strike for the sake of university staff who are struggling to make ends meet.
The people who run universities cannot argue with these basic facts. Staff work more for less pay, with less job security, and worse prospects for retirement.
What university bosses point out in return is how ‘difficult’ the funding environment is. Universities get less now than they used to get from the government. Brexit has mutilated some of the research and business opportunities universities depended on. Home student fees – which most university staff opposed when they were introduced – are slowly starving the sector for the same reason that staff pay is worth less and less: inflation.
This all sounds very convincing. Universities just don’t have enough cash to pay staff or underwrite their pensions.
But let me add in a final piece of historical context: as these changes have filtered down, universities have come to devote a smaller and smaller proportion of their expenditure on staff. This is a change in recent history, a deterioration driven by a vision of universities that sees them as something more like global corporations than communities of learning. The cuts to the pension scheme are an obvious example. The problem for university bosses is not the overall financial viability of the pension. Instead, changes to the pension are part of a long-term project to shift the risk for our retirement onto individuals. This will be disastrous for me and my colleagues in our retirement but is convenient for university finance directors who want to borrow large amounts of money.
We are going on strike to challenge this deterioration of universities across the whole country. Our industrial action is one of the few powerful tools we have to challenge university bosses. By withdrawing our labour, we stop all sorts of work that happen at the university. For students, this is most obvious in missed teaching, rescheduled assessments, and facilities or libraries that become unavailable.
But the strikes also bring the invisible university to a halt. No writing research articles. No applying for funding. No preparing teaching. No administering complex IT systems.
What we want to achieve is fairly simple. We want fair – and equal – pay for our work, secure contracts, and fair pensions. We will achieve this sooner the more people support and join our strike.
The people who run universities also want something simple.
They want to ignore these problems. They want to ‘mitigate’ our strikes and wait out another round, as they did the last time we went on strike. They don’t want people to think about the recent histories of universities as places where profit has increasingly been prioritized over education.
If we win, universities will change once again, as the pendulum of history swings back to properly funding teaching, education, and everything else that makes universities exciting, creative, and joyous.
If they win, the question is whether there will be anything resembling the university left.
Strike action by UCU will be running on 24th, 25th and 30th November. For a student’s guide to strike action, you click the link here.