WTF is going on in UK higher ed, strikes edition
An explainer for North American comrades
Yesterday, the University and College Union (UCU), the labor union that represents lecturers, professors, PhD students, librarians, research staff, academic admin staff, and so on in the UK, announced the exact dates for 18 days of strikes across February and March. This wave of action is brutal. It’s also not dissimilar from strikes held during the 2021–22 academic year. And in 2019–20 before the pandemic stopped further action. And in spring 2018.
Why does this keep happening? Why are strikes structured this way? Can this strategy achieve results? These are all questions I asked upon arriving in the UK to start my first academic job post-PhD. I was a labor activist during grad school, have been a union communications officer, and have written and spoken to the press about higher ed labor issues for years. Strike action decimated my spring semester, and my bank account, last year. It will do so again this year if bosses don’t come to the table in good faith. So I feel decently well-positioned to both answer my original questions and translate all of this for a US and Canadian audience.
Buckle up: here’s a crash course for my North American comrades on working, and fighting, in UK higher ed.
Wait, what’s going on right now?
To answer this question, we need a bit of context.
Unlike in the US, where labor unions for college and university workers are affiliated with national unions for auto workers, teachers, and more, all university unions in the UK are connected to the same national organization, UCU. UCU organizes national campaigns that, at least on paper, involve every university in the country. This provides ample ground for solidarity and massive action. It also gives the national union—and the few people who sit at the top of it—a lot of power.
Since 2018, UCU has organized country-wide actions around a set of issues involving pay, pensions, and working conditions. I’m not the person best positioned to comment on the particulars of campaigns prior to 2021, when I started working here. In 2021–22, the main issues were pensions and the “Four Fights”: overall pay, workload, casualization (adjunctification), and gender/race/disability pay gaps. In the current dispute, called “UCU Rising,” the main point is pay. The precise issues here are many and layered, but they can perhaps best be summed up by the fact that, in real terms, pay has fallen by about 17.6% since 2009 relative to inflation, whereas pension cuts pushed through last year mean that some young academics have had their future retirement income slashed by 40%. And, much like in the US, about 1/3 of university workers are on casualized (adjunct or temporary) contracts.
As part of the ongoing disputes, UCU has called 18 days of strike action this spring. Because of how the dates are organized and how short UK teaching terms are, this will, effectively, decimate the spring semester if university employers refuse to negotiate.
The possible decimation is nice and all, but why not just call an indefinite strike?
The short answer: good fucking question.
The long answer: there are lots of reasons, which I will summarize below in no particular order.
National and local strike funds have been ravaged by years of strikes, and we don’t have the ability to sustain indefinite action at every university in the UK.
Past action has been more fragmented across universities. This is the first time we have had an “aggregated ballot,” wherein if 50% of all union members across the country turned out and a majority voted to strike, we would (which is what happened). In the past, we’ve had disaggregated ballots, where if an individual university hit 50%, they would strike, but a different university down the road might not if they didn’t meet the turnout threshold. This means there are different levels of strike fatigue across the university. My branch at Nottingham is one of the most active in the country and had one of if not the highest turnout rate last spring. Some very well-known campuses, such as University College London, did not meet the threshold last spring. Some have not gone on strike at all yet, despite individual members’ support of the strikes, due to the disaggregated ballot. So different branches have more or less experience and higher or lower cash reserves. This creates different preferences.
Higher-ups in the union also had their own preferences. They got what they wanted. That’s all I’ll say about that.
In the UK, migrants who strike for more than 10 consecutive days can be reported to the Home Office and potentially found in violation of their visas. The right to strike is legally protected for migrants (for now), but as anyone who’s ever encountered an immigration office knows all too well, the entire process is arbitrary and full of racist and nativist fuckery. This is most likely to occur not via immediate deportation, but by denial of future visas or Indefinite Leave to Remain status (similar to a US green card). As a migrant, I am all too conscious that the law does not exist to protect me and can be bent at any time; there was plenty of tomfoolery with my own immigration journey on both sides of the Atlantic. And, I’m the kind of migrant that the UK is okay with. Things are much harder for my comrades racialized as nonwhite.
Though individual branches are great (shout-out to my own branch committee), the national union is, from my vantage point, very disorganized and not good at planning or communication, which as a neurotic Virgo moon is a Problem for me. The stars aside, indefinite action requires exquisite planning and communication. So.
My personal opinion is an odd mixture of skepticism about strategies short of indefinite action, relief due to my migration situation, and cautious optimism about a strategy that could take out the term despite not being indefinite. Which brings me to…
Will this work?
Last term, I had regular conversations with my master’s students about this very question. My predictions about what was likely to happen were usually wrong. I didn’t see UCEA (Universities and Colleges Employers Association—the body that decides the national pay scale) coming to the table after just three days of action in November, given that they had not done so for four years and far longer waves of action before then. But they did. I then didn’t see it coming that UCEA would demand we guarantee no further strikes before negotiating at all, nor that they would make a lowball pay offer. And I didn’t see the union calling a grade strike (we call this a marking boycott over here) in January, though this has since been called off.
In short, my poor students have whiplash, and you should take anything I say with a large grain of skepticism. But here’s what I’m considering in trying to think through this:
Some days, it seems like the entire country is on strike. A combination of COVID, Brexit, economic effects of the war in Ukraine, the Tory government, and the general woes of late-stage capitalism have meant falling wages and unsafe and unsustainable working conditions across industries. This past fall alone, ambulance workers, nurses, rail workers, subway drivers, bus drivers, border security, teachers, and university workers have gone on strike (and there are probably other sectors I’m missing here). Junior doctors for the NHS are balloting for industrial action. Everyone who is not independently wealthy is fed the fuck up. This is not an environment in which bosses can afford to be intransigent forever. I do think this played into UCEA’s decision to negotiate in the fall, however minimally.
In the past, university leadership has waited out the strikes. This has been possible because they’ve been more broken up: three days here, two days there, a week at the end of term. This time, however, action is almost constant, sometimes with only a weekend in-between strike days. As an instructor, you can’t teach coherently in the face of this. There will be modules (classes) that do not meet for the entire month of February. In the past, universities could say that learning outcomes were still met during strike periods. This time, that will be much harder.
Students are fed up. As they should be. Because this wave of action is more constant, they have more grounds than ever before to demand tuition refunds. Do I think university leaders will grant refunds? Not in a million years. Do I think there is the opportunity here to annoy the shit out of them with a deluge of requests? Absolutely.
This time, every university in the country is on strike, rather than some subset. Of course, levels of participation are likely to vary from branch to branch, but no university will be spared at least some action. As may be obvious, I have…feelings…about our national union leadership, but there’s one line our general secretary loves that I love too: the longer the picket line, the shorter the dispute.
And still: UK university leaders are remarkably callous. Remarkably. They effectively ignored four years of action. My benchmark for success is US grad labor unions—seriously, folks, this is where the energy and dedication is at—and both the Columbia and UC strikes took about 8 weeks of constant action to have an effect. The UK is different and labor structures are different, but I am never not thinking about these cases.
I don’t work in the UK, but I’d like to help. What can I do?
We are grateful for your solidarity! Some ideas:
As mentioned, our strike fund is not where it could be. We wouldn’t take action during a cost of living crisis if we didn’t have any other choice, but the bottom line is that this is going to hurt. You can donate to the national fighting fund via PayPal at ucu.org.uk/fightingfund (or directly if you have a UK bank account). If you want to directly help people you know, you should check if their branch has a local strike fund that accepts donations. Not all branches have one, but many do! (The donation portal for the Nottingham fund is not up and running yet, but you can bet I’ll circulate it once it is.)
If you have coauthors or other collaborators in the UK, write to university vice chancellors (not chancellors—they’re usually not the decision-makers) in support of them. Mention how disappointed you are that VCs aren’t treating your coauthors properly and how much this has made you reconsider working with UK coauthors in the future (even if it hasn’t). VCs love international research collaborations and hate threats to them.
If you are scheduled to give a talk at a UK university on a strike day, even if it is virtual: don’t. It is 2023 and we all know better than to cross picket lines. Just don’t do it. Strike dates are February 1, 9, 10, 14, 15, 16, 21, 22, 23, 27, and 28 and March 1, 2, 16, 17, 20, 21, and 22. If your talk is in March and you want to tentatively cancel it—i.e., “if the strikes are still on, I won’t come”—that makes complete sense.
Show your support on social media; the hashtag is #ucuRISING. Media exposure is only part of the equation, especially when you don’t live in the country with the relevant media, but the more attention this gets, the less university bosses can ignore it.
Ask questions! Though higher ed labor struggles in North America and the UK are not identical, they do rhyme. (It’s almost like the structure of the industry is flawed or something.) We can learn a lot from each other’s experiences. To bastardize a statement about US politics, comradeship does not stop at the water’s edge.