Roar writer Kevin Wang on why the UCU needs a more inclusive strategy.
Undoubtedly the UCU, University and College Union, strikes are a tragedy for everyone. Through multiple strikes, the academic staff of universities have been fighting against pension cuts that deeply affect their wellbeing, especially after retirement. Non-academic staff would have indirectly also been affected. In addition, the interruptions caused by the union strikes virtually every year added on by Covid-19 have caused immense mental health stress and a dearth of substantial academic support for the students.
This leads many to wonder if there is a better way to go about than the current UCU strikes that add insult to injury. Through this article, I will attempt to highlight the structural problem that the academic staff faces in its industrial action strategy and propose a better way to rectify such issues.
Don’t Blame the Teachers
Throughout this crisis, a diversity of opinions arises. Students may support the strikes because they support justice and better working conditions for faculty. On the other hand, students may oppose the strikes because they no longer want disruptions to their studies already abound. Both are very valid reasons. However, out of this tragedy, one very clear thing is that one must not vilify the teachers and the academic staff that they have come to this drastic action of an industrial strike—of which the University Vice-Chancellors and University management are at the culprit.
As general secretary of UCU Jo Grady stated, “to apologise for something you too are a victim of would be to send a really mixed message about who should be apologising to students and who should be putting this right.†And to minimise disruption to the students as much as possible is to remember that the only way to not extend the strike is for the management to hold up to the UCU’s demand for fair pay and better working conditions.
Concerning Signs on Solidarity
In truth, strikes do work, and the effectiveness of strikes in improving working conditions is a testament to history. After all, industrial strikes have brought us weekends and the working conditions that we currently enjoy, but even when looking at academic strikes, the 2018 UCU Strikes have brought relative successes regarding pensions. However, the students’ concerns about the UCU strikes are immensely understandable. And it is the circumstances and the manner how the strike is conducted that dictates its effectiveness, just like how a war initiated by warmongers would not be effective if it is waged whilst the public cannot afford it, in turn losing public support.
Regardless of whether students ought to unconditionally support the UCU strikes to obtain fair conditions, the practical implications could be concerning. The UCU strikes especially in these circumstances can hurt the solidarity between the academic staff and the students, the latter of which being one of the particularly precarious groups of people that have been hurt the most during the disruption and the interruptions caused by the past two years, academically, mentally, or even financially. The good news for UCU is that 73% of students nationwide in the UK support the coming UCU strikes.
Yet major student unions like KCLSU and UCLSU voted student-wide to not support the strikes by a comfortable margin, reversing long historical precedent of support for faculty strikes. In addition, on-campus, many complaints about the disruptions that the strikes are going to cause can be heard. This may cause a fallout of support, especially from rather apolitical and apathetic students who previously offered lukewarm support for the strikes.
Clearly, the logic behind UCU’s strike long term strategy is structurally flawed. The time has ended when the faculty can ask for wooden appeals for solidarity.
A Better Way Forward
To rectify this, first, we must recognise that the three groups of people that constitute the university—the academic staff, the non-academic staff, and the students—are equally affected by the actions of university managements. Not only the academic staff but also non-academic staff such as cleaners and security, who are strangely not unionised in British universities, are affected by pay cuts and worse working conditions. For students, management’s actions affect us deeply in every level whilst students need to pay high tuition fees, and especially for London universities, also high accommodation fees, both of which should be accessible yet still barely affordable and out of reach to many students.
The only logical conclusion to this is a strategy of a coalition—the triad of academic staff, non-academic staff, and students must form a powerful coalition to leverage power against the power that be—not only because we must, but also because that is the only way we can effect change against the university management. In order to do so, for starters, academic staff must be more inclusive in their demands to include demands that tangibly improve the lives of every member of the university.
For an excellent example, we can look across the pond in the United States. Although not higher education, most successful K-12 teacher strikes always included non-academic staff in their industrial actions, as seen by the illegal yet strategically wildly successful strike in West Virginia. In Chicago, teachers unions not only fought for the interests of the teachers themselves but also “bargained for the common good,†which notably included the good of the parents and the students. The Chicago teachers strike successfully fought against school closures in majority-Black neighbourhoods, and for investment in affordable housing in the neighbourhood.
The industrial strikes by the Chicago teachers were so immensely successful precisely because they pushed an inclusive union campaign that organised the parents and therefore the students to support them in the strike, and by getting into the core issues that affect parents and students deeply, not limited to stronger protections against ICE for undocumented students, nurses in every school, and smaller class sizes. The Chicago Teachers Union refused to let the school board divide and turn the parents and students against the teachers.
However, in the long term, it should not end there; the academic staff must also proactively encourage the non-academic staff and the students to unionise themselves. As Roar News editor-in-chief Marino Unger-Verna rightly stated ironically in his argument against the strike in KCLSU’s open forum, “While I agree [university staff members] are underpaid and undervalued within the industry, the concept of a strike, in terms of fighting for those rights staff members deserve, is flawed in the sense that a typical union strike aims to deny the employer, in this case, King’s, the creation of their ‘product’, and therefore the revenue they gain from their consumer.â€
The flawed and incomplete strike model of the academic staff that leaves out the students is precisely the reason why the participation of students and non-academic staff for their own demands must be concurrent with the faculty strikes. First, although the non-academic staff have been left out of academic staff unionisation through the academic staff’s history of elitism in the past, to amend this, the academic staff must stand in solidarity whilst the non-academic staff unionise, defending their right to unionise and right not to be fired for unionising.
For students, although the unequal power dynamics between the university and the students is usually not that of employer and employee like the academic and non-academic staff (unless the student is a student worker), it certainly is that of a quasi-renter and rentee relationship. University students pay rent to university accommodation, and university students also pay tuition fees to consume education. In order to stand in solidarity with the faculty, either the student union must take up its new role, or a new union must act, to conduct tuition strikes or rent strikes whilst it also pursues improvements in material conditions for students.
Real Solidarity Requires Inclusion of Everyone
To conclude this long article, any strike action, by virtue of the actions of universities management also deeply affecting student livelihood, must also include the interests and the wellbeing of the students and non-academic staff. Appeals to “better working conditions for faculty means better learning conditions for students†no longer works and is intangible to the students.
The faculty strikes also need to cause real change for the other two important groups that also constitute the university. And finally, expanding the subject of industrial action to be more inclusive and gain bigger leverage can only strengthen the solidarity among everyone whom university management’s actions are affected by. Only when the faculty will be tangibly in solidarity with the students and the ‘blue collar’ non-academic staff will the students and the non-academic staff be fully there for the faculty.
