To Strike or Not To Strike?

Officially, the UCU is on strike today; the headline is that the dispute comes down to being about pay.  According to the UCU website, the real value of academic salaries has fallen 14.5% since 2009; the latest pay offer is 1.1%.  I'm not sure how the 14.5% figure is calculated, but I'll take the Union at its word.  (I don't doubt that Universities UK would dispute the figure; but even if it's mistaken, there's no reason to suppose that the UCU is speaking in bad faith.)

To be honest, when it comes to pay levels, I'm personally not all that fussed.  Larger pay rises are nicer than small ones, but academics at my level are not poorly paid by any stretch of the imagination.  But it's not about what I get personally.  What's much more worrying is the dual trend of the demands placed on us in return for that pay, and the casualisation of HE.  Everyone I know works evenings and weekends; I've had five days' annual leave in the past two years, and I worked during that; I'm not taking any holiday this year.  The idea that one might take a couple of days away from the keyboard to read and get to grips with a new book, or longer to get up to speed with a new but important topic or sub-field on work time is risible, even though doing so would obviously contribute to teaching and research.  There's no time or incentive to step back and look at how courses work and how the might be done differently.  If you're casual, you can flit between sessional gigs for years - and increasing numbers are casual.  Pay at my end of the scale may not be bad in absolute terms; but if you're starting out, it can be awful.  It isn't always; but it can be.

In many ways, the UK system is beginning to look like the US system, with all the grotesqueness that that entails... except that here (with a very few exceptions), we don't have the Prince-Bishop professoriate.  Senior academics are in pretty much the same boat as a newly-appointed junior lecturer.

We do have our Prince-Bishops, though: Vice-Chancellors' pay has gone up by quite a bit more than academics' - in one case, by about 25%.  (Falmouth has a university.  Who knew?)  The Wolverhampton VC's pay went up by 19.6%, apparently as a reward for exceptional leadership - whatever that may mean - and reflecting the "size, complexity and performance of [the] university" - as though academic staff have nothing to do with that performance.  On that basis, the hypocrisy of the 1.1% offer is stunning.


The combined result of this is that the whole academic experience suffers.  We're demoralised; and the student experience isn't what it could be (we all know that); the academic content of teaching is OK, but we all have a creeping sense that there's more we could do if only we had the breathing space or (for the casuals) job security; research gets squeezed.  (There is an absurd pendulum by which, if NSS scores aren't great - or even if they're fine but those of the university down the road are slightly better - we get shouted at by the management; we then shift resources to teaching, which means research suffers; we then get shouted at by management because of that.)  We're good enough; it's less and less easy to be good.

So there's all kinds of rationale for there to be discontent.*  All the same, I'm not convinced by the strike.  There's a number of reasons for this - the most prominent of which is that it seems to end up hurting the wrong people.

Striking means not turning up for work, and - concomitantly - not getting paid for it.  Now, this might then go in one of two ways.  Either the work simply doesn't get done; or else it does get done, but later.  In most cases, it's the latter that happens.  When teaching is happening, lectures, seminars, assessments, and meetings get rescheduled.  This is fine - except that it means that, in the end, all that's happened is that we've given ourselves an avoidable problem of how to fit everything in, in return for which we're taking home less money.  Result: the students - with whom we have no dispute, and who'd benefit from better working conditions - suffer, we suffer, and our employers simply save themselves a bit on the wage bill.  Bluntly: we do a financial favour for the people with whom we are in dispute, and cause hardship for those with whom we aren't.

Alternatively, we could refuse to reschedule things.  But then the students suffer significantly, and that seems to hit the wrong people.  In the past, I've told students whose lectures have been affected that they should write to the University to demand that day's fees back.  (I don't know if it's possible to withhold a day or two's fees.)  At least that way, the burden of the strike would fall on the right people.  Not exclusively - students'd still suffer, and we'd still lose pay - but at least the right people would lose something as well.  On the other hand, I don't honestly believe that universities would take the blindest bit of notice.

During assessment periods, this might be even more effective - at least on paper.  If final year students knew that their degree would be delayed because of a strike getting in the way of marking, this might make a big difference to employability, about which universities really care.  Students might go so far as to sue the university for lost earnings should their employment be deferred.  But I don't know whether that'd be successful - and, anyway, a two-day strike here and there isn't going to make that kind of a difference anyway.  Marking will still be done, and it'll still be done on time.  We'll just work that bit later into the evening to make up what's lost.

Correlatively, as far as I know, my employer hasn't cancelled any exams today.  (I can't see any notification along those lines, and a friend was still on the rota for invigilation.)  When it comes to the crunch, academics aren't willing to put academic progress at risk, especially given that as a bunch, we really do care about academic progress.

We're in a very different situation from other people who might go on strike.  If firemen or doctors strike, the fire will still burn and people will still get ill.  That puts a moral pressure on those supposed to provide against such eventualities - the government, in this case - to do something.  If shop assistants strike, profits fall.  If we strike... well, not much happens, beyond making ourselves a little busier when we come back.  (There's no backlog of fires to put out.  There might be a backlog of patients, admittedly.)

Oh, and since most of us work evenings and weekends anyway, the idea that we ought to sacrifice pay during a couple of days of strike seems to have moral weight only if we can claim for the notionally free time that's been sacrificed on the altar of our regular jobs.  (The harsh truth is that a lot of people who're notionally on strike today will be working anyway, either to try to clear a small part of their own backlog, or else to avoid generating more of one.)

Now, solidarity is a virtue.  And if the strike gets anywhere, I'll benefit.  So there is a good moral argument for saying that I ought to be striking as well - and that those who aren't UCU members ought to join, and go on strike themselves.  Not to do so would be to act as a free rider.  I don't think that free riding is always a moral problem; but sometimes it is.  Cases like this might very well belong in the latter group.  And yet, while there's much to be said for "One out, all out", there is a limit to that.  There are certain causes in respect of which falling back on that mantra would be abhorrent.  For example, suppose a strike was called as part of a campaign to segregate classrooms by sex: it'd be absurd to go along with it wholly in the name of solidarity.  This obviously isn't at that level; but the point is that one-out-all-out isn't cast-iron.  Since striking in the current case means that the punches are all landed in utterly the wrong place, the mantra isn't powerful.  Hence the decision about whether or not to strike is a problem.  It requires careful thought.  And on this occasion... I'm not persuaded.

Upshot: I'm not actually striking today.  I think the cause is good, but I'm not persuaded by the means.

What're the alternatives?  Well, during term-time, I think that there are things that we could consider - things like teach-ins.  Here's the idea: granted that we'd be working during the evening or at the weekend, we should do that stuff during office hours.  Things like seminars should be done after 5 pm.  That'd mean that universities'd have to pay overtime to the non-academic staff - security, janitors, and so on.  We wouldn't even have to teach to the curriculum: we could simply teach our "dream" course, with doors thrown open to all.  I don't know how effective it'd be, and people with families might not be able to manage it, but it's only an idea.  There must be other stuff that we can do that'd be genuinely disruptive, that'd hurt the right people, and that'd revive, even if only for a few hours, the thing that a university could be.

For now?  I've no idea.  I'd think about it a bit more, but I've work that needs doing.


*There is, in addition, a line of argument for the strike that has to do with the gender pay gap across academia.  However, that's a structural problem (a real one, I may add!), and it's nothing new; the proximate cause of this particular walk-out is the 1.1% offer.  Perhaps I'm a bit jaded, but the UCU here seems to be mentioning the gap in a tone of, "Well, since we're striking, we might as well mention this...".