Workers and students: join 30 November demo
Why I’m striking: For a life worth living
Lluis Bertolin, UCU member, Birmingham
University staff are at breaking point.
What once used to be a prestigious profession, which offered good and secure working conditions, in the last decades has transformed into exploitative arrangements, spurred by the commercialisation of higher education.
Long, unpaid hours over contract. Fixed-term casualised contracts. Oppressive working conditions for working-class and young academics, who depend on their precarious university job to survive. A widening of the gender gap. All of these are the reality of working in higher education today.
The unwarranted threat on USS pensions is just the culmination of the contempt higher education bosses feel for their employees.
Bosses have escalated their attacks on our ability to live lives worth living, so the University and College Union (UCU) has also escalated, calling its most ambitious round of strikes yet.
I am striking because I want students to receive a proper education, delivered by lecturers who are secure in their working arrangements, and not on the brink of collapse. I am striking because I want the sector to be able to survive the greed and short-sightedness of the fat cat vice-chancellors.
Why we support the strike
Staff are struggling
George Phillips, Cardiff Socialist Students
This is the second time in my university life that the UCU has taken strike action, and the third time it has balloted. This shows nothing has changed – university management continues to ignore workers’ demands for fair pay, conditions and pensions.
Lecturers and postgraduate teachers are overworked, underpaid and treated as cogs in the university business machine. Postgrad teachers are on zero-hour contracts, and lecturers work 60+ hours a week, leaving them just 20 minutes on average to prepare for a lecture.
Cardiff University vice-chancellor Colin Riordan earns £289,275 a year, has use of a company car, accommodation, and up to £1,000 for private healthcare, alongside other benefits. All this while staff struggle to pay their bills and put food on the table.
Cardiff University has the money to pump millions of pounds into vanity projects, but not to pay its staff a reasonable wage. Students must stand in solidarity with striking workers, as their working conditions are our learning conditions. We must rise up together to demand better pay, conditions and free university education.
You have our full support
Noah Eden, Sheffield Socialist Students
For too long now, university staff have been subject to unfair working conditions and a below-inflation pay rise, which means a real-terms cut since 2009. This is just one of many injustices that they are fighting against.
They are also striking to end all unfair pay gaps based on race, gender and disability, to get rid of precarious employment, action to address excessive workload and unpaid work, which are further adding to the ongoing mental health crisis, and for standard weekly full-time employment contracts of 35 hours, with no loss of pay.
All these harmful policies towards staff, while vice-chancellors make obscene amounts of money, highlight how capitalism and the marketisation of universities is not fit to meet the needs of the workers. And this is why the UCU has full solidarity from Socialist Students and the Socialist Party.
This is our fight too
Matthew Bates, Northampton Socialist Students
We want to explain why students should get behind striking academic staff.
Firstly, this is our fight as students. With lecturing staff being unfairly paid and overworked, this means we aren’t getting the high-quality education we deserve and pay for in astronomical fees.
Secondly, Socialist Students backs all striking workers. This is a corrupt world of work we will be entering. We must demand a better deal for our future selves, as well as for those being taken advantage of right now.
Thirdly, university vice-chancellors are laughing with their own obscene pay deals. Under capitalism, the ruling class inflicts poorer conditions on workers, while enjoying an affluent lifestyle themselves.
Join the picket lines at your university, and show solidarity with striking staff. As Karl Marx said: “Workers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains”.
- National strike demo in London at 1pm, King’s Cross station, N1 9AL
