Anyone in the UCU?

[Closetlibrarian]

And striking at end of Feb?

I joined UCU after the last strike, so this will be my first. Even though I voted in favour it, I'm now in an utter quandary. I have an absolute monster of a semester coming up and I'm fretting about all the lectures, tutorials, etc, I'll have to cancel as part of the strike.

If you've gone on strike before how did you present it to your students so that they didn't just get really pissed off with you for cancelling lectures (that we're then, according to UCU, not supposed to reschedule)?

Also, how did you mange with the loss of income? I'm the 'breadwinner', so 14 days of strike action is going to massively impact us (i.e. I'm not sure we'll be able to pay our bills).

or start paying us more thanks for making me chuckle whiskey

AIBU thread here

You may have to work on a few Saturdays; overtime is completely normal in most jobs. I guess the lack of teaching for 4/5 months of the years eases up the pressure though?

I am still shocked by the lack of compassion to the students here.

I think we can cope with your shock, starrysights, since you don’t seem to have any idea of or interest in learning about academic working conditions.

"I guess the lack of teaching for 4/5 months of the years eases up the pressure though?"

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

I would cry if I wasn't so tired working 5 days for 3 days' pay.

Actually I might...

I have a great idea; more so than the average member of public!

I just think that the strikers are saying they want to negatively affect the university management but in reality the only ones they’re going to affect are the students.

When i was an academic in the UK, i was im UCU. We had strike action, if i recall correctly, it was for less time. The university didnt dock our pay and the students were happy to have a few days off. It worked and we got huge payrises.

I just think that the strikers are saying they want to negatively affect the university management but in reality the only ones they’re going to affect are the students.

They're affecting management by affecting students. How else could it possibly be done? It's like when people suggest tube strikes should happen at the weekend 'to make it less annoying'. It misses the whole point of a strike.

"I guess the lack of teaching for 4/5 months of the years eases up the pressure though?"

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Indeed. I often think we need to be much clearer with students (and their parents) about what we actually do and how bloody difficult it is to take annual leave. Then maybe they’d stop thinking that we get from May til September ‘off’. They might appreciate that the summer is the time you hoped you’d get some research done but instead watch all the time slip away on exam boards, graduations, resits, PG students, clearing and admissions, prep for the next academic year, piles of really pointless admin, even more pointless meetings, irritating collaborative ventures bollocks that they foist upon you, and all manner of other things that weren’t what you were hoping to do when you decided to be an academic.

It might also help students to understand that if you’ve said you’ll meet them at 12.30 on Tuesday they should definitely turn up because it genuinely is the only time you have available for the next 3 days. And actually, you’re giving up your lunch break to see them.

I guess the lack of teaching for 4/5 months of the years eases up the pressure though?

Yes, absolutely.

In the semesters I work 70 hours per week, and outside semesters I only work 60 hours per week, so much less pressured.

You may have to work on a few Saturdays; overtime is completely normal in most jobs.

Really? Working 6-12 days extra on weekends for no extra pay? In addition to working evenings and not taking annual leave?

There are very few other professions that require graduate qualifications in which all of these hold simultaneously.

I have taken to making my entire calendar visible to students when making appointments, so that they can see it is blocked out with teaching, committees, research council meetings, PhD student meetings, tutor meetings, management meetings etc. It has actually helped them appreciate that I am not just a teacher and that my time is very stretched.

As far as I can see, they're either going to have to redress the balance or start paying us more.

But you know that this is not actually true, because there is a queue of early career researchers who don't have jobs i.e. permanent jobs are still heavily over-subscribed. Universities are losing from the top end to other countries, but they can conceal this while there is such a glut of young researchers keen to get permanent jobs, ignorant of what lecturer jobs have now become.

*"I guess the lack of teaching for 4/5 months of the years eases up the pressure though?"

Hahahahahahahahahahahaha.*

Yup. A lot of my salary is covered by grant income, and I have a major admin role (y'know, to help keep the dept functioning), so only about 10% of my time this year is spent on teaching.

That must mean I should only be pressured 10% of the time, right?

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!

Weell, user, I'm not so sure. My (qs highly ranked, forgive me if I don't say more!) department still has huge numbers of applicants for some posts... but not, since the Brexit vote, for all. We have enough of a sense of the absolute level required that it's happened a few times that we have failed to appoint following an advertisement. I know people are concerned a couple of levels up; if this is replicated in an least some departments of many universities across the country, it may start to worry the high-ups.

I agree that there are some research areas where applicant quality/quantity has fallen. Unfortunately, in my experience, this is not enough to bother the top of the university - provided that other areas can still recruit at a reasonable level.

I think starry just totally proved my point about people honestly not understanding the workload. The trouble is, we are really up against this culture of pig ignorance, where people (including students) simply doesn't understand what modern academia is 'about'. The number of times on Mumsnet I encounter someone who says "Oh, you're an ACADEMIC, you don't understand the REAL WORLD" is evidence of the persistence of some myth of the tweedy professor, cycling around absent-mindedly with a basket on the front of her bike, quoting Horace at the grocer - which couldn't be further from the highly modern set of skills and demands we have to evidence on a daily basis. I can honestly think of no other profession where being 'world class' at something (research) is so pitifully rewarded. Nor of one where the expectation of being world class is shoved alongside the expectation of ALSO being superlative at management, administration, teaching, student support, grant capture and knowledge transfer. And certainly not of one where, in addition to all of that, one is supposed to cover one's own wages for quite a lot of the time by capturing grants!

Indeed, (re. a general lack of awareness of what we actually do). That and the 'oh, how lovely, you get the whole summer off' comments that I find so hard to respond to without getting shirty. Yes, mmmhmmm. Those books just write themselves. And the marking does itself. And the lecture prep and curriculum design - that gets done by little elves overnight.

Looks like the mainstream media has started to cotton onto the strikes and students are starting petitions to get compensated for the lost contact time.
What an absolute mess. I think 2018 could turn out to be as toxic for HE as 2017.

At least the petitions are mostly directed to the right place - the VCs.
They may actually help put the wind up the university, and bring them back to the table. That's no bad thing. It's inevitable that strike action involves this kind of unpleasantness, the same as any other conflictual/agonistic situation. No-one wants to cause it, but it is part and parcel of pushing back and protesting against encroachments of rights.

The success of strike action often however comes down to levels of wider public support. There is still a pervasive myth that academics have three months off, don't work very hard, etc among the wider public. I've spoken to parents of children at RG institutions who buy into this.
Now the strikes are being featured in the MSM, it will be interesting to see how the public react. It could go either way - it could be a rallying point for general discontent among workers about their own pensions/"neoliberal" economics, or it could lead to more toxic and misconstrued ideas about lazy entitled academics. The country is split between the young and the old and I have a feeling reaction will be on these lines.
The newly announced HE review will prob drop tuition fees (without making up for funding shortfall), cut AHRC funding for "pure" humanities research, boost vocational skills training, and continue with the marketisation of the sector. This will esp affect the humanities and social sciences, and if the strikes lead to a loss of public support for those sectors, the gov will feel they have a stronger hand to push through these reforms.

The general public are not going to be sympathetic about moving to a defined contribution pension - when this is what private sector workers get (without comparable levels of employer contributions).

I am not convinced that the HE review will end up dropping tuition fees for STEM subjects (without making up the funding shortfall by the back door), because such subjects do cost considerably more than 9k to deliver and we are underproducing STEM graduates. I would bet though that funding for humanities and social sciences will be cut - with corresponding loss of staff/increases in class sizes and teaching loads.

The depressing thing about strikes is that since the 1970s there's always been a body of people who don't really understand the role that labour relations have played in history, who think that capitalism is basically a benign system that would always voluntarily, and without any prompting, have cut the 14-hour working day and created the weekend, implemented health and safety standards to ensure people weren't regularly chopped up by machinery, insisted that children shouldn't work and should be educated, and raised wages. These people fundamentally do not understand capital, and will always characterise strikers as lazy and feckless, and themselves as hard-working and put-upon - and this often goes hand-in-hand with a view of causation that is almost entirely individualist and lacking in any structural dimension. It's been a form of virtue signalling for decades, and is much beloved of the Daily Mail. Pushing back against it over an evental issue is difficult because it basically involves revising some very, very deep level ideological assumptions that these people make about how the world works.

The people you can work on are those who already have some sense of structural forces and the role that collective bargaining has played in driving up living standards for all - hopefully this includes some students and some parents of students! (Otherwise, we have assuredly failed as educators).

I am with you, however, in thinking that the tactics for this strike are misguided. They are incredibly high-risk. There seems to have been little consideration of what happens - not just to pensions, but to the union itself - if the universities take a hard line and brazen this out. People in my department will crumble if it goes into a third week, I'm absolutely certain of it. The prospect of a greatly weakened union in a context of such extensive and rapid marketising change is frankly gruesome.

I'm more and more convinced that what we desperately need is an enormous level of solidarity (and disruption) in the first week or so to drive this back to negotiation as soon as possible. And that means everybody reporting as striking initially, not just working from home. My institution has told HoDs not to give annual leave over the strike period, which is a classic "get out", so it sounds as though battle lines are being drawn.

Interesting stuff coming out yesterday and today suggesting that it's Oxbridge who are driving this derisking and negative valuation - and the suspicion that UUK have cooked the figures somehow by counting the individual Oxbridge colleges separately.