When do you think the strikes will be?

[JasminaPashmina]

Just that - when do you think the strikes will happen?

Before Christmas by chance?

@Pota2 I completely agree with you. I have it on good authority that a certain Leverhulme project comes with a postdoc attached

Jasmina 😂

I have pulled in large grants (comparatively speaking for a humanities discipline). I read the Concordat carefully, and have always given my post-docs ample time to do their own publications - more than I get, actually!

So it is possible to be a research high-ranker and try to facilitate ECR careers. And by pulling in grant money, when my younger colleagues are not in a position to do so, I'm protecting their rights to sabbaticals etc - at my university (Russell Group blah blah blah) these things all count for the team, as much as the individual.

My current post-doc would be working in a non-academic job if they weren't on a 3 year postdoc with my project, and they are given time for getting their first book out, as well as carefully chosen teaching to plug perceived 'gaps' in their CV. My aim is that they resign halfway through the project because they've got a "proper" job.

My buy out (such as it is) gets rolled into departmental funding of 2 0.5 Teaching Fellows, again giving recent postdocs experience and some money for 12 months.

In the current climate, we do what we can ... It's not good or enough, but it's better than nothing - without my grant, 3 people would not have academic employment. I still teach - indeed, I'm the senior professor but teach 1st year small group work ... I don't think the kids realise that this is actually quite unusual.

Part of the problem is that we train PhD students in all sorts of professional stuff based on the assumption that they're going into lectureships as "in the old days" (a phrase I've heard thrown about by the radical kindness lot).

There never was a "Golden Age' - I got my first job in the late 80s (a 5 year Teaching Fellow 0.5fte contract while I did my PhD) and there was precarity then. I was bloody lucky to get my first permanent job - it was because of a unique combination of my research interests & extra-curricular activities. Of the group of about 10 I did my doctorate with (largest most prestigious department for my discipline in the country) only about 3 of us remained working in academia.

The good old days of university expansions in the late 60s & 70s employed pretty much exclusively men, and only 15% of people went to university in the first place. So - do we want to go back to that?

The issue is larger than individual senior academics can solve, and frankly, going on strike about precarity is a pretty useless and uncreative way to try to force change.

I've been pretty disgusted by the pile on to Mary Beard, as well. If I didn't think I'd add to her workload, I"d email to send her good wishes.

I do think that fixed-term teaching fellowships wouldn't be that bad if they could work as a gateway to a teaching-only career up to professorial level. That might actually suit some academics that prefer teaching (& the scholarship of it) over research. In practice, these are extremely rare and are often the product of circumstances rather than a viable opportunity for an ECR. As things stand now, ECRs who go into teaching fellowships will need to keep developing their research on the side.

And I agree @Dolorabelle that strikes seem useless and uncreative in our context - I remember when we had the marking boycott and the external examiner mass resignation, which seemed to put more pressure on unis (at the same time it's not something all UCU members can take part in, as not everyone marks or external examines). But now it seems that striking is the default position. I do actually think that working to contract (if everyone really stuck to it and found ways to make it visible) could be more effective than striking straight away.

@Dolorabelle YES! The rhetoric around the 'good old days' irritates me too, especially the invisibility of women's non-academic labour to support these kind of (assumed) patterns. It's all tweed jackets, elbow patches, pipes, philosophising with oodles of time for research and really deep relationships with students (perhaps over a pint). This is an incredibly masculine approach.

Yet a female academic, preaching "radical kindness" actually tweeted that she was waiting for "auld" academics to die so she could get a job.

Charitably, this might be a way of making her point, through exaggeration (or bathos), about the paucity of lectureships.

But less charitably, it was an appalling thing to say, and far worse than Mary Beard's rather desperate tweet.

Dolorabelle thank you and I didn’t mean to imply that it’s all the fault of senior profs. Yes, your grants create jobs. I think I was more thinking of some academics who get a term’s buyout by hourly paid people or those non-grant holders who claim their research is so important that they shouldn’t have to do much teaching or admin, leaving it to their mainly female colleagues to pick up. I was also pointing out the hypocrisy of some people on the picket line who decry precarity but don’t seem to realise that their own conditions would be very different if it didn’t exist.

The thing is, academia functions on precarity and that’s endemic at all levels. You’re right that striking is largely pointless in this line of work. It achieves little and there are more effective means. The digital picket in particular achieves almost nothing (apart from not making some people feel bad), yet people are spending their days trawling their timelines for ‘dissenters’.

And even people with what I would call very privileged fixed term jobs (eg a Leverhulme with three years of no teaching and funding for research activity- seriously, I would give my right arm for that) are labelling themselves as victims of precarity, unable to function because of the hostility of it all. So no doubt they would argue that your job-creation isn’t sufficient. But the alternative is of course no job. Everyone who is precarious cannot become permanent. It wouldn’t work.

I agree re Mary Beard. I thought the tweet was a little inappropriate but seemingly well-intended but the pile-on has been horrible. They seem to take such delight at putting the boot into people they deem ‘problematic’. There’s so much hate there (making the radical kindness thing especially ironic). They behave the same way towards anyone with GC views and casually dismiss anyone who’s older because ‘things were so easy back then bla bla bla’. I’m the same age as these people actually but I cringe at how they act and wish they had more respect for others.

On the topic of the digital picket line I've just seen someone criticizing and threatening to unfollow university services (i.e. those where most staff aren't UCU but rather Unison, Unite, etc.) for not abstaining from tweeting during the strike. I'd be interested to know if these same types would enforce a digital picket line with no research tweets if administrative assistants or technicians went on strike... I don't think so. But it seems this is an acceptable way to establish your superiority as an academic over other types of workers at a university, despite all the talk that "we're in it together".

I think I was more thinking of some academics who get a term’s buyout by hourly paid people or those non-grant holders who claim their research is so important that they shouldn’t have to do much teaching or admin, leaving it to their mainly female colleagues to pick up

Oh those ones. I'm lucky - I haven't encountered one of them for a while. We have a workload model that my HoD is using increasingly stringently. That sort of behaviour gets short schrift, thank goodness. Female HoD, go figure

aridapricot of course they wouldn’t act in solidarity if it was support staff striking or even post-92. One of them was calling out someone who had launched their book. Apparently this was a kick in the teeth to the strikers. The author was at a non-striking university. Non-striking means you do not strike. Business as usual. You cannot decide not to do your own unofficial strike or ASOS because some entitled idiots from other universities would prefer you did that.

Sorry that should say you cannot decide to do

Because they suffer so much when they see someone else posting about their research... a dear colleague of mine based abroad announced on Twitter that they'd been awarded an article prize in their country & I commented on this to congratulate them (I mentored them informally while they struggled to establish their research profile, so this was great news to hear) , I hope the picket police isn't coming after me now!!

@Dolorabelle
Ditto, I also didn't mean to imply its the fault of senior staff. I do, though, think a lot of particularly male senior staff don't realise just how much of their seniority/status has come off the back of precarious research staff. Small gestures like including postdocs as co-authors (rather than just acknowledgements), offering postdocs appropriate teaching opportunities, or offering them useful conference attendance would make all the difference but I've seen senior men (and a few women but mainly men) act terribly and reinforce the precarity of their research staff by not helping them to build their own research profile. The natural and physical sciences is, though, much worse for this than the social sciences.
Again, I think institutions could do more here. Perhaps a rule of no postdoc applications of less than two years. I don't know, just suggestions.

The issue too is that teaching fellowships are so often confirmed year-to-year. For the last 10 years, we've had at least 2 TFs in my Department but never a contract longer than a year. It's shit for those staff and completely avoidable.... because there's always at least three people on research leave across the year, we know we'll always need at least one TF every single year. A permanent teaching-only job should be created for this purpose.

I have mixed feelings about MB. I think her claim to 100 hours was quite exaggerated to be honest and without reflection that a lot of her work includes some really enjoyable stuff (work nonetheless of course) like making BBC documentaries. However, the pile on was awful and absolutely not 'radical kindness'

oops sorry - I wasn't taking offence - just explaining! I agree with you all - I've seen some pretty bad behaviour from some colleagues in my years on the chain gang. Not always from senior men (the colleague who could not lower herself to make her work accessible to other scholars so has never had her book published despite 3 proposals to 3 different publishers; or the colleague whose denial about her chronic illness means several of us had to cover half her job for several years).

I think we all do stuff for such a mix of reasons and motivations. I will putter for hours reading & in the archive - I don't notice a 12 hour day doing that ...

So according to twitter, we are ‘so close to getting it’ but apparently we don’t get it yet because we’re criticising the teach-outs. So this post is addressed to our captive audience.

Look, I totally understand that teach-outs provide often better learning than the taught modules do. The point is that the strike is meant to cause disruption to the extent that so much pressure is put on the employer that they agree to the workers’ demands. If you think that this happens through providing conference-style papers on subjects nothing to do with the strike and with bloody slides and published papers, fair enough. But don’t be mystified when that doesn’t pressurise the employer into settling because the students are delighted at their substituted learning.

Few of us can continue this action for much longer. As you can see on here, I strongly disagree with the UCU tactics, yet I have been on strike for 4 of 5 days this week because I am a union member. I will probably strike for 2 days next week. I will have lost hundreds in salary and I will not claim from the fund because that is for precarious workers. So I am not a scab or whatever insult you want to level at me. What you don’t seem to grasp is that this is a serious situation. The UCU has demanded 8 strike days. There seems to be virtually fuck all movement in terms of negotiations - no offer yet and people applauding some letter demanding the chairman step down as if that chairman had in fact stepped down. How much more will you expect your members to give if you have no success now? How much more salary will we lose due to rushing prematurely into strike action when ASOS initially could have been more effective? Will it be another 8 day block in the new year? Longer than that? Feel free to sneer at people who believe in academic freedom and second-wave feminism. I am sure it will make you feel good. However, I wish you and the union would turn your mind to the very serious issue of how this is being handled and perhaps what compromises can be made and what alternative action can be taken to try to end the strike as soon as possible. Personally, I don’t think presenting on your REF case study and/or linking your publications and calling it a teach-out is the way to go. But maybe it’s just me.

Apologies to everyone else for that. Just sick of sneering on twitter as if that moves us any further forward.

Bravo Pota2, you’re absolutely right. And in fact not all the students are happy with the teach outs. I’ve had a self-funded student come to me in tears as she’s lost the last two lectures of term, which would have covered material essential to her dissertation. Her dissertation outline has only had the most cursory feedback, so she’s on her own, trying to prepare for next term, seeing her chances of a distinction disappear. And, to colleagues crowing about students marching with them. How many others are too scared to complain about their loss of opportunity?

Thanks impostersyndrome. Hopefully these people will now stop taking their guidance from those who aren’t even on the picket but are militantly enforcing a meaningless digital picket and will actually do something meaningful so that progress can be made in the dispute and precarious workers can avoid another round of strikes that they absolutely cannot afford.

To anyone confused, this thread is what I am referring to:
twitter.com/thegracek/status/1200533124456861697?s=21. There are others too.

Despite their attempts to twist it, I think some of them realise we do have a point. For avoidance of doubt, I am 100% on the side of precarious workers, including those on fixed term contracts BUT I question whether this strike action will be effective because so many in academia progress due to their reliance on precarious labour. This includes the huge over-recruitment of PhD students which is far higher than the number of permanent jobs. I do not in any way think precarity is good but I think precarious workers are being used as pawns in this action without serious thought being given to challenging the structures (eg grants and other funding). ASOS initially would have been far more effective to tackle some of this and wouldn’t have exhausted people’s financial and emotional resources from the word go. I’d love to be proved wrong with evidence of progress in negotiations (and I suggest it might be better for the union leaders to be solely focused on negotiations rather than being visible on the picket lines).

Rolling together the conditions with the pensions in this strike was also misguided because, despite words to the contrary, many on the pickets are just there for the pensions and precarity is a side-issue. Many of them benefit from the existence of precarity. The letter from UCU of 29 November set out concrete demands regarding the pension (albeit not necessarily realistic ones that will help promote settlement) but nothing about tackling precarity. Dealing with them both in one go, negotiating with different people, does not seem like a good strategy. And if the pension issue is sorted, how many people will continue action to support precarious workers? My view from the outset has always been that precarity should be the number one issue, not pensions (not at this time anyway).

I would urge our twitter-fans who are precarious workers to think carefully about how you are being exploited in this dispute rather than sneer about how evil we are on social media. The truth is that many who claim to stand with you now will drop the solidarity as soon as their own financial demands are met.

I hope to hear some good news about progress in negotiations next week and I do hope I am proved wrong.

Anyone saw Jo Grady's post in that thread? The thing is, we're also union members, Jo. We pay our membership fees (that presumably go towards paying your salary, which is certainly more than double mine and probably higher than a lot of people's here on this thread), we've been on strike and some of us even there on picket lines, even if we disagree with the tactics, out of a sense of discipline and solidarity. Would it be too much to ask that you show some respect?

Well said, aridapricot

@Pota2

@aridapricot

@impostersyndrome

Totally agree with you all

Jo Grady surrounds herself with fans. Those fans are vocal, especially on Twitter, so the questioning voices get drowned out and the questions we raise don't particularly get a fair hearing.

I absolutely applaud Jo Grady for travelling the country and joining colleagues on pickets. It's good to see her visibly supporting the strike unlike what we had with Sally Hunt. But I still haven't seen confirmation that she'll be forgoing 8 days pay like the rest of us and donating that to the strike fund? Perhaps I just missed her tweet confirming that....

Given how much they say that they hate the people (mostly women) and the politics (mostly gender critical), these people from Twitter spend a lot of time on MN

twitter.com/mikeotsuka/status/1200705366734061568?s=21

The latest. If this motion is passed, it will be a disaster in terms of negotiations. I don’t get what’s wrong with the UCU left. It’s as if they WANT to sabotage things because they will surely realise that the employer will never agree to a ‘no detriment forever’ stipulation. Also, why are things like this never put to the members to vote on? Why are such key decisions made by a small number of very extreme people? Doesn’t seem very democratic to me.

I will not be going on strike again, the universities have learned to deal with any disruption and the students are pretty much glad of the break at this point in the term, just before essay end of term deadlines. Our uni extended them all anyway, so they haven't lost much in a traditional social science subject where they are doing most of the reading themselves- and they have a week or two of term afterwards to attend office hours/catch up anything missed. It isn't an effective negotiating tool.

This seems a hopelessly ineffective time of the year to go on strike. Our students are now on revision week. All we are doing is saving the university money.

Mike Otsuka seems to me a sensible commentator. I am afraid I am struggling with why the pension proposals are not suitable, given that employers are also upping their contribution and our working environment and conditions need to be economically sustainable for everyone’s benefit.

I feel like I am completely missing the point of this strike because I am more scared that the demands placed on institutions by UCU re pensions will make universities financially unviable and people will lose their jobs. Nobody has yet explained that this is not a real concern.