Britain
Unrelenting Fight Against Assaults on Education, Students, Faculty and Staff
Picket line at University
of Manchester, September 27, 2023.
Academic Year Begins with More University Strikes
In their latest round of action over pay and working conditions so as to safeguard the future of higher education, university staff across Britain went on strike for five consecutive days from September 25 to 29.[1]
The dispute centres on low pay and bad working conditions which are at the heart of the anti-social offensive whose aim is to restructure the state in favour of narrow private interests. The University and College Union (UCU) pointed out that the employer body, the Universities and Colleges Employers' Association (UCEA), has imposed a pay increase for 2023/24 worth just five per cent for most UCU members, even though they overwhelmingly voted to reject it. UCU is also demanding action on gig-economy employment practices and high workloads.
According to research by the union, the higher education sector made more money than ever last year, yet the claim of employees fell to a record low.
Nationwide strike ballots at 143 universities also began on September 19, following the rejection of the five per cent offer. This is the third such ballot this year. As the union explains, a successful ballot will renew the strike mandate into 2024.[2]
The union also points out that lecturers' actions have forced employers to negotiate over workloads and job security for the first time. Meanwhile, the UCU has ended its marking and assessment boycott, which had been ongoing since April 20.
Covering all marking and assessment at 145 universities, the boycott was met by an up to 100 per cent decrease in pay for participating staff at a number of institutions. This disproportionate, punitive, and probably illegal response by management was an aggressive tactic aimed at intimidating workers into backing down.[3] University of Sheffield staff went on strike for ten days over this pay issue following the boycott.
UCU regional official Julie Kelley said: "The brutal pay docking regime Sheffield's management is enforcing means a staff member with a single unmarked essay could lose a month's wages. Attacking staff like this only adds fuel to the fire and will do nothing to bring this dispute to an end. Sheffield needs to stop the pay docking and call on UCEA to re-enter negotiations."[4]
Oxford Brookes picket
line September 25, 2023, first day of five-day strike
actions.
University of Brighton Cuts Staff Significantly
The University of Brighton announced in May its plans to cut over a hundred staff members, resulting in a significant reduction in lecturers across various subjects, citing "cost savings" of £17.9m, despite having spent more than £50m on building projects in the past two years. Local UCU members voted to take industrial action, with the university's higher education committee subsequently voting for the university to be greylisted, which is the union's ultimate sanction.
The UCU asked its members, other trade unions, labour movement
organizations and the international academic community to
support its
members at Brighton by not applying for advertised jobs, not
speaking
at or organizing conferences outside of contract, not accepting
new
positions as visiting
professors or researchers, not accepting invitations to write
for
academic journals, not accepting new contracts as external
examiners
for taught courses, and refusing to collaborate on new research
projects outside of contract.[5]
Goverment "Crackdown on Poor Quality University Courses"
An egregious "crackdown on poor quality university courses" was unleashed by British Prime Minister Rushi Sunak on July 17 which typifies this government's assault on academic standards, on academic staff and students. At the University of Chichester it is also an assault on students and professors of African and Caribbean history which helps students to think for themselves on the basis of their own thought material, not through the lens of British imperialism.
|
Professor
Hakim Adi speaking on history of Africa and African
diaspora The University of Chichester suspended recruitment for the masters by research (MRes) course on African History and the Diaspora and made its program leader Professor Hakim Adi redundant. Professor Adi is a world-leading expert in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora and the first person of African descent to become Professor of History in the UK. It is a thinly veiled racist attack aimed at disempowering students of African and Caribbean heritage, many of them mature students, who come forward to train as historians.
The University also dismissed a colleague of Professor Adi, Dr. Dion Georgiu. A vigorous campaign has been launched by students and colleagues and by wide sections of concerned people, in the midst of disinformation and high-handedness from the University.[6]
A letter to the press from ten MRes graduates points out: "As MRes graduates, spreading this disinformation does a disservice to our discipline, to the culmination of our hard work and the work of Professor Hakim Adi. It also jeopardizes our ongoing challenge, to uphold the course and the rights of the students and Professor Hakim Adi to fair treatment." What the University of Chichester is seeking to accomplish amounts to an attack on all academia, Professor Adi emphasized in an online press conference.
These attacks are coming in the
context of the government's
socalled "crackdown on poor quality university courses." The Financial
Times
reported:
"Universities in England offering courses with poor employment
prospects and high student dropout rates will be subjected to
stricter
regulatory controls under plans to be unveiled ... by Prime
Minister
Rishi Sunak. The government will order the Office for Students,
the
higher education regulator in England, to do more to limit the
number
of students that universities can recruit on to certain courses.
The
prime minister and
education secretary Gillian will promise a crackdown on 'rip-off
degree
courses' which leave graduates with inadequate pay and high
debts."[7]
According to the government's logic, the point of degree courses is to fit the graduates with the ability to earn large salaries and pay off the debt incurred while at university. The irony of this can be seen in the present struggles, where "inadequate pay and high debts" is the norm for higher education workers, not to mention the graduates.
The struggle of higher education workers, both academic and support staff, is aimed at recognizing and realizing the value they add to the economy. They produce highly skilled graduates and postgraduates, contribute to society's cultural level, and contribute to scientific and technological advances. It is a fight for the future of higher education. Education is a right that should serve the people, and academics and workers are fighting for their rights and conditions.
By holding the line against imposition and intimidation, higher education workers have forced negotiations on certain key issues. Tactics, such as attempting to block workers from organizing in self-defence, themselves reveal that it is an issue of control over the direction society is headed. Through their stand, university workers are contributing to a new outlook where people can think and act in their own name, allowing them to take control over matters that affect their lives and the general interests of society.
Notes
1. "Start of university term to be hit with five days of UK-wide strikes," UCU, 6 September 2023
2. "Date set for university strike ballot," UCU, 11 September 2023
3. "University Staff to Strike against Arbitrary Full Pay Docking," Workers' Weekly, June 10, 2023
4. "Ten days of strikes set to hit the University of Sheffield over pay docking row," UCU, 15 September 2023
5. "Start of university term to be hit with five days of UK-wide strikes," UCU, 6 September 2023
6. For full details of the closure of the course, the sacking of Professor Adi, and the campaign to save the MRes in the History of Africa and the African Diaspora, and Professor Hakim Adi's post at the University of Chichester, see the History Matters website.
7. "Rishi Sunak announces crackdown on 'poor quality' university courses", Financial Times, 17 July 2023
(Workers' Weekly. Photos: UCU Rising and WW)
This article was published in
Number 57
- October
4, 2023
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/WF2023/Articles/WO10573.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca