UNIVERSITY staff are on strike for three days because the employers’ negotiators are stonewalling the union.
Far too many university bosses think they are the lords of creation.
Bunkered behind runaway remuneration packages and retirement pensions that would make Croesus cringe with embarrassment they refuse to meet the University and Colleges Union without preconditions.
Background to the dispute is, as always, pay. The employers won’t budge on a below-inflation pay offer that means staff have survived a real-terms pay cut of 20 per cent over the last decade and more.
But this overworked and undervalued group of workers are as angry at their worsening working conditions.
Far from the dreaming ivory towers of myth most higher education institutions are highly stratified workplaces where a very large body of insecure workers — by definition specialists in their chosen areas of expertise — labour under temporary contracts and are unable to deliver their contracted hours without many more hours of unpaid preparation and marking time.
Driving their sense of betrayal is the latest scheme by the employers to devalue their pensions. The pension scheme’s own trustees say that a typical member would see a 36 per cent pension cut.
The strike wave is all the more impressive because many workplace UCU branches managed to overcome the strike ballot hurdles that Britain's restrictive anti-union laws throw up to prevent the exercise of our basic human right to withdraw our labour. Such is the sense of outrage that even the places where the strike ballot threshold was not met are balloting again.
The pension dispute will be over if the university employers revoke the pensions cut while the union wants an across the board pay increase of £2,500 and progress on workloads, pay inequalities and job security.
Universities are in the business of producing knowledge and for university bosses and Tory ministers alike the business aspect is paramount.
Students provide a revenue stream and are cultivated as such, with their still malleable minds conditioned to see universities as service providers, themselves as consumers and their relationship with university staff as transactional. All the more remarkable then that three quarters of students see the strike as justified.
It was Adam Smith who wrote of “new layers of specialists who are men of speculation and who made important contributions to the production of economically useful knowledge.”
The production of knowledge, research and the cultivation of students’ minds is central to modern life. As Karl Marx noted as far back as 1858: “Knowledge has become a direct force of production.”
The battles being fought out in education — from centres of higher education to the even more important early years settings — are of great importance to the labour movement as a whole. To give support to the UCU action is to act in the interests of society as a whole and for a better future for every new generation.
When UCU leader Dr Jo Grady told university bosses that they should not underestimate the determination of her members to change the sector for the better she gave voice to a demand that reflects our common interest.
One factor shaping higher education is its increasing subordination to capital and the resistance that this naturally engenders.
Marx wrote that the “forces of production and social relations — two different sides of the development of the social individual — appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high…”
Herein lies the opportunity education provides for a working class that would constitute itself as the ruling class.
