Trade Unions are good, actually
As the UCU pauses strike action for negotiations, Sorcha Kahn argues for the continued importance of trade unions and solidarity in our society.
Astrid Broden
Keir Starmer, from a Twitter video, exhorts the viewer to ‘join a union’ - ironic from a man who banned his frontbenchers from joining picket lines. Increasingly, it seems like unions are valued in theory, but reviled when they act as they are meant to, namely, when they take action to secure fair working conditions for their members. “Britain is a nation of workers!” “The unions are the lifeblood of the left!”, we hear, but God-forbid they attempt to exercise any real power or make any real change. At that point the tides of public opinion and a coordinated media campaign have, in recent years, been all too quick to turn against them.
One major issue here, or the real feat of rhetoric, is the extent to which governments and executives since the 1980s have shifted the anger at disruption caused by industrial action away from themselves, and onto workers. The party at fault has become not the government that undermines wages, not the CEO, or vice-chancellor, with huge salaries, but the worker demanding they are compensated fairly for their labour. My inclination here was to highlight that often striking workers are demanding something as simple as a liveable wage, or an end to gendered or racialised pay disparities, but that’s not even the point. Workers have the right to demand more than just a living wage – they have the right to demand a wage which supports a real, rounded life. And everyone else has the responsibility to support them in this.
After six days of strikes, the UCU has paused industrial action in order to engage in negotiations. This will be a relief to many people; for UCU members it hopefully indicates that the universities are finally willing to consider their entirely legitimate demands. For university students, it offers a return to normal teaching after years of unprecedented levels of disruption. It has been rare for a term to go by where all teaching proceeds as it should, and no one would deny that this is far from ideal. However, what is also far from ideal is average cuts to pensions of thirty-five percent, real terms pay cuts of twenty-five per cent since 2009, increasing casualisation of work, and race and gender pay gaps. This moment of negotiation indicates that change is possible, but it requires us to be stubborn. The amount of industrial action proposed for this term was daunting, but it was also obviously daunting to those who run these institutions.
For a period of time last year, I was the co-Chair of the Cambridge University Labour Club, and in Michaelmas much of the discussion within the club generally was what CULC’s position should be on the strikes. Let me say firstly that I was shocked this was even something members of a Labour club were debating; to me, and many other members, it felt self-evident that we should throw our support behind workers, and I am happy to see this happening currently. Something that was raised was that, at the time, the strikes didn’t seem to be working, and when I pointed out that the miners’ strikes didn’t exactly work either, but we all thought they were a ‘good thing’, the rebuttal went along the lines of ‘but these aren’t miners, they’re academics.’ This article is not the place to get into a debate about what ‘class’ in modern Britain looks like, and I’m not trying to argue that we should view university lecturers as ‘working-class.’ What I am trying to say is that they are workers, and just because their work isn’t manual doesn’t mean that we should tolerate their exploitation. The fact that working conditions ‘could be worse’ does not undermine calls that they should be better.
And they really should be better. To expect quality education from people being overworked and underpaid is unfair; yet our lecturers and supervisors so often still provide just that. They care about our education, and any contestation that industrial action is not entirely necessary is undermined by how quickly it has been paused to negotiate when the opportunity is presented on reasonable terms. So we owe it to them to care about the conditions under which they work - not just because we are in direct contact with these people, but because as people we should care about each other. This isn’t, in my opinion, a radical take. And in our society, caring about each other, when wages for ordinary people are stagnating and living costs are sky-rocketing, means acting in solidarity with those workers who are demanding fair conditions. We have to have each other’s backs.
As a student, it is quite clearly stressful to miss teaching and to feel like your future is in jeopardy. But the reality of the harm we experience as a student in relation to the disruption from these strikes is minimal in contrast to the degradation of the working conditions of University staff. And the reality is, if we don’t stand against the degradation of pay and working conditions now, our futures will also look bleak. If you know you’re going to be making hundreds of thousands of pounds in three years’ time at a Central London investment bank– good for you! But you have to live in this country. You are a member of this community. That means that how other people live not only should matter to you, but will impact you. So, support the UCU, and hope that these negotiations work, but recognise that if there is a return to industrial action it is necessary. Every time a worker strikes, they are not only demanding better for themselves, but making demands for a better and fairer future for everyone.