There are more strikes by lecturer's unions in the UK today, over changes to pay and conditions (today is about pension rights for a particular scheme, but this is part of a series of strikes on various issues. In the UK, academics are unionised, and pay and conditions are worked out nationally rather than regionally or locally - there is a national pay scale (for those below full chair level - they, like senior management, are exempt from such restrictions), a national pension scheme and general agreements on rights and conditions of work. The Union also does stuff like supporting members through disciplinary proceedures, providing legal advice and professional indemnity insurance, and acting as a single point of contact for the (again national) employers organisation for collective discussions and policy making. It's not QUITE that simple, but I won't go into details that aren't relevant for this post.
I do believe in Unions, I belong to my Union, and I also believe in the democratic process, so that when the Union votes to take a particular action I will conform to that decision even if I voted against it - after all, if I ever want the Union to stand up for me, I don't want them saying "oh, don't feel like it today" so I can't behave the same way. The current issue is a problematic one, where the overiding impression given to a lay person reading the figures and arguments is that the employers are taking advantage of the current economic uncertainty to bring in changes to a pension scheme which will have a negative impact on some current and all future members of that scheme, but which aren't YET needed, although they are needed now by other schemes and may well be needed in the future for the university schemes. And the employers appear to be refusing to negotiate, so I understand that the union felt driven to ballot for action, and to take action.
All that said, though, I wonder what the POINT of a on-day strike is? Surely the point of a strike should be to affect the employers and to draw the attention of a wider society to the value of the strikee's role and the intransigence of the employer. This assumes that the strikers take actions that affect the employer. Not teaching a few classes - especially since most universities then go to great lengths to either reschedule the classes or make sure that the missed material is not covered by assessments and therefore that students' learning is unaffected - seems sort of futile. The problem is that action that actually prevents the employers from doing their business of awarding degrees or meeting their statutory requirements, such as refusing to grade or withholding marks, is seen as damaging to students. This is then used to demonstrate that academics don't care about students, or leads to the students (those who buy in to the 'customer' model at least) getting mad at the academics. And many other actions, such as not taking part in assessments like the Research Excellence Framework, lead to negative effects on individuals rather than institutions. This is further complicated by some inconvenient stereotypes - that academics only work in the classroom for 10-12 hours a week and have long, long holidays, that students are idle layabouts who watch daytime TV, binge-drink, enjoy themselves immorally and have an easy ride through 'Mickie Mouse' modern degree courses and generally the whole sector is cushy, lazy and, those worst of all modern accusations, unbusinesslike and inefficient. So striking tends to annoy those who might support us rather than help our cause.
So, as academics, what power DO we have? As a collective body, what action could we take once good faith negotiations have failed which would actually have an effect on the 'management'?
Can I hold back the overhead on my grants? Probably not.
ReplyDeleteUnions are moving forward at most US colleges, I need to study more on how this has worked in the UK. My initial reaction is that I do not see how a union can help my specific concerns. I wouldn't mind see faculty comm's out of the loop on pay raises, too much a popularity contest for me. Does handing this over to the Dean, with a union, sound better?
I tend to think that writing about the problems of the modern university, with specific examples drawn from one's own experience, and with one's actual name and affiliation attached, would be a useful form of protest, since universities tend to care a lot about their reputations. However, this approach is dangerous if one doesn't have tenure, and since one of the major problems of the modern university is the declining percentage of tenure-track jobs. . .
ReplyDeleteI think the union is pretty much the only protection you've got left. And the main weapon a union has is the threat of a strike. If you don't occasionally actually do it, administration stops believing you ever will, and the threat doesn't work anymore.
ReplyDeleteSo, yes, I think it does help, as much as anything can, and more than anything else will at the moment.
Don't worry about upsetting your potential allies. The people who think that university professors work 12 hour weeks, have lengthy holidays, and spend all our time drinking and having sex with our students weren't allies in the first place.