24 Questions about Universities on Strike

Members of the Universities and Colleges Union holding placards protesting about pay and pension cuts, gender, disability and race pay gaps, and increased casualization.

This blog started as an email to the PhD students I’m responsible for. I wanted to let them know that union members will be taking industrial action from next week and explain the background and how they might be affected. I quickly realised that the email was getting too long and might be considered partial, so I joked on Twitter that it had turned into an essay about Marx’s theory of surplus value and the crisis in UK universities, and then lots of people said they wanted to read it, and here we are… (thank you, anna, for rescuing it with the Q&A format xx).

Question 1: What’s going on?

Universities - like lots of other sectors in the UK at the moment - are in an industrial dispute. These are called by trade unions, when they decide that other negotiating tactics are getting them nowhere.

Question 2: What’s a trade union?

Trade unions are organisations established to represent the interests of workers to their employers. That definition does, however, erase other forms of unions that are not ‘representative’ in this way, but simply associations of workers. There is, for example, a persuasive critique of the historical development of representative unions and its political consequences in this short book by the Solidarity Federation. It argues that the leadership of a hierarchically organised representative union is structurally committed to making deals with management, and is therefore always vulnerable to becoming just another arm of capital (stay with me - there’s more on this below). However, even those of us who would want to advocate for a broadly anarcho-syndicalist approach to building worker power must accept that the representative union is currently the only game in town in the UK, and most of the global north (again, I’ll come back to this).

Question 3: Who represents university workers?

Most university workers in the UK who are members of a union are members of the UCU (some are members of Unison, who represent workers across the public sector). The UCU have called the dispute.

Question 4: What do you mean ‘called’?

Well actually they called a strike ballot. This is a bit complicated because of legislation that has been introduced gradually since the time of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in the 1980s. The 1984 Trade Union Act mandated secret pre-strike ballots so that unions could not initiate a dispute without the majority support of their membership. These ballots were then made fully postal in 1993 (with the effect of reducing turnout), and in 2016 the Trade Union Act enforced a new threshold: 50% of relevant members of a union had to vote in the ballot for its result to be valid. In the recent UCU ballot 57.71% of members voted, with 81.14% in favour of action and 18.86% against.

Question 4: So who’s the dispute with?

The dispute is with the employers (in effect, the senior managers of universities, who are responsible for determining pay and working conditions). They are represented, in turn, by UCEA (the Universities and Colleges Employers’ Association).

Question 5: Can’t we all just get along?

No.

Question 6: Why not?

Capitalism.

Question 7: Can you elaborate?

Well, Marx teaches us that, under capitalist conditions, the interests of workers and their employers are always antagonistic.

Question 8: What does he mean by that?

He means that the things that workers want are directly opposed to the things their employers want. Basically: workers want to be paid as much as possible for their labour, and capitalists want to pay as little as they can.

Question 9: Why?

Because labour is the crucial source of what Marx calls ‘surplus value’, which is the value that is added to a commodity in the process of its production. If you are making bread, you need certain commodities (flour, water, yeast, salt), as well as means of production (equipment, electricity), and you need a final commodity, which is unlike the others: ‘labour-power’. Only labour-power (the commodified form of the harnessed, purposive energy of workers) can both conserve the value of the commodities that form part of the production process and create new value by combining and transforming them, with the help of the means of production.

Question 10: I thought this was about universities?

Ok, think of a seminar. You can provide books, chairs, paper and pens, laptops, a warm room with good lighting, but it’s a tutor and students combining these things to construct an event in which certain ideas are discussed that produces a seminar. Thus, it is labour-power that creates surplus value: the value added to the value of all of the things involved in the making of a seminar when they become a seminar.

Question 11: What’s so important about surplus value?

Surplus value is crucial because it is the basis of profit, upon which capitalists depend. Capitalists require profit because capital is a process of accumulating more and more value by reinvesting profit into production to produce more value, and thus more profit. Without the continual generation of surplus value, there is no capital accumulation, and capital accumulation is the material basis of capitalism as a social order.

Surplus value is relatively easy to generate from workers because of the imbalance of power in a capitalist system. Whereas workers must sell their labour-power to survive, capitalists are not similarly compelled to keep buying it. Capitalists therefore seek to improve their workers’ output, to extend the time spent working, and to increase the intensity of work as much as possible, so as to ensure that there is the biggest possible difference between the price of labour and the amount of value created by it.

Question 12: Have I read all this just to discover the revelatory information that bosses exploit their workers? I thought this was about the UCU Strike.

OK one more thing from Marx and then back to universities, I promise.

Marx notes (and somewhat skips over) in Capital the point that the price of labour contains ‘a historical and moral element’. He means by this that the price of labour, which should represent the cost to the labourer of reproducing their power (housing, heating, food, transport, childcare, leisure, and so on), fluctuates according to historical conditions and moral beliefs. Maybe workers don’t need such nice houses? Maybe they could shop more cheaply? Cycle to work? Get their kids’ grandparents to look after them? Put on another jumper in the evening? Put foil behind their radiators? (No, it doesn’t work.)

Edwina Currie suggests putting foil behind your radiator on Good Morning Britain.

These are all examples of the ‘historical and moral element’ in the price of labour that can allow it to be reduced and surplus value to increase.

Marx’s argument explains a lot about UCEA’s response to UCU’s announcement of industrial action. Raj Jethwa, their Chief Executive, said that ‘there will be disappointment [MORAL] across the sector at UCU’s decision to call three days of strike action later this month’. He went on to add that ‘any threats of industrial action will do nothing to support students [MORAL – more on this later], staff or the many HE institutions working hard [MORAL] to avoid redundancies or maintain staffing levels [MORAL – morality is usually a veiled threat], having delivered the August pay uplift [HISTORICAL]’.

The historical element at stake here is the current cost of living crisis: ‘All institutions face significant cost increases, with most enduring falling income in real terms [HISTORICAL]. HE institutions want to do more for their valuable staff [MORAL], but any increase in pay puts jobs at risk [MOOOOORAAAAAAAL]’.

This is play-book stuff. Manipulate common-sense understandings of 1) the moral stakes of industrial action (it disrupts students’ learning, it puts jobs at risk), and 2) our historical situation (we’ve just given you a generous pay award and we’re in an inflationary crisis that is driving up our costs at a time when we cannot increase our income! Be realistic!’)

Question 14: Is he right, though? Should the union be realistic?

Let’s put morality to one side. It is true that universities have just offered a pay uplift of 3%, with 9% going to staff on the lowest pay (the fact that the total increase on the wage-bill is 3.18% tells you how much of a difference that headline-grabbing 9% figure actually makes). We’ll come back to the question of how (historically) significant this ‘pay uplift’ is.

It is also true that universities are currently facing a crisis of income. When the coalition government raised student fees in 2012, they did so to a level that was widely analysed to be below the cost of delivering undergraduate degrees, and they also capped them. This was a bit of a medium-term issue when inflation was running at historically low rates, but has became a serious, short-term issue with inflation rocketing to 11.1% (CPI) or 19.9% (RPI).

It’s also been exacerbated by the impact of Brexit on student numbers – particularly for taught postgraduate programmes, where fees are not capped. This is what UCEA mean by ‘falling income in real terms’. Universities get most of their money from student fees, and they’re being squeezed. Without question, this is a problem.

Question 15: So universities really don’t have any money?

No. Actually, they are seeing record levels of income (£41.1 biliion in the 20/21 financial year), with £3.4 billion more in the bank than they had a year earlier. It’s not universities who don’t have any money, it’s their workers. Pay in the sector has dropped by 25% in real terms since 2009.

Question 16: What’s happened since then?

Marketisation. When the coalition raised student fees, that was not really what they were doing. The real structural change was that universities were being marketized. Their income was redirected (via student loans) to students, who were thereby positioned as customers in a market, and – in what was probably the the most significant long-term change – that market was substantially deregulated by the removal of caps on the numbers of students that universities could recruit. The oversight of universities was likewise converted into a process of commercial regulation. Metrics of success were produced through feedback systems including the National Student Survey, and statistical exercises such as measuring rates of graduate employment. Many of us pointed out the basis of such metrics in dodgy assumptions (guess what? posh students have good employment outcomes!) and the disastrous consequences of this wholesale marketisation of the sector. We urged caution, we suggested acting in solidarity with other universities, we even broached the possibility of a refusal to participate in the new regime.

Question 17: Did they listen?

They did not.

Question 18: What did they do?

They started acting like capitalist enterprises let off the leash. If more students could be recruited to courses, they were. Sometimes without staff to teach them until the very last minute. Traditionally privileged universities kept their offers to A-Level students high because it sent out a clear message about their prestige, but when the results came out they started quietly dropping the requirements and undercutting other institutions. Because it’s difficult to commodify the experience of challenging, enriching, life-altering learning, universities went all-in on the quantifiable. Posters appeared telling students ‘YOU SAID. WE DID.’ Everyone had meetings about ‘recruitment’, ‘competitors’ and ‘employability’. There was an arms-race in shiny new facilities with new university buildings springing up everywhere (this did not mean, by the way, that crumbling old ones were well maintained). Invariably new developments featured numerous accommodation blocks that could provide additional income to the university in the form of rent. I even once heard it suggested (apparently in all seriousness) that a replica of a department could be built next door to it, exclusively to house students from China doing parallel courses. Vice-Chancellors wielded golden spades in the desert.

The groundbreaking ceremony for the University of Birmingham’s Dubai campus (2019).

Some of the people responsible for this were venal, many were stupid, almost all were complacent, but I’m not pointing fingers. The government turned higher education into a game with financial rewards for the capture of students’ fees and rent, and universities played it. What did we expect they would do?

And this is where surplus value comes in. With income constrained by fee caps, and expansion into areas with fewer limits on income (rent and uncapped postgraduate fees) dependent on significant investment, maintaining a high level of surplus value was both difficult and essential.

Question 19: So how did they maintain surplus value?

Easy. By driving down wages. That’s what this dispute is actually about. Universities have been forcing down wages as a proportion of their costs for over a decade. But that’s not all they have done. They’ve also driven down deferred wages (i.e. pensions), but I’m going to put that to one side because this simple fact is mired in grotesque complications. They’ve driven up the intensity of labour by increasing workloads. They’ve driven down the cost of labour by hiring a far higher proportion of casualized staff who are only paid for the hours they directly teach or research and aren’t eligible for other benefits that cost employers money (sick pay - actually you are entitled to a bit and you should claim it, but…, maternity/parental leave, an office, training, time to think, the list goes on…). This has led not only to pay cuts across the board (with the notable exception of senior managers), but to the predictably unequal distribution of austerity. Across the sector, the race pay gap is 17%, the gender pay gap is 16% and the disability pay gap is 9%. Don’t bother asking who is most affected by casualization and workload pressure. Finally, senior managers are currently trying to delegitimate strike action focused on these issues by claiming that it puts jobs at risk and actually targets students most of all.

Question 22: Isn’t that true, though? Won’t students be the people who suffer if their teaching is cancelled?

In the short-term, definitely. Industrial action is deliberately disruptive, and you can’t disrupt universities without disrupting students. But those on strike are being disrupted too (students frequently don’t realise that their pay is deducted, for example), and they want to work. One of the reasons that employers have been so successful at ratcheting up workloads is because people who work in universities are dedicated to students, to sharing knowledge, and to research. They work tens of hours over their contracted time every week, and they have been doing so for more than a decade under punishing circumstances. Unavoidably, students have also been suffering as a result. Staff working conditions are their learning conditions, after all, so if working conditions improve, students will benefit. Unfortunately, it’s clear that won’t happen without a serious confrontation.

Question 23: But, even so, does it stand any chance of succeeding?

Maybe not. Industrial disputes are often long and painful and inevitably they don’t always end well for workers. But this isn’t a dispute about a bit more money at the end of the month, it’s about the future of universities. The way they’ve been run for the last decade has driven them into the ground. Action has to be taken not just to improve working conditions, but to reorientate the sector, and this might be a time when the political problem of the representative union is balanced by a benefit.

At the start I said that some people have critiqued representative unions because they can easily become aligned with management, and therefore just a vehicle for imposing deals on their members. At the moment, though, Dave Ward, General Secretary of the Communication Workers Union (CWU), is doing a lot of good work in the media talking about his members’ dispute with Royal Mail as a question not of pay but of the future of the company. Rather than saying to management, ‘the company’s problems are your problems’, CWU negotiators have drawn up an alternative plan for restructuring Royal Mail that doesn’t dispense with daily deliveries, introduces more flexible parcel delivery and doesn’t shred working conditions. In a sector like Higher Education, that has been completely derailed by its leaders, unions could work with them to put it back on better tracks. We could accept voluntary caps on student numbers, we could refuse competitive relations between universities, we could share, or even collectivise, facilities and resources.

I know we could do this because it’s what academics on research projects do all the time, we just do it under the radar. Coming out from under the radar means accepting confrontation. This dispute could be a crucial step towards that confrontation, and therefore towards serious conversations about what we want univerisites to be and how we make it happen.

Question 24: Right, when does it all kick off?

24 November. See you on the picket line.