The biggest ever strike in UK higher education is entering its fourth week. Lectures are going untaught, students are not being supervised, research is not getting conducted. My colleagues and I remain on the picket lines, without pay, because of drastic cuts to our pensions that could result in losses of £10,000 a year once we retire.
We chose this profession not for the money, but because we wanted to create and share knowledge, so the last thing we want to do is hurt our students. However, we are continuing to withdraw our labour to make it clear to administrators that university workers are no longer willing to accept passively the steady erosion of their working conditions.
As an academic who studies some of the challenges faced by people in the gig economy who are trying to improve their own working conditions, taking part in a strike for my own job has been simultaneously inspiring and disheartening. Together with a team of smart and committed researchers, I have spent the last few years travelling through Asia and Africa speaking to hundreds of workers who carry out digital jobs that are outsourced from rich countries like the US and the UK. Some of these workers do tasks you might recognise: transcription, website design, or translation. Others carry out work that barely existed a few years ago.
These jobs range from tagging images to train artificial intelligence systems that will be used in autonomous vehicles to writing blog posts about products; ones that, instead of ever being read by humans, will be used to manipulate search engines into ranking websites more highly.
What unites all of these jobs is that they are carried out through a planetary-scale labour market. A Kenyan who spends her days writing text for search engines or a Vietnamese data entry worker are in direct competition with workers from everywhere else on the planet. This matters, because not only are tens of millions of workers signed up to gig economy platforms, but there is also an enormous oversupply of labour power on them. This is a buyer's market, and workers know it.
When we asked workers about how they might push for better wages or working conditions, they consistently told stories about how replaceable they are. If they don't accept the terms given to them, there are tens or hundreds of other people able to do the same job – often within minute’s notice. They know that there are few possibilities for traditional trade unions in their line of work, because workers see themselves as competitors rather than collaborators. Indeed, they often see themselves as entrepreneurs rather than workers at all. And, very frequently, they don't even know who they are working for in the first place.
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For these reasons, we observe a range of negative outcomes, such as low pay, wage theft, and work in excruciatingly long shifts. With hundreds of millions of people newly joining the internet every year, the gig economy is increasingly looking like a central part of the future of work. And the ubiquity of Deliveroo riders and Uber drivers in most UK cities shows us that it is already an integral part of our reality here
This new world of work stands in contrast to the jobs of UK university staff. When I started my job nine years ago, only a few of my colleagues were in our trade union, because most saw little need for it. It is hard to imagine our jobs being offshored due to a planetary labour market (not yet, at least, although attempts are underway). Most of us felt that we were on good terms with our employer, and that we were able to periodically negotiate for better working conditions. The situation was not unlike that of many other white collar jobs, where workers ask themselves what use a trade union could serve.
But, in the higher education sector, the severe cuts to our pensions, the increased corporatisation, and high levels of precarity for junior academics have changed all of that. Many of those on our picket lines have never before been in a union or engaged in industrial action. Over 3,000 new members have joined my union alone in the first week of the strike. They joined because of worries about their futures, and a belief that this is a fight worth fighting. The numbers on the picket lines keep growing, and it has been inspiring to see many of our students standing with us in the bitter cold in solidarity.
It remains unclear how the UK university strike will conclude. Despite the optimism on the picket line, I continue to see colleagues willing to cross it, while the rest of us stand outside in order to try to salvage not just our pensions, but also theirs. Some, on precarious contracts, or those without UK citizenship, are understandably and justifiably concerned about severe consequences if they don't show up to work. But others break ranks with strikers not because they are worried about workers on the other side of the planet taking their jobs, and not because there are any laws or rules prohibiting them from striking, but rather because they seem to have internalised a vision that little can be attained through collective bargaining.
If we are unable to muster enough strength on the picket lines, those colleagues will be right. What hope will there be for any future collective bargaining in the university sector? Star professors will continue to do fine, and top administrators will continue to pay themselves more than Presidents or Prime Ministers. Meanwhile the legions of casualised staff that do much of the work throughout the sector will have to content themselves with low pay and precarious conditions.
This gig economy vision of autonomous, self-interested, individuals battling with each other for precarious jobs is one that we need to collectively resist. If we are not careful, it will increasingly define ever more jobs in our society. If we give administrators this inch, they will surely be back for a mile. The importance of the current university strikes cannot be overstated.
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In the inspiring 2013 'Kilburn Manifesto', The late Doreen Massey and Michael Rustin wrote that a change of government in the then-upcoming elections would not "itself transform politics or society, but […] it can establish a situation in which new thinking and new kinds of political action may again become possible." Can strikes like ours do something similar? A different world is possible if we want. Much like the concessions recently won for cleaners at the LSE, strikes can have the powerful effect of showing workers there are alternatives.
This doesn't necessarily mean that the traditional union organising model will work for everyone. What it does mean is that there is nothing inevitable about a future characterised by the erosion of working standards, precarity, and the shifting of risk from large institutions to individuals.
To get there, we need to move away from nihilistic visions that see the erosion of our working conditions as inevitable, and defeatist notions that little is to be gained from collective bargaining. There can be real strength in the unity of workers, defining together how jobs are governed. What it will ultimately take is us acting like communities, collectives, and collaborators rather than just collections of individuals.
Mark Graham is professor of internet geography at the Oxford Internet Institute and a faculty fellow at the Alan Turing Institute
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
