Public and Personal Opinions on Strikes

Hala Haidar, BA Global Development

As strikes have been occurring across di erent sectors—from teachers to nurses and train drivers—there has been a lot of discourse on the public’s opinions on strikes, or to what extent people are willing to support strikes. I have heard the sentiment, ‘I support the strikes, until they become disruptive,’ quite a few times. e problem with that is that strikes are supposed to be disruptive! If a strike isn’t disruptive, then the employer is probably not going to care. And while public support is great, it’s not necessary to win a labour dispute.

With the UCU strikes for example, employers care because their students, who the modern neoliberal university considers to be customers, are a ected. is, in turn, impacts the university as they have promised to deliver a certain standard to their customers in exchange for high tuition fees (even higher for international students). erefore, our teachers’ best leverage is to withdraw their labour, which is what the institution uses to make a pro t, in order for their demands to be seriously considered.

I’ve learned a lot from picket lines at SOAS. e sentiment I have gotten from speaking to striking sta is that while they appreciate how supportive the majority of students are, they also understand students’ frustration and anger because it is an unfair situation to have their studies disrupted. However, they want students to direct that frustration at the employers, who are underpaying academic sta and cutting their pensions.

e neoliberalization of higher education is a problem for everyone. Students and teachers are facing the same ght. It’s important to recognise that and stop thinking in binaries of worker/customer. Students are paying higher and higher fees, while simultaneously, our teachers are losing 25% of their real terms pay. Teachers are also ghting for us. At the end of the day, this is the workforce we will be joining when we graduate, and we are seeing the same issues across most, if not all, sectors.

You may have heard the phrase ‘their working conditions are our learning conditions’—it’s completely true. How can we expect our teachers to be able to teach us well if they can’t a ord to meet their basic needs or are worrying about 35% of their pension being cut? e neoliberalization of higher education also means an increasingly casualised workforce, resulting in the precaritization of working conditions. When Aimée Lê was nishing up her PhD while working as a lecturer, she was forced to live in a tent for two years because