On the Picket Line
By Connie Bostock, PPE student at University College and Co-Chair for TT20
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This time a few months ago, I was stood on the picket lines in solidarity with striking academic and support staff of the University of Oxford. The second wave of industrial action during this academic year saw academic and support staff from 74 higher education institutions across the UK take industrial action for a total of 14 days, spread over four weeks. This marked the joint longest strike period in education since records began. The action centred around two disputes, the first regarding USS pensions, and the second pay and conditions of staff. The second dispute draws attention to a theme prevalent in not solely higher education, but the economy more broadly, and that is neoliberalisation. When we speak of neoliberalisation, we typically mean the implementation of market-based ideology within our public institutions. This can be traced back to the 1980s, with the right-wing Tory government of Margaret Thatcher. However, as Coventry South MP Zarah Sultana so beautifully reminded us in her maiden speech in the House1, this generation has faced forty years of destructive Thatcherism. That’s to say that the progressive marketisation of public institutions, including the health and education sectors, continued even during the Labour terms of both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. This marketisation infiltrates the very fabric of society, shifting the dynamics of public services from relationships between members of a political community, to those between producers and consumers of particular services.
Neoliberalism plays into this idea that everyone is replaceable. This is the signature tagline of Abby Lee Miller, the owner of ALDC and star of the US TV show ‘Dance Moms’, in which talented kids and their pushy parents are followed in their quest for national dance championship glory. In the show, the children are constantly in competition with each other, and this explicit competition is viewed with a ‘pyramid’ that ranks each child at the start of each show. The child at the top of the pyramid usually wins a place in Abby’s good books, and a coveted solo position. Throughout the series’ of the show appear many scenes of the dancers crying and having to leave the team – the stress of it all becomes too much for the dancers to take. This highlights a dark truth of capitalism: we are simply workers, cogs in the machine, who are there to fulfil the roles that have been ascribed to us by our bosses. Within the marketized higher education
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1. RT on YouTube: Labour MP slams 40 years of Thatcherism in scathing Commons maiden speech https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=MgxIGI2phyk
in which we find ourselves, we are always in competition with one another: for funding for our research, for permanent positions, to be labelled the ‘best’ by some arbitrary framework. While Abby Lee cracks the whip to ensure that her dancers win each competition that they are entered into, the VCs of our universities do so to ensure that we acquire the latest teaching accolades and highest rankings on worldwide league tables. Without the security of a permanent position, staff have no guarantees that they will retain their jobs after their contracts are up, and their bosses are able to bring in someone new to do the same work. Like the dance studio, our universities become high pressure environments, with staff unable to cope. Conversations on picket lines tell us that this is all too common, with stresses about long term economic security underpinning the realities of those within the academic labour market. Our fate and security is down to the discretion of another, someone deemed to have skills ‘more valuable’ than our own. The classificatory change of essential, low paid, jobs from ‘low-skill’ to ‘key-work’ during the current pandemic (except for when migrants are involved of course) indicates that this is a framework based upon false pretences, and in the interests of those with economic power. Profit over people has been the overarching take from the government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. This is unsurprising considering the pattern of marketisation that has occurred not solely in higher education, but throughout the global economy. The fragility of an economy which rests upon the labour of precarious employees is clear to see. According to the BBC, almost half a million private renters are at risk of eviction during the current pandemic2. Many precarious workers within higher education, including the graduate teaching assistants, non-tenure tracked staff and those on zero-hours contracts, face significant pay cuts at the minute, as well as the looming risk of unemployment. One department at the University of Essex has already announced that there will be no positions for Graduate Teaching Assistants in the next academic year. This means that PhD students that typically rely on the exploitation of their own labour in order to survive through their graduate programme are unable to do so. In the context of little access to funding extensions, and a struggling economy to be graduating into, this could spell disaster not only for these students, but also for the discipline of higher education. The current coronavirus crisis can lead to a period of introspection about how we conduct ourselves as 478
2. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-52564
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