Fighting today’s battles with yesterday’s strategies? On the romanticism of the picket line!

Since 2018, UCU has been in almost permanent industrial action over cuts to pensions, pay and working conditions including more than 60 days of strike by now. Currently action is paused to provide room for 'meaningful negotiations', but we are yet in another ballot to extend the dispute for a further six months including a potential marking and assessment boycott in the summer. Key to any action has been the sanctity of the picket line. All-out strikes are supposed to be all-out strikes. However, is this still the right strategy at this point in time? In this blog post, I use the moment of pause in industrial action to reflect on our approach. I will argue that we need to rethink our strategy drastically and emphasise impact on our employer over purity of action. The way the neo-liberal University works has changed, and we need to adjust our tactics accordingly.

It was a cold, dark morning in 1995. Striking workers huddled around burning fires outside the entrance to the Liverpool docks establishing a formidable picket line. Bacon and eggs were fried over open fires, warm drinks handed around to sustain the strikers and their supporters. 20 meters away a group of police officers gathered to ‘police’ the action. Workers had been out for months resisting an onslaught on their pay and working conditions by management. Together with activists from Manchester I had made the trip over to show our solidarity. Suddenly a lone figure emerges out of the darkness and approaches the picket line. Within seconds all hell breaks loose. Shields go up, the police barely manage to prevent the strikers from tearing into the scab crossing the line. The situation is clear. An all-out strike is the most powerful weapon of dock workers bringing the port to a standstill with ships unable to discharge their cargo. Every worker who crosses this line directly undermines the action and rightly faces the strikers’ anger.

 

The situation could not be more different within today’s setting of Higher Education in the UK. When we set up picket lines, they no longer deter staff or students from accessing the university. Picket lines no longer allow us to shut down activities on campus. For sure, they remain important in that they are a demonstration of our industrial action to wider society. They are crucial in visibilizing our action to non-striking colleagues and students. They are essential in keeping up our morale by connecting with striking colleagues from our own Department as well as other areas of the University. Nevertheless, the slogan ‘the longer the picket line, the shorter the conflict’ no longer holds. The way the neo-liberal University works has changed, and we need to adjust our tactics accordingly.

 

Over the last ten to 15 years, universities in the UK have become transformed into ‘surplus maximising’ corporations. While still formally in the public sector, they operate like fully-fletched private sector corporations, in which every activity is assessed according to its 'financial viability'. Programmes which do not attract large groups of fee-paying students are closed down, staff levels are kept at the bare minimum. The disruption of students’ learning is no longer considered a problem, provided they still receive a minimum-level of teaching, which allows the University to ensure that all modules are graded and students can graduate or progress to the next level.

 

Last year, students lost ten full days of their teaching due to industrial action, but my own institution the University of Nottingham simply shrugged it off. The threat of a marking boycott did focus minds in the end, but even here emergency legislation was brought in at short notice. It would have allowed management to allocate module marks, provided at least 40 per cent of the assessment had been graded, if negotiations with the union had not resolved the conflict. The biggest worry for university management is not a disruption of students’ learning. Management could not care less. The biggest concern is that students will not be able to graduate or progress and can, therefore, make a credible demand for a reimbursement of fees.

 

In short, only if the cost basis of today’s universities is threatened are they likely to engage in serious negotiations. Blocks of strike days across the semester only imply financial hardship for staff, but they do not put pressure on management. Indefinite strike action, by contrast, threatening to take out the whole semester, is a potential winning alternative as it would make graduation and progression impossible (see Neoliberal strikes for the neoliberal university). This could only work, however, if it was combined with a flexible implementation in that staff only take action on those days, when they actually damage university business directly to minimise personal financial losses. Any rigid insistence on complying strictly with strike action called by the union is misplaced in such a scenario.

 

To be successful, our goal has to be to cause utmost havoc to university proceedings and threaten university income. This could include novel forms of direct action to maximise disruption costs to universities. It may include targeting key managers directly in addition to strikes (see How To Win The Current Strike Wave). Equally, why should we comply with management’s preferred option of declaring that we participated in strike action? Why not send in postcards? Why do we not refuse declaring in the first place? Why should staff not organise sick-ins, in which staff call in sick in large numbers and bring the workplace to a halt that way rather than going through the ever more laborious procedures of organising ‘legal’ industrial action? Again, the goal has to be causing mayhem to university proceedings and emphasising maximum impact on management.

 

Of course, when pursuing alternative strategies, we do have to accept that colleagues will ‘cross the picket line’ on certain days. Perhaps, we even need to think about getting rid of picket lines for large parts of the action? Perhaps we need to re-define the meaning of the ‘scab’, the strike breaker? What we cannot do, however, is continuing with strikes in the traditional manner while the world of work around us has fundamentally changed.

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy

University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

28 February 2023