The UCU dispute, specifically the possible marking boycott, was front page news. Why should staff, however righteous their cause, adversely affect the progress of students by not marking their essays and exams? Students are rightly concerned about the potential impact of the marking boycott on their studies and future prospects. As is often said, no one wants a strike: they are a stressful business. The case for the marking boycott, therefore, must rest on a positive case: the quality of education. If staff continue to have their work devalued by an ever shrinking pay packet, if their concerns about improving students’ education through greater investment are ignored by a high-handed managerial class, is students’ education being valued? Similarly, is your education being devalued by the increasing casualisation of staff?

Lecturers and teachers are not just professors with decent (ish!) salaries. They are also hourly-paid postgraduate students, early career researchers and academics on fixed-term contracts. They are individuals doing the ‘bread and butter’ work an academic institution entails: teaching seminars, tutorials, attending labs, marking essays and exams and delivering lectures. Yet these workers don’t have permanent contracts, don’t have any job security.  Universities try to cut costs and fix the problems created by a broken funding system by doing education on the cheap, exploiting aspiring and junior academics.

Doctoral students face a Catch-22 situation: needing teaching experience when looking for academic jobs and the money (postgraduate funding is extremely scarce), it is extremely difficult to turn down rotten contracts, lacking job descriptions and expectations. Some contracts don’t even cover office hours to offer support to our students. ‘Working to contract’ thus becomes a convenient fiction. Caring about their students’ education, casualised teachers work hard to ensure students receive proper feedback and answer every query. They effectively end up doing a lot of free work for the university which in return sees them as cheap and disposable. You fulfill your job and do it well? There’s no guarantee you come back next academic year! Want to contribute to the teaching and learning strategy in your school, feedback your students’ experiences? Sorry, staff meetings are for full-time staff only! Many permanent staff unfortunately do not realise being casualised is not a rites of passage to get into a competitive profession, it is a fact of precarious life being entrenched by the modern university.

Facing job insecurity every year, wages barely covering our rent, bills and food, 56 hour weeks, just to be able to teach what we are passionate about, with no time for research and developing our publication list which might ultimately gain us a permanent position: recent doctors have dire stories to tell.

In the last 5 years, the pay for new lecturers and tutors has dropped 13% in real terms. Following the USS pension saga, they (we) have each had tens of thousands of pounds taken from them over the course of their careers, while staff that retained their old rights are paying more every month into a scheme that was, let us recall, nowhere near crisis. There are fewer scholarships and research grants than before, and an increase in teaching-heavy posts. Consumer-driven logics are set to make that worse. On the horizon, just over there, is a US-style expansion based on precarity, a prestige elite, and debt bubbles. Some at the top are already breaking from the national pay spine, inaugurating a two-tier system. Consider this trend alongside the state of university finances. What is it to look at this and say things aren’t so bad? I put it to you that such a position is detached, complacent, and irresponsible.

Second, there is the strikes-change-nothing complaint. This has better justification. Local actions over the last years have not reversed policies. Pensions were stripped down anyway. And there is something peculiar, isn’t there, about the idea of day-long walkouts and picket lines in a sector so based on relatively scattered student-teacher interactions. There is no machinery to fall silent, no buzzing shop floors to stand empty. Just a day of saved wages for management and probably a whole stack of reorganised lectures, academics not really being the types to withhold knowledge (or, rather, unwilling to see knowledge as labour). There is a sense that the old tactics are dead, and should be left in their graves.

On the one hand, this is an argument for more radical action. If employers can handle strike days, we need more. Or, alternatively, forms of action that do not fetishise the picket line. Something that will make VCs pay attention, like a marking boycott or withholding final grades. In a customer-orientated culture this is the pressure point, especially if action begins to alter the results of the National Student Survey, that Big Other of the academic scene (what do students really want?). The complaint goes up that the national union lacks the imagination to instigate these actions, and that we should therefore turn to more vibrant kinds of opposition. But new forms of resistance nevertheless confront established modes of punishment. When full pay is withheld day on day, when even partial performance leads to the forfeit of full wages, how quickly will we really buckle? We know something has to break the pattern, but we’re not sure we’re capable of it, or that the sacrifice is worth it. In other words, we find ourselves a little too close to text-book academic bitching: something more fundamental needs doing, but we’re not likely to be the ones to do it.

On the other hand, the fear and the paralysis can be found closer to home. Complaints about the union form do not produce their alternative ex nihilo. There are possible replacements, but no actually-existing ones. Nor does the appetite for creating one seem to exist. And for good reason. The paradoxical character of academic subjectivity is both to consider ourselves in a position of real epistemic and social privilege and to be so despondent about our influence on things as to merely absorb the changes thrust upon us (working conditions, impact agendas, research restrictions). The legal protections of strike action have no parallel, truncated as they are. Creative alternatives have raised energy, and served as political classrooms in their own right, but they haven’t actually stymied ‘reforms’ (whether on fees, outsourcing or investment portfolios). And, strange as it may sound, universities are probably happier taking draconian action against their workers than their students. A faculty occupation, if we could even imagine such a thing, would not end well.