BUILD WORKERS' UNIONS: demand £10 now and 16-plus hours

"Reports of my death are greatly exaggerated", quipped American novelist and humourist Mark Twain, when a New York reporter conveyed the fact his obituary had been published back in the US while he was on a speaking tour in London. 

A similar reply should have been issued by the leadership of the trade union movement this month, as Doomsday reports on the state of the unions and workers' struggles were published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the formation of the British TUC, at the Manchester Mechanics Institute in 1868. 

Capitalist media outlets - including the allegedly liberal Guardian - gleefully reported government statistics of 2017 witnessing the lowest number of strikes since records began In 1891; a mere 79, involving just 33,000 workers in a total of 276,000 days of strike action.

Parallel government figures reported 6.2 million union members in the UK, which - due to the overall rise in numbers at work - means a marginal dip in the percentage of workers unionized, down to 23.2%.

Wake Up Call

Certainly, these cold statistics should act as a loud, screeching alarm-call to union leaders and activists. Especially so the startling fact that the average union member grows older, as less than 5% of workers aged 16-24 are union members.

But such data only give us a superficial glimpse of workplace realities. 

The low strike figures heavily disguise the mounting anger, bitterness and discontent of workers at employers' exploitation. 

The reign of fear, often terror, imposed by senior managers on behalf of the owners might cow many workers for a period but is also storing up the combustible materials for future outbreaks of struggle, on pay, conditions, loss of hours and jobs, against repressive, petty measures at work. 

The back-breaking and mind-breaking workload, as bosses across every sector demand more output from fewer workers, has led to an epidemic of stress at work, camouflaged by reductions in sick absences as the same workers fear for their jobs and face cruel disciplinary sanctions for being off work. 

Fury is gathering on 'the shop floor' at the gaping chasm between the pay and perks of top management and Chief Executives compared to the Ice Age pay freeze for workers, both in the public and private sectors, with the deepest and longest real wage cuts since the Napoleonic Wars, 200 years ago. 

Anyone in any workplace will testify to these growing resentments. Anyone campaigning on the streets for an end to poverty pay, zero hours contracts and job insecurity will confirm the growing desire by people to vent their anger at the ruthless profiteering, even if initially only by signing a petition.

Workers Always Need Unions 

Workers - who constitute a growing, overwhelming majority of the Scottish and UK populations - need the collective defence of unions now more than even their parents or grandparents did. 

That will always be the case, for as long as the rapacious system of capitalism exists - the system which systematically robs workers of their unpaid labour as the source of private profit for a tiny handful. 

The right to collectively withdraw our labour - to strike - is one of the core weapons workers ultimately possess, to stop cuts to jobs, wages, conditions and human dignity at work.
And indeed, even in a future socialist society, we will need independent workers' unions to help democratically plan and organise production for society's real needs, and to help check and prevent the development of government excesses and state bureaucracy.

Given the grotesque gap between the rich and the rest of us is growing - with a million Scots below the poverty line, including over half a million workers, whilst 'our' eleven billionaires have combined wealth of over £16,200million - the urgent need for organised workers' unions cries out more loudly than ever.

Living Example

So why are the unions not growing? And what do we need to do about it? 

On a microcosmic level, union membership in my own 400-plus workplace has grown from 15% in 2010 to 75% now, because we've stood up for members on day-to-day issues; won some reforms, such as minimum 4-hour shifts and 16-hour contracts; resisted detrimental changes, even when we've not always won; and broadcast our aim of policies such as an immediate £10-an-hour minimum wage. 

Significantly, not only does that contrast with the average union density of 13.5% across the private sector, but the membership embraces all age-groups from 16 to 70, and workers from at least 17 different countries of origin. 

More telling by far, those unions which have fought back against the onslaught by successive governments and employers - in a period of general setback and retreat since the brutal defeat of the heroic miners' strike in 1985 - have retained and increased their membership. Unions prepared to put up a fight, to defend members, including by strike action, may frighten a few overpaid, remote union (including TUC) bureaucrats, but they attract and embolden workers into joining.
This experience applies to a wide range of employment sectors. 

20,000 Join UCU During Strikes

University staff in the UCU union, of vastly different job grades and age ranges, took determined strike action this Spring, initially on pensions, but also raising the growing curse of insecure contracts. 

A remarkable 20,000 new members joined the UCU, in many cases literally on the picket lines, because they saw action on issues they relate to; issues rooted in their material self-interest. Action forced upon a reluctant, lacklustre, compromising union leadership by the demands of branch activists, it has to be added. 

Thousands of them have been transformed by learning the fundamentals of solidarity, and into an awareness that regardless of job title they are education workers, selling their labour power to employers battling to boost profits by a race to the bottom on wages, deferred wages, and conditions. 

RMT Grows By Fighting Back

Another union which has strengthened its numbers in recent years, despite vitriolic attacks by the privatised employers, successive Tory and Labour governments, and the media, is the RMT.
It's no accident that transport and storage accounted for 68% of all strike days in 2017. They've fought to improve wages; defied the propaganda onslaught when they've used their pivotal position in the London economy, in particular; courageously battled for public safety in strikes against Driver Only trains (winning in Scotland's case); and led the campaign for public ownership of the railways and ferry services, including here in Scotland. 

A union that takes its own rule-book clause about "replacing the capitalist system with a socialistic order of society" has emboldened workers to stand up for themselves... and grown in strength. 

PCS Strike Ballot 

The civil service workers' PCS union, which has a left-wing leadership (including members of the SSP) was specifically targeted in an attempted demolition job by the Tories - and in previous decades by Labour under Blair and Brown, when they declared a target of 100,000 job cuts.
Last year's attempt to crudely wreck the PCS by the abolition of the check-off system of collecting union members' subs directly from their wages, made PCS activists more determined; they defended membership levels in a systematic campaign of signing members up to payment by direct debit. 

If anything, the whip of Tory counter-revolution may have reminded many workers why they need the union. And they are now balloting for strike action in pursuit of a 5% pay rise, to partially compensate for a decade of pay cuts.

The Cruel Trap of Social Partnership

These examples (and there are others) demonstrate a simple truth that needs to be applied across the board: unions prepared to fight for workers on bread-and-butter issues, informed by an understanding that workers have interests in direct conflict with the interests of the employers, with a willingness to mobilize members in decisive action, are best equipped to grow. 

And the corollary is also true: unions which fall for the monumental con-trick of 'social partnership' with the employers, discouraging members from daring to take action in case it upsets their 'social partners' in the boardrooms, are prone to seem irrelevant and unattractive. Especially to a younger generation who have little or no living examples of successful, mass, national struggles by unions. 

Yet these are the very people most in need of powerful, active, determined unions, prepared to combine for collective defence and improvements. 

Super-Exploitation

There are literally millions of younger (and older) workers in low-paid, precarious sectors like fast foods, hospitality, retail (the second-biggest jobs sector, after the NHS) and social care. 

The ten million across the UK in 'precarious jobs' including those on zero hours and short hours contracts, agency staff, temporary jobs, the gig economy, and bogus self-employment.

The one million in part-time jobs only because they can't get the full-time jobs they want.

The hordes of retail staff on 7-hour, 10-hour or 12-hour contracts, but at the beck and call of 'business needs' - the phrase heartily hated by workers expected to chop and change their sleep patterns and family life to do additional hours in busy spells, only to be cast aside onto their lowly contract hours without overtime at the whims of management.

And that's not to mention the 21st Century version of 'the dark satanic mills' run by the likes of Amazon. 

A new report by the GMB union exposes the outrageous scandal that ambulances have been called out to Amazon plants 600 times over the past 3 years, with workers taken to hospital in over half of these 600 call-outs. They describe "pregnant women being forced to stand for 10 hours, to pick, stow, stretch and bend, pull heavy carts and walk miles - even miscarriages at work." 

Winning Young Workers Through Courageous Action 

Workers in these super-exploited sectors especially need to be organised to fight back. But in order to win over new and younger workers to the union cause, leaders of the TUC, STUC and specific unions need to revive the fighting methods and spirit of the early pioneers of the most downtrodden sections of the working class - such as those who heroically battled during the waves of struggle by the unskilled and semiskilled workers in what was known as 'New Unionism', from the 1880s to early 1900s. 

It's all very well the TUC's Frances O'Grady marking its 150th birthday by declaring "the unions have to change or die", followed by vague talk of a digital reach, and dodgy mutterings about helping workers BEFORE they decide to join a union. That dodges the key questions: what do the union leaders plan to fight around, what issues, what alternatives that relate to workers' material conditions and needs? 

And when will they dump the fatal trap of relying on their 'social partnership' with the employers, which in turn hampers their ability or inclination to confront these 'partners' with collective action to win workers' demands? 

To quote but one example, when will O'Grady and the TUC pledge to never again repeat last year's dirty deed of excluding the Southern Rail strikers' RMT representatives as they huddled in a meeting with the privateers to do a deal behind the striking guards' backs? 

Nothing New About 'Social Partnership' 

These misnamed 'Social Partnership' deals are neither original, nor good for workers' health, nor for union growth. 

They were called 'Mondism' (after the big chief of chemicals giant multinational, ICI) after the defeat of the 1926 general strike. 

Under the Labour government of 1974-9, it was called the 'Social Contract', which meant union leaders enforcing government wage restraint; workers' wages being slashed by an average 10% whilst prices let rip at about 30% inflation, leading to workers' bitterness, confusion - and the ultimate election, by default, of the obnoxious Tory Prime Minister, Maggie Thatcher. 

Past generations of socialists and trade unionists had a less polite, more accurate name for 'social partnership': class collaboration!

Pockets of Resistance 

Pockets of resistance by workers are already erupting, giving a glimpse of the potential for a wider, bigger struggle to stem the tide of insecurity, poverty pay and exploitation that curses the modern working class. 

Small groups of McDonald's workers - victims of poverty pay, zero hours contracts and harassment at work - have been on strike for £10 and union rights. McDonald's tried, in vain, to buy them off with the biggest pay rise in about 10 years. 

TGI Friday's workers are striking every Friday against the theft of their tips and wages by Friday's profiteering bosses. The last straw - after earlier loss of premium pay for bank holidays, Christmas and New Year, and denial of even the miserly government minimum wage through charges for black shoes as part of their uniform - was the two-day notice of robbing front-of-house staff of 40% of tips from customers (up to £250 a month) to top up the plummeting pay of kitchen staff. These Unite union members show young (and older) workers will fight, provided unions take a lead. 

Tesco Dagenham Strike 

Retail - including the giant Tesco's - is a prime example of partnership agreements that are designed to facilitate union recruitment, but hamstring the ability of the unions to resist attacks or organise action for improved pay, hours and conditions. Bitter disappointment from workers at their unions ("the union did nothing when our pay/bonuses/premium pay was slashed", being an all-too-common complaint) is beginning to shed members. 

In contrast, at the stand-alone Tesco distribution centre in Dagenham, Usdaw members have recently staged strike action for pay parity with workers in identical jobs in neighbouring depots. Only ten out of about 500 crossed the picket lines, and even more workers have joined the union, as they see it taking a determined stance, forcing Tesco bosses into talks on the very first day of strike action, after them ignoring the union for over a year.

The central message that should be shouted from the rooftops of every union headquarters is that they need to break from the grisly embrace of so-called Social Partnership with the employers; and organise every union official, shop steward and union activist to launch a concerted campaign around key issues that will make the unions immediately relevant in the eyes of the 75% of workers who haven't yet been convinced to join. 

£10 Now & 16-hour Minimum Week 

Aside from battling on issues specific to particular workplaces, the trade union movement could gain a vast new lease of life if they seriously prepare action plans around two immediate issues: a national minimum wage of £10 here and now, rising with inflation, for all over 16; and a guaranteed minimum 16-hour week for all who want it, to replace the curse of casual, insecure jobs. 

The entire trade union movement committed to "a £10 minimum for all workers" back in September 2014 - nearly 4 years ago, at the TUC conference - unanimously! It's criminal that, with honourable exceptions, they've barely lifted a finger in pursuit of this since. We need socialists and other dedicated trade unionists to bludgeon the more reluctant union leaders into action on this... before the £10 demand becomes entirely obsolete through inflation! 

The other central demand here suggested - a legally enforced guarantee that all employers are obliged to offer a minimum 16-hour contract to all workers who want it - is a new, pioneering policy that could tackle the complex balance between workers needing flexibility and the same workers needing stable incomes and stable lives. 

No employer should be allowed to opt out. But workers who wish to opt out in favour of fewer hours could do so, with representation by their union to protect them from any bullying by bosses. 

This would transform the lives of millions of workers who simply can't survive on zero hours or short hours contracts. The latter is especially rampant in the likes of retail. 

The fighting demand for a guaranteed 16-hour minimum was first raised in my book, Break the Chains, subsequently adopted as a policy by the Scottish Socialist Party, and I'm proud to have convinced my Usdaw union national conference, in April, to agree to it as union policy - unanimously! 

Reach Out to Young People 
As well as drawing up urgent plans to campaign around workplaces on these twin demands, the unions could reach out to young people by asking for meetings in secondary schools and at colleges, especially aiming at the 'student-workers' who now frequently staff retail, hospitality, food and drinks to earn a living in the absence of a student grant. 

The National Rate For the Job 
In all this, unions can also combat the vicious exploitation and racist division surrounding migrant workers, by seeking to recruit and organise them around the demand for 'the national rate and rights for the job' - countering divide-and-conquer tactics by employers and governments. 

Just as socialists played a pivotal role in the pioneering days of trade unionism, especially around the demand for an 8-hour day to reduce the grinding drudgery of the times, so too socialists in the unions and workplaces - and indeed in schools and colleges - can do so around fighting policies like £10 now and 16-plus hours. 

The Pioneering Spirit  
There is no need to write the obituaries of the trade union movement. But there is every need to break from the compromising, self-defeating trap of 'social partnership' with workers' own worst exploiters and enemies. 

The unions, and STUC, should reach out to genuine political allies including the SSP, construct plans to vigorously fight for these policies, and show the same brash readiness to battle for them that was the hallmark of the best of the early pioneers. 

Resist the Fear! 
Workers have been forced to live in fear for far too long, without the confidence that most of the union leaderships are prepared to confront and defeat the capitalist employers. 

The 150th birthday of the TUC shouldn't be marked by mourning and moaning, but by organising around such class demands that will inspire workers to struggle for a better future, melting away their fears in the process.

To give the last word to the aforementioned Mark Twain: "Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear." 

UNIVERSITY BOSSES ON THE RUN: keep chasing them!

Strikes work! Well organised collective action, with full involvement and mobilization of union members, can put to flight even the most hard-nosed employers. 

That's the core lesson from the ongoing, rapidly evolving struggle to defend pensions for university staff, involving unprecedented strike action by members of the University and College Union (UCU). 

Lecturers, teaching assistants, researchers, librarians, IT and other student support staff voted by a whopping 83% majority for strike action, smashing down the multiple barriers erected by the Tory Trade Union Act, designed precisely to prevent workers from fighting back in self-defence. The first phase of action involved 14 days of strikes, plus action short of strike action (ASOS), including sticking to their contracted 35-hour week. 

Before the wave of strikes, growing pickets and massive rallies, the UUK university bosses insisted the existing defined benefits pension scheme was dead and gone, never to be resurrected. Staff were to lose defined benefits, their pensions to switch to an entirely Stock Market-dependent defined contribution scheme, with the loss of an average £10,000-a-year on retirement. All based on their dodgy valuation of the state of the pension scheme - the USS - which perpetrated the austerity-driven narrative that the pension pot is in deficit, so they simply can't afford to sustain the deferred wages of university staff, throwing them at the mercy of the vagaries of the grotesque gambling den that is the Stock Exchange. 

For weeks, the UUK bosses refused to even talk to the UCU union. Then they made the absurdly offensive offer of talks... but not about pensions! 

Strikers' Control 

Faced with the third of a four-week strike plan, they entered ACAS-sponsored talks with the UCU, and offered some concessions, which initially the national UCU negotiators portrayed as an agreement. All hell erupted on the picket lines, with online petitions gathering thousands of objections to the 'deal' literally overnight, and just about unanimous rejection of this 'agreement' by every single UCU branch meeting the next morning. The rank and file of the union - the strikers and their branch activists - seized back control, and insisted the national negotiators throw out a shoddy package that meant (to quote a couple of the numerous examples I was given on the pickets) staff 'only' losing 42% of their pension instead of 52%, or 'only' 38% instead of the original 48%! 

Emboldened by Insulting Offer 

This episode massively emboldened the strikers, hardened their resolve to hold onto their defined benefits pensions, without cuts to what after all is earned, deferred wages. New forces joined the pickets. New recruits joined the UCU and joined the strike; union membership grew by 15-20% nationally over the duration of this phase of strike action. 

The strikers' strength was further fuelled by the solidarity shown by fellow trade unionists at the pickets, solidarity rallies, and collections for their Strike Hardship Fund. Likewise, by the widespread support from students - including the courageous actions of a determined minority in student occupations at Edinburgh, Stirling, Glasgow, Strathclyde, Aberdeen and Dundee universities.

Solidarity and Steep Learning Curves 

This workforce has not traditionally been the most militant in its trade unionism, but a month of collective action has taught more than decades of theoretical discourse. The electrified atmosphere of the pickets, roving marches round university buildings, and rallies with strikers and their allies speaking, have served to make determined fighters of people who are often on their first ever strike... or who've only just joined the union! 

The growing strike force went back to work after the first phase of 14 days with heads held high. In Stirling, for instance, they assembled at the site of picketing and marched back to work with union banners, behind a piper! 

Bosses Split 

The strike and widespread solidarity from other workers, and students, impacted on the university bosses, leading to splits and public disagreements between the various Vice-Chancellors and the UUK. Union branches pounded the former with demands to make supportive declarations, and to spread loss of earnings through strike action over 3 months, often successfully. 

They also kicked up hell about more bellicose bosses docking pay for staff working to contract, rather than the usual millions of unpaid hours worked through goodwill towards students' education. 

After the roaring success of the first four weeks of strikes, UCU members enforced a 'work to contract', and in preparation for the second national strike phase announced for the exam period from 25 April onwards, over 700 resigned their posts as External Examiners, which would make the exam-period strikes really bite. 

First Serious Offer 

Hot on the heels of this mounting pressure, Unison announced a ballot of its union members on the same pension scheme, which undoubtedly was an added factor in the sudden, apparently spectacular retreat by UUK bosses on Friday 23 March. 

Many strikers were at first astonished and euphoric at what appeared like capitulation by the bosses. But as they scraped away the layers of verbal trickery and obfuscation, it became clear that whilst this is the first serious offer from the employers, and a huge retreat by them, it needs an awful lot of clarification and tightening up to become acceptable. 

As Strathclyde UCU branch president Brian Garvey told me, "After declaring the UCU demand for the status quo on defined benefits to be impossible, they've now conceded it - at least until April 2019." 

The new offer also proposes 'an independent panel of experts' to assess the valuation of what the pension scheme (USS) can support in the future, with 50% nominees from the union, 50% from the employers. But as Brian added, "We need to test the real independence of this panel." 

One of the crunch clauses in the offer is that after April 2019, and after valuation of the USS by the 'independent panel', pension benefits would remain "broadly equivalent to current arrangements." What does 'broadly equivalent' mean? This could be a trap, a deal-breaker, whereby a besieged gang of university bosses try to obscure future cuts to pensions for current and/or future staff, including the spectre of two-tier pension schemes for current and future staff. 

Closing the Loopholes: No Detriment! 

Strikers have pored over the details, and as I write this (Monday 26 March), are holding branch meetings instructing national union negotiators to demand these grey areas are cleared up, to defend the existing defined benefits system, without detriment to staff. 

As Brian Garvey told me, "We need to close the loopholes on economic arguments about the valuation of the pension scheme. If the proposed Panel was to decide the USS is in deficit, we should demand action against mismanagement - and there's been plenty of that around! For instance, the employers' past pension contributions holidays. The bottom line needs to be no detriment to staff. 

This is a huge step forward which demonstrates the effectiveness of strike action, but in its current wording, it's not yet an acceptable offer." 

The UCU strikers have plenty of grounds to be distrustful of top UUK bosses - and their slippery use of language! 

After all - as I've hammered home in speeches at four solidarity rallies at Strathclyde and one at Stirling university, speaking as newly-elected USDAW NEC member:

"These are the same bosses who declare a black hole in the pension fund - despite last year's USS annual report showing 20% growth in assets. These are the bosses who claimed £8million in expenses over the last two years - on top of the 60 Vice-Chancellors who each earn over £300,000 a year. In the same institutions which rake in £17billion a year from students alone. Hardly a corner shop in crisis!" 

And if - contrary to all the existing evidence - the valuation process was to declare a deficit in the USS pension scheme, the employers who took several years of contributions holiday should be forced to fill any gap by increasing their contributions, rather than punish workers for the university and pension scheme bosses' past dodging of their duties. 

Sustain the Action Until Victory 

One of the obstacles to the UUK's verbal trickery, as they are beaten back by the solidarity of the strikes, is the expertise on pensions of many of the academic staff on strike! They've helped demolish the bogus claims and false valuations that were constructed to justify these drastic pension cuts. 

But the power of their expertise needs to be combined with the power of sustained industrial action, until such time as defined benefits are guaranteed not just "until at least April 2019" but for the future. As we publish this, members' branch meetings are poised to demand the planned 14 days of further strikes from late April go ahead, unless the UUK fully concede on the UCU's demands. 

Powerful, unprecedented strikes have pummeled the austerity brigade at the top of this huge sector of the economy, forcing massive retreats already. It could be a massive victory for the entire working class, provided the planned action is sustained until the university bosses accept UCU members' demands to close the loopholes in their 23 March offer. 

As one after another group of workers suffer loss of Final Salary Pension Schemes, and switch to defined contribution schemes and increased worker contributions - paying more to get less, and later - this could be a turning point in fighting back against austerity. 

Pensions Plus...

This struggle is about pensions, but also about much more; against the spreading curse of casualisation and precarious employment, and against marketisation of education, which has increasingly turned students into passive consumers for university business profits, instead of being partners in learning for the good of society as a whole. 

Unless the UUK bosses capitulate completely, we need the wider trade union movement to escalate solidarity for the UCU strikers until they win an outright victory for us all. 

#nocapitulation  #nodetriment  #victorytotheUCU 

VICTORY TO THE UCU STRIKERS!

UCU members striking against savage pension cuts and austerity

The breadth and depth of strike action by staff at ten Scottish universities and 61 across the UK are unprecedented. Members of the University and College Union (UCU) voted overwhelmingly to stage an escalating series of strikes in defence of their pensions, with a total of 14 days already named.

The pickets are large, the roving demos colourful and noisy, and the support for staff from students vast and visible.

Pensions Under Attack

This strike is primarily about an assault on staff pensions, with their bosses in Universities UK (UUK) wanting to slash the current defined benefits scheme - the Universities Superannuation Scheme - to a cheap and nasty defined contributions scheme, where retirement income would be dependent on the fluctuations of the stock market. 

Concretely, as the UCU union spells out, this would mean an average annual cut of £10,000 to pensions for lecturers, teachers, librarians, researchers and student support staff. 

As Dave, one of the strikers in Glasgow, told me, "I face a 50% cut! In many ways, this was always quite a conservative workforce, reluctant to take industrial action, and we often put up with the pay levels because at least there is a decent pension at the end of it. But we have to take the pain of losing pay now, through striking, or there'll be nothing left at the end of our careers."

The UUK bosses claim they have to take this slice off pensions because they face a £6billion deficit. But the same bosses have further infuriated teaching staff with their choices of expenditure. As Dave added, "They say they can't afford to sustain our pensions. But the principal is on over £300,000. And have you noticed the £1billion being spent on buildings and investments in Glasgow and Strathclyde universities?"

On the picket lines 

Marketisation of Education 

Another striker gave me her view of the UUK bosses' claim - and of the deeper causes of the strike - as she rushed in to address a 'teach-in' of supportive students:

"This is about our pensions, but also about the power structures behind it. The way the pension scheme is set up tells all: it's based on a flawed risk assessment, which favours those investing, to the detriment of workers. The assumption in the risk assessment is that all 65 universities will all go into administration; if that were true, our problems are a lot greater than the pensions scheme!

In these underlying power structures, we are told pensions are a benefit. But we work hard for them; pensions are part of our wages. And this doesn't just affect lecturers, but all staff, and it's really important workers are not divided. This is about the casualised workforce, temporary research assistants, the library staff, and all the rest too.
We want to shut down the education factory - because that's how we and the students are treated. The irony is that free education means those who pay are treated better. Free education is of less and less value on the market. That's why we have the students on our side. They live through it and know what it's like to live through the marketised universities."

Student Support 

First-year engineering student and SSP member, Max McKay, told me some of his reasons for actively supporting the strikers and attending their picket lines.

"It's vital we support the strikers. They're the ones trying to teach us and be available to us. Now they need us in their moment of struggle. All students should do what they can: join picket lines, not attend lectures, talk to other students to get their support."

I asked Max what difference the attack on pensions makes to him, as a student. 

"If the UCU don't win, and the pension cuts go ahead, some of the best lecturers will be gone, they'll just leave. Their pay is already low, and the only thing making the job OK is a reasonable pension. Some students may be considering going on to become lecturers, but these cuts may stop them, a loss of opportunity. And if the staff lose on pensions, what next? Us as students attacked next? That's why I've been on the pickets showing my support."

SSP supports the UCU strikers

Principal's Pets... and Pension Cuts! 

Pensions are the upfront source of the anger that has erupted into strike action. But that anger is also fuelled by the ongoing attacks on education, the brutally precarious nature of many of the jobs for the likes of tutors and teaching assistants, and the grotesque contrasts between pleas of poverty by the university bosses and their own opulence. 

Take the case of Peter Mathieson, the recently appointed principal of Edinburgh University. He graciously accepted the offer to move from being vice-chancellor of Hong Kong University so long as he got a basic salary of £342,000 - a mere £80,000 more than his predecessor at Edinburgh!

But while UCU members have been driven to withdraw their labour in defence of their pensions, Mathieson enjoys an additional payment of £42,000 "in lieu of pension contributions". On top of his £342,000, that is. And as a reward for the trek north, he was given use of a lavish "grace and favour" home, plus a £26,000 relocation package. Just in case that's not cause enough for outrage, the relocation bung handed over from university funds included the cost of moving his pet cat and dog.

So the university bosses plunder workers' pensions, but pay out travel costs for the principal's pets! You couldn't make it up... and you don't need to; it's a metaphor for what the university bosses think of hardworking staff. 

The School of Struggle

A new generation is being educated in the fundamentals of trade unionism in the heat of battle. For many, this is their first-ever strike. 

As Strathclyde University UCU chair, Brian Garvey, told me, "Many members are on strike for the first time. And many, many more have joined the union since we started this strike action. They may have been scared to take action at first, but once it gets going, it's like being liberated."

Another key feature of this struggle is the rapid learning about unions, strikes and solidarity that a new generation are living and learning. Whilst withdrawing their labour, lecturers are staging 'teach-ins', addressing hundreds of students on issues like privatisation, the marketisation of education, and as Brian remarked, "I'm going in to speak about what unions and strikes are because consciousness of those issues had declined amongst younger people for a time."

The UCU strikers need and deserve the solidarity of every reader, every trade unionist, every SSP member. Show support on their pickets and demos; invite them to your union branch; help win a victory for the UCU - which would be a victory for all workers, in the face of austerity cuts designed to boost the perks, privileges and profits of the rich and big business.

 

Brian Garvey puts the case for pensions justice 

FROM THE FRONTLINE: article by a strike leader for the Scottish Socialist Voice:

The staff, students and supporters of the strike know that while this strike is about pensions, it is about more than that. 

The unprecedented turnout is a clear message that we, together, have had enough of austerity, where pensions are cut while those cutting them award themselves £0.5million salaries. 

Enough of cuts in education, enough of taking more and more from workers, enough of taking an axe to our pensions and spending billions elsewhere. 

This strike is wakening academic staff up to the fact that their future is tied up with nurses, construction workers and all working people, and not the heads of UUK taking £10,000 a year from pensions. 

We call our members, staff, students and supporters to join us in our ongoing strike action that will continue until we win this fight for dignity.

 By Brian Garvey, Chair, UCU Strathclyde University