Universities

PCS members fighting privatisation at the National Gallery voted on 24 July for all-out strike from the start of August if the gallery does not back down. Workers have already struck for more than 50 days, as well as holding various stunts, parties and protests inside and outside the gallery. Workers will strike again on Wednesday 29 July and are holding an “alternative leaving party” for outgoing gallery director on Thursday 30 July. Sacked PCS rep Candy Udwin was due to have her appeal hearing with the gallery on 22 July, after being vindicated by a judge who said that a “tribunal would most...

Following a one-day strike at Lewisham and Southwark College on 4 June, union members report a different atmosphere in the college. The dispute has now broken out of the world of committee meetings and into the classrooms and corridors, canteens and staff rooms. Everybody now has to have a position on the strike, everybody has to think about taking a side. For many staff and students, this is a further political education and a first direct experience of trade union struggle. Managers walk around smiling, trying to convince themselves things are back to normal, that is, closing sites, sacking...

Train drivers for Southern rail will vote on a new pay offer, after they voted by 91% and 95% for strikes and action short of strikes to win a better deal. The strike votes, which saw turnouts of around 85%, followed the rejection of the company's initial pay offer of a 2.65% increase even against the recommendation of officials from the drivers' union ASLEF. Such resounding votes against union recommendations are rare anywhere in the labour movement, and show a clear strength of feeling amongst Southern drivers to win a better deal. Strike plans were suspended, however, after Southern made a...

UCU members at Lewisham and Southwark college (LeSoCo) have voted by 85% for strikes over job cuts. At a meeting with the chair of the college governors, union reps made it quite clear that we were going to fight to build a college, not a scrapheap composed of redundant education workers and working-class people denied a further education. Already, more than a hundred students have demonstrated to governors their opposition at a meeting at the Camberwell site. This is only the beginning of a range of actions, on all sites, which will now unfold over the coming weeks. By the last week in June...

Max Watson, London Met Unison branch secretary, spoke to Solidarity The Section 188 redundancy consultation is now over and we are waiting for the results. Management used changes to the law for a shorter, 45 day, consultation, and we got this extended by just a week. It is likely they will make people reapply for their jobs, forcing people to go through the very upsetting process of competing with their colleagues. We’ve fought against job cuts and privatisation, and to defend overseas students before — our members are used to fighting management and are prepared to do so again. We had...

On Wednesday 13 May students occupied part of the Manchester Business School, Manchester University. They reclaimed the space, which was being redeveloped into a £50 million “executive education centre”, in protest at the Tories’ continuing marketisation in education. The university has prevented anyone else entering the occupied area through aggressive security measures. Initially management were also preventing deliveries of food to the occupation, but backed down on this measure following after national media attention. The University’s management are still refusing to let anyone into the...

In 2010, when the Tory government reduced universities’ direct funding and replaced it with a licence to charge students £9,000 fees, it looked like that move might bring cuts in universities. In fact universities are about the only area of apparently public endeavour to have had a boom — of a special sort. The Financial Times (17 April) reports: “Across London, from the Olympic Park in the east to White City in the west, universities are breaking new ground... [with] campus extensions, building projects and acquisitions already worth a combined total of more than £4 billion”. It is not just...

Warwick University has set up a company, Teach Higher, which until the University backtracked, was going to be a means to outsource hourly paid academic staff. The University now say Teach Higher will not be a subsidary, but a department within the university. Staff will be directly employed on current terms and conditions. It is good the University have backtracked but no one can be complacent. At the very least a Teach High “department” will be a way of streaming casualisation throughout the University — employment more hourly-paid academic staff. Ultimately Teach Higher could become...

Inspired by and in solidarity with occupations at LSE and UAL [University of the Arts London], we, an autonomous group of students at Kings College London, have been occupying the Council Room since Wednesday 25 March in protest at the undemocratic marketisation of our institution. KCL is run in line with the neo-liberal consensus on education, that it is a commodity to be quantified and organised according to market fundamentalist principles. We believe in free education accessible to all and demand greater accountability and democratic involvement by students and workers. Other key demands...

For centuries, university campuses have been, relatively speaking, a haven within capitalist society for free debate and criticism. A high point, for much of the 20th century, was the right which universities in Latin America won to keep the police off their campuses and have university officials elected by staff and students. That began with the University Reform Movement in Córdoba, in northern Argentina, which opposed a focus on learning by rote, inadequate libraries, poor instruction, and restrictive admission criteria, and spread across the subcontinent. The student radicalism which...