On The Picket Line At Leeds University: ‘I Will Strike For As Long As It Takes’
On the first day of a three-day strike by university staff over pensions changes, low pay, and precarious working conditions, third year PhD student Mattia Dessì shared his feelings of insecurity. Standing among fellow strike participants outside the University of Leeds, he expressed his hopes for a postdoc position or any job that could offer him some level of stability. With dismay, he acknowledged that stability was unlikely in the next five to ten years. “There are days when I think that I should just stop my PhD and do something else,” he confessed. Meanwhile, a second year law student named Lewis Lockwood voiced his disillusionment with academic aspirations. Although he’d come to the university with hopes of researching human rights, hearing academics’ “horror stories” about conditions had left him discouraged. The strike participants included musicians and dancers performing among the picket lines, with protest songs such as “Solidarity Forever” and original lyrics set to the tune of “The Lion Sleeps Tonight.” Faculty and students joined together, expressing profound concern over pay cuts and the casualisation of early career contracts, as well as the difficulties this creates for recommending academic career paths to students. Dr Kate Hardy, an associate professor in the university’s business school, explained candidly why she struggles to encourage women who want to have children to go into academia. “You will face five to ten years of temporary contracts, when you can’t make decisions about your life, your fertility, where you live,” she warned. Meanwhile, Mark Taylor-Batty, an associate professor in theatre studies, voiced outrage over young faculty members facing pension cuts of between 40 and 80 percent. His concern was echoed by another member of the strike, who’d held a fixed-term contract since 1994. UCU general secretary Jo Grady’s pep talk to strikers won cheers, with her declaration that the industrial action will continue into next year if the workers’ demands aren’t met by Christmas. Dr. Hardy affirmed that strikes are essential because regardless of the money she loses, she still loses more out of her pension. And undergraduate student Owen Reese-Hattersley regarded the disruption to class schedules as a small price to pay for ensuring far better learning results. For Dessì, the adverse working conditions were gradually destroying what he loved about research, as the commercialisation of education progressively deviated from the values universities should transmit to society.
