Pre-strike portmanteau post

It's Tuesday. I wouldn't normally post this early in the week (it's quite a while since I was blogging 4 times per day!) but the rest of the week isn't going to be normal.

Today sees the first Staff Summer Party over at the other campus. There are rides and ice-cream stalls and a bucking bronco because that's what academics really want to do apparently. Truth be told, a summer tea party after a long year is rather a nice idea, but this one falls on the eve of our strike. We all got a letter from the Vice-Chancellor explaining that we should all be satisfied with a 1.1% pay rise after 8 years of below-inflation settlements, and that he's very very disappointed with our ingratitude (I paraphrase, but only slightly). I've suggested that the party be renamed the Let Them Eat Cake bash, but apparently that's not helpful.

I wouldn't mind, but that very day the Times Higher Education Supplement published a report which singled out our VC for his 19.6% pay rise: a very handy £44,000 which should see him through the summer. The Chair of the Governors told THES that the rise is due to the VC's excellent performance, while forgetting to mention – and this is in the publicly available records – that the VC's salary is being increased to the median for the sector as a matter of policy.

Now, I'm a governor of this institution (though I'm excluded from the Renumeration Committee) and am bound by a duty of confidentiality, so I can't give you all the details, but I can give you my view. Academic staff are not rewarded for 'results': we're assessed and appraised and criticised and occasionally praised, but not rewarded. Only senior executives – some of whom are demonstrably ignorant of what goes on in classrooms – are afforded bonus payments and a salary scheme which depends on an all-universities pay survey. What this essentially means is that the senior managements of all universities are on a one-way conveyor belt of pay uplifts. If senior pay is benchmarked to a sector average, all they have to do is tell each other that this year, they've deserved an increase. Hey presto, they all get one! As we say round here, credit and money rise to the top. Only blame trickles downwards.

To be honest, if it wasn't for the sight of people on 20% pay rises sending out threatening emails telling us we're greedy I wouldn't mind so much about the salary. What I do object to is the complete absence of analytical rigour. Universities' monies are loans from students, to be paid off (over decades). I want to see a Vice Chancellor or a Head of Finance of a university – which is a charity, let's not forget – stand in front of a student and explain why he or she deserves to soak up the £9000 fees of 30 students (45 for Birmingham University's VC) while they're being taught often by insecurely-employed, part-time teachers who are expected to produce world-class research, generate external funding and top-class National Student Survey reports while often being employed on zero-hours contracts.

Academics aren't fat-cats. We're like footballers in that our careers start very late: I did 4 degrees to become fully qualified and worked on an hourly-paid basis until I was 34, so I've missed out on at least a decade of savings, pension contributions and housing costs. My female colleagues have done the same, except that those who take time off to have children lose out even more. Our pensions have been slashed while the contributions have increased. And yet I'm expected to keep quiet while the VC gets a top-up equivalent to my annual salary. We're not like footballers in that football managers don't get all the money when the team plays well.

We all know what happened to the banking sector. They were captured by a group of employees who treated their institutions as personal piggy banks, and therefore thought it was OK to use shady and often illegal methods to achieve short-term gains for themselves while bringing about a global recession for which we all paid. Education is too important to be captured by uncollegiate, self-reinforcing circles of sharp-suited snake-oil salesmen and women, convinced by their MBA training that they and they alone have 'saved' their institutions and deserve corporate rewards, while the teachers, technicians and support staff are simply fungible assets to be sweated and discarded.

Universities need managers, and the skills required to keep a complex, enormous institution like a university going aren't necessarily the same as those required to propel an academic to the top of her field – I don't think we can manage without them. However, I do now feel like the public service ideals which underpinned the collective enterprise of the academy have been replaced by a Directors and Hands structure whereby our views are unwelcome and our labour to be sweated.

How can I say to my nephews and nieces – and my fresh-faced PhD students –  that they should consider a career in teaching and research when they could get a decent job at 21 with a BA or even no degree at all? My life is mostly brilliant: I spend all day talking about books and get paid for it. I spend my classroom time with students and colleagues who are a pleasure to be with – but I'm old. If I were 21 and burdened with £50,000 of debts I'm not sure that the simple pleasures of intellectual enlightenment would make up for another decade of unemployment, another £50,000 of debt, of scrabbling around for enough hours to make ends meet, followed by decades of bullying and pay cuts delivered by someone with a chauffeur-driven limo and an air of bemused contempt? That's a tough gig.

That's why tomorrow I'll be out on the picket line with my bags of peanuts (representing our pay offer) and some 'filled pockets' Whiskas treats for the fat cats as they sweep past us.

The King and the Animals: a tale of university folk

Long, long ago, an eternal winter had fallen upon The Hegemon. Ruled by a cruel Queen, the animals who lived there shivered under the lash, and any who dared disagree with her were lashed into silenced. Nothing she touched turned to gold. Rather she and her henchmen managed to despoil and degrade what had been a happy and harmonious place. One day, having deceived the Gods of Hefce who gave her gold, the Empress of Hegemon announced that hundreds of the animals would have to be culled to make up the shortfall. Cowed and resentful, the survivors retreated to their burrows and nests, fearful that they too would never see spring.

And then, out of the blue, the wicked Queen was gone. In her place was a new ruler. The snow melted, the clouds lifted, the grass waxed green and the animals emerged from their hiding places to sniff the fresh air and nibble on the tender young shoots. The King seemed wise and friendly. Gone was the lash and the cold stare that would freeze young animals into stone. Instead, he was seen strolling about The Hegemon, talking to the kits and encouraging the fauna to speak bravely and boldly. And The Hegemon did prosper.

But alas! Honeyed words soon turned to blows. The animals looked at their hungry cubs and threadbare homes, at the labour tripled by the absence of their fallen comrades, and begged of the King a little more fodder from his bulging granaries, such as had not been granted for many a year. At this the King grew angry and the animals did perceive that though he wore a glove of velvet, his fist was made of iron. They resolved to resist, and withdrew their labour from the King's field, a little at a time, but he waxed imperious: for every short rest they took, he would punish them by removing their fodder for a whole day. Even the neighbouring kingdoms had not been so vindictive, so cruel, so vengeful. It mattered not to the King of The Hegemon that his subjects loved him no longer. The animals returned to his fields and mines, broken and saddened, but victory was not enough for him. The creatures had to be humiliated, lest they ever again were tempted to resist his might.

And yet… hardened to the beatings under successive rulers, the doughty creatures of the air, the forests and the soil. They were many and Kings were few. In every hidden pool, glade, burrow and nest the gathered, sharing their nuts and their strength. Soon they would pour hence to test the King's resolve in the Halls of Justice, and in the meantime, the King's harvest would rot in the fields.

Dear Tristram

I'm sorry to harp on about this. I'd rather post something about the books I'm reading or the music to which I'm listening - but Tristram Hunt's betrayal of his colleagues and political friends is really bugging me. Here's the letter I sent him and Ed Miliband. I encourage you to do the same. Their email addresses are ed.miliband.mp@parliament.uk and tristramhunt@parliament.uk

Dear Ed and Tristram,

I am a Labour Party member and a university lecturer, after four degrees (BA, MA, PhD and PGCE), ten years of extra debt and many years of hourly-paid casual work. At 38, I have only been employed full-time and with pension rights for 6 years. In that time, my pension has been cut, my pension contributions increased and my retirement date extended far into the future. My salary has not increased in real terms since I secured this job, though my workload, class sizes and management expectations all have.   

I look at my students and see bright, eager people, many of whom would like to become the next generation of intellectual leaders and educators like you once were Tristram. But every year, weighed down by £50,000 of debt, they’re forced to take ‘socially useless’ jobs in for example banking rather than follow their hearts and give back to society. While the senior management of many universities demand corporate levels of pay ‘to attract talent’, academic pay is declining and it’s hard to attract a new generation when conditions are declining.  

This is why I was so utterly disappointed to see a Shadow Minister for Education crossing a picket line to deliver a course - ironically - on Marx. I am not naive enough to expect a Labour politician to support an industrial dispute any more, but I would have thought that Tristram would have had the good manners to simply reschedule the session or use another entrance. Given the caution and sophistication of your political activity, I can only conclude that publicly crossing a picket line of one’s colleagues is a deliberate political act designed to deliver some kind of message to the political right.  

Despite being an expert on Marxist theory, Mr Hunt has clearly failed to learn the Labour virtues of solidarity and empathy. I would like to stress to you how disappointed I am by yesterday’s action. Even though I’m on the Board of Governors of my university, I was on the UCU picket line and worked hard to explain to my students that withdrawing our labour is both deeply unpleasant and our only remaining option in the pay dispute. How can I talk to them about the joys of social democratic unity in an individualistic neoliberal society when my own party’s leaders are so willing to betray their former colleagues and political allies? 

I’m not asking either of you to support our strike (though I wish you could), but I would like you to contemplate whether crossing a picket line is what you got into Labour politics for.
Yours,
Plashing Vole

PS: Here's the automated email reply from Tristram:

However, as I am sure you will understand, my immediate priorities will be my parliamentary duties as Shadow Secretary of State for Education and to my constituents in Stoke-on-Trent Central.

Yes, it really looked like it as he strolled across a picket line to deliver a class in London.

Are You Katie Hopkins Or A Human Being?

Another strike day tomorrow. Look out for my custom-made placards. We'll be handing out Heroes chocolates for strikers and supporters, and peanuts to strike-breakers, to subtly symbolise what we're being offered. 

Here are my designs - rough and ready but they'll do. 

In case you missed it, this is what professional troll Katie Hopkins said about academics and university support staff, some of whom don't even receive the living wage: 

Lecturers - get your idle arses off strike and back in the lecture theatres pronto. Be warned.

Which is pretty much what my management said in a charming note reminding us that

The Vice Chancellor, in his letter to staff in December 2013, indicated that a 1% salary uplift for staff on nationally agreed pay scales was both fair and consistent with what many other large public and private sector organisations were awarding. In fact, many organisations have not awarded a pay increase for several years and local authorities in our region are having to look at making posts redundant. We believe that our staff, both academic and non-academic receive better pay than many non-HE employees 

I'm sure they do believe it. But then what's the comparative group? We earn more than Bangladeshi football-stitchers, but less than dentists. If the university's really starting a race to the bottom, let's start at the heights. Next time the Executives come to renegotiate their contracts, let's say to them 'I'm sorry, but people outside the institution earn less, so we're cutting your pay'. I'm pretty certain that the response will be 'but you need to attract talent'. It's incentives for them, and pay cuts for us. 

Let's not forget too that most academics don't get full-time jobs until they're in their 30s. I was 34. So that's no savings, no pensions and no National Insurance contributions for several years while I pursued the 4 degrees required to fully qualify for a job for which the salary is back to 2008 levels, the pension have been savagely cut, pension contributions increased and for which the qualification period has been extended. Not only am I getting poorer, I won't get a pension until 2050, with the distinct possibility of that date getting more and more distant.  

How are we going to attract the generation behind me? What are we offering? Bigger Classes – Research In Your Spare Time – Less Pay – Longer Hours – Worse Pension (and if you don't meet your research requirements, you can sling your hook). 
Stay classy, education employers!

Despatches from the picket line

So here I am, back at my desk after our first 2 hour strike in pursuit of our pay claim. In case you haven't been following it, we've been awarded 1%. Given that prices are rising at at least double that, it's a pay cut. Not the first one either: inflation's been up to 4% and our pay awards have been as low as 0.5%. When inflation is taken into account, my salary is back to 2008 levels, though my duties are very much of 2014 vintage.

To make matters worse, our pensions have been cut, our pension contributions increased and our retirement dates extended far into the future. So far, my retirement date is 2048, and it will be extended further than that before then. I fully expect to be commuting to work on a jet-pack, as a bag of bones hanging limply from a sentient metal exoskeleton, while some robot Vice-Chancellor demands to know why I'm not using the 24 hour telepathic feedback system installed for the Martian exchange students. What really depresses me is that we'll never recruit a new generation of academics. Students graduate with massive debts to pay off, and won't be attracted by a profession in which research and teaching (the good bits) are rewarded by ever-decreasing salaries, while becoming a sharp-suited upper-management axe-wielder attracts vast pay, perks and prestige.

And as if to ad insult to injury, the university's management ha budgeted for below cost-of-living settlements for the next four years, which means that teaching staff will have got poorer for an entire decade. Is the same true of senior management? Of course not: rather a lot of them are on £100,000+, while the VC is on significantly more than £200,000. They negotiate their contracts individually, making a case to a hand-picked bunch of chaps and chapesses just like them. They need to be 'retained' by massive salaries of course: shame they don't value our service just the same. Take the Vice-Chancellor of Sheffield University, who had a handy little pay rise to cover his gas bill this year: this charming gentleman is offering 1% to academic staff and refuses to raise support staff salaries to a living wage. Thankfully his new salary enables him to keep body and soul together – Sir Keith has gone from a pitiful £269,000 to a more reasonable £374,000, a modest increase of only 39%. No wonder there's nothing left in the kitty for the cleaners and teachers.

So, off we went for our strike today. In an additional burst of petty spitefulness, our Executive decided that our 2 hour strike would be punished by docking an entire day's pay, so we'll be seeing them in court very soon, as I cheerily informed the head of HR when she calm skulking round. Hoping to see a pathetic, reduced turn-out, she was greeted by a large rumbustious group which was receiving a lot of support from students despite the vile and disingenuous propaganda circulated by the management and students' union, which is sadly little more than a marketing wing of the university. Management claimed that our strike was 'disruptive' - failing conspicuously to recognise that locking us out for a full day is rather more disruptive than 2 hours of action.

Interestingly, the head of HR told the governors that they were sticking to the 'nationally agreed' 1% settlement. Now, call me a pedantic old teacher of English literature and communications, but I was under the impression that an 'agreement' needed two or more parties,

a negotiated and typically legally binding arrangement between parties as to a course of action

rather than the various members of UCEA, the employers' association , and that the poor illiterate must have mistyped the word 'imposed'. Either that, or she was deliberately misleading the governors, and I wouldn't like to believe that.

We're on strike again next week, and again the week after. Another day's pay lost, more disruption for students. We don't like it, but it's nothing compared with the tatty, demoralised, exhausted and downgraded condition higher education will be in if we let these grasping bureaucrats turn what used to be a collegiate profession into a low-rent, low-trust, low-quality service industry.

Oops: almost forgot. Kittens for the local paper.

'What do we want? Fair pay in HE!' Best picket line ever. 

Solidarity, baby!

Hi everyone. I'm not blogging properly again: it's been one of the busiest weeks in years and I'm rushed off my feet. But here's a letter I've just sent to the President of The Dark Place's Students' Union. 

Dear President, 

thank you for your email asking me if I could help out with the Students’ Union’s University Challenge effort this year. As you know, I’m a huge fan of the show and would love to see our students do well.  

However, I feel I must decline your request. As you know, academic staff took strike action yesterday and are working to contract. This is because our salaries have reverted to their 2008 level, with further real-terms reductions projected some years into the future. As a hard-working, committed, conscientious academic, I support students well beyond my contractual duties, as any of them will tell you. My colleagues in the library, the cleaning staff, the caterers and security guards all do their best for students, in public and in a thousand little ways which might never be noticed. This university is rightly proud of the ‘student experience’, but it never acknowledges that its success is dependent on the good will and free labour provided by staff who go the extra mile, not for money, but because it’s the right thing to do.  

Yesterday, I stood on the picket line, in the cold, for hours. Between explaining to strike-breaking colleagues and passing students why I wasn’t in a nice warm classroom – which is my natural and favourite environment – I followed the Twitter feeds of fellow academics and students across the country. I saw Students’ Unions at Warwick, Birmingham, Sussex and many other places joining their friends on the picket lines, or occupying their universities.

What you won't see at The Dark Place

They know that to attract and retain good teachers, cooks, cleaners and other workers who make the ‘student experience’ so good, universities need to stop squeezing their standard of living.  

What did your Students’ Union do? As far as I can tell, the Student Council has no policy on this matter. The Executive decided to make policy in breach of its own constitution, and decided to remain ‘neutral’ as you put it to me. I and my UCU colleagues are not ‘neutral’. Nor are you fellow student leaders in the NUS and across the country. They know that good staff make life good for students. I am desperately sorry that the Dark Place’s Students’ Union is ‘neutral’ when faced with declining living standards.  

I’m sorry I can’t help with University Challenge and wish you well. But it’s just a giggle in the end. What will really help students is solidarity in our fight to make sure that this institution can attract and retain motivated, secure staff, whatever their jobs: some of them are or will be your members. We support your members every day: when it came to the crunch, you failed to support us. Until this changes, I won’t be taking on additional duties, however much I enjoyed them. 

Yours,
Plashing Vole 

Why I will be on strike tomorrow.

Those of you who pay attention to the times I post here on Vole will be aware that far from being a lazy shirker getting fat on state-funded largesse at the expense of 'hard-working families' (copyright: all politicians), I actually find it hard to tear myself away from the dear old place. Being on campus for 12 hours per day is pretty normal for me.

And yet tomorrow I'll be standing outside my workplace, stamping my frozen feet and brandishing a placard and very politely asking colleagues and students not to enter the building. Not just to experience what I've read about in the 1930s proletarian novels I spend my life researching, but because we have a serious problem.

By most standards, I'm quite well paid: more than a schoolteacher of the same age and seniority, vastly less than a doctor or lawyer. However, that's just the headline figure. Like most of my colleagues, I've only achieved secure employment very late. After my first degree, I needed to get an MA and a PhD, which took a long time and sunk me in debt. For several years after that, I got by on hourly-paid teaching: a bit of Politics here, a semester of Sociology there, a dollop of Media Studies. The work wasn't reliable, stable or predictable. Pay arrived months late, and didn't cover the hours marking, research and extra tuition required to do a good job for my students and my colleagues. Summer was entirely income-free and a pension was a distant rumour. Financial disaster was narrowly averted a few times through gifts and by selling treasured possessions. I finally achieved permanent status (with the help of sympathetic management) in my mid-thirties, long after most people would be thinking about mortgages and families.

There's a whole army of colleagues out there teaching classes every day without a scrap of security, and carrying huge debts earned in pursuit of a moderately paid job. They spend their salaries on petrol and train tickets as they shuttle between 3 hours at X University and 2 hours at Y College in the vain hope that one day, one day a bean-counter will realise their true worth and find some way to given them a decent job. You just can't tell us apart because we're all so damned impressive in class (ahem). Even those of us with decent jobs got there very late, meaning that our apparently excellent pensions aren't nearly so gold-plated as you'd think. My retirement date is currently 2046, and it's absolutely certain that it will be extended several years beyond that by the time I get there. Most of my students think I'm a boring old fart now: what will they make of a septuagenarian trying to comprehend their cultural world by then, trapped in the classroom by the urgent need to earn enough to avoid burning my books for fuel? Academics are like footballers, only more attractive and less likely to steal each others' partners or start fights in nightclubs (some exceptions apply): our careers are shorter than in other professions, and rely on the repeated demonstration of very individual skills – a decent salary and secure pension isn't too much to ask.

The immediate cause of this strike is this year's pay offer. It's 1%, which is an effective pay-cut because inflation is around 3-3.5%. This is the fifth consecutive pay cut, meaning that we're 13% poorer than we were in 2008. I hear politicians and business leaders explaining that management bonuses and huge salaries are essential to attract talent: how are universities meant to attract the bright young academics of the future if they're left with little to eat but professional pride? You can bet your ass that most universities' senior executives aren't accepting these settlements: only dishing them out. My university is spending nearly £40m on much-needed buildings to offer students top-quality educational opportunities: if only they could find the tinier sum needed to make sure that those labs and lecture halls will be staffed by eager, motivated teachers.

My university recently renamed the Personnel department 'Human Resources'. Well, let me tell you this: Soylent Green is people! We're not just a fixed cost, or a 'fungible asset' (as one of my IT friends was once called by his boss). Yet the way the government and the more business-aligned academic leaders talk, we're no longer professionals with duties beyond the merely contractual (to society, to students, to public culture), we're disposable delivery units to be sweated and discarded.

Tomorrow morning, my students are going to be confused and upset when their classes are cancelled and they see me asking for their support. I hope they will see our cause as just, and as a microcosm of this country's ugly turn towards a low-wage, low-skill, high-dividend economy in which shareholder profits trump justice, fairness, the public good and collective benefit. Some of those students, carrying £50,000 of undergraduate debt, will be lost to academia because they can't face additional years of debt and study to qualify for a job which pays less and less and attracts only the scorn and hatred of the political class and their media lackeys.

I can live with a fifth pay cut in a row. I'm striking because I can't see where this will ever end.

Wish you were here?

I'm still at UCU Congress in Brighton. I keep getting texts asking me if I've been to this or that tourist attraction, restaurant or beach.

The answer to all of the above is 'no'. It's very much not like this:



Even though my hotel is on the sea front. I don't even have an external window: mine looks out to the lobby. And the conference venue has no windows either. I could not tell you what the weather has been like today.

So what do we do all day? Well, I've done a lot of marking, and I've been alternately bored, angry and frustrated. Some of this is good. I went to the anti-casualisation meeting, for instance. I knew the situation was bad, but not this bad. Students should be outraged that so many of their teachers are on hourly-paid and zero-hours contracts. I did it myself for 6 years, in seven different departments. The teaching was fun but the students were short-changed to some extent. I was expected to be an expert but I was only paid for the hours in the classroom. No holiday pay or sickness pay. I would often wait 6 months to get paid £300, surviving in the meantime on a huge overdraft and family bail-outs.

Casual staff are expected to be as good as their salaried colleagues, and as learned, but they only get paid for a few months of the year, which seems utterly dishonest to me. One of my colleagues teaches more than any of the full-time staff. She also works at another university 60 miles away, on another crappy contract. She has published multiple papers and a book, which the other university wants to claim for their REF submission, despite not helping her do that research at all. We have a policy of fractionalising contracts to regularise long-term visiting lecturers, but it appears to have been abandoned. We'd rather just exploit the skills and hard work of such people like parasites.

Apart from anything else, it seems short-sighted and self-defeating of the university system. All that time and money spent producing highly-qualified intellectuals who we then abandon or treat like dirt. And yet we've all accepted it as a rite of passage. Except that it isn't: I heard from someone today who has been on casual contracts since 1973. Two years before I was born. This is one of the dirty secrets of the global education system: it wouldn't run without the systematic exploitation of insecure, often young workers. I believe it's called 'McDonaldization'.

So meeting other people to plan how to resist this kind of rubbish is great. What's not so great is spending hours on motions nobody in their right mind would oppose ('Comrades: it's our duty as Trades Unionists to condemn cruelty to kittens'), and the even longer hours spent either (depending on your perspective) as HQ plotting against the rank and file or the rank and file plotting against HQ. There are also plenty of people with whom I agree on principle, but who spend the time making grand speeches that get us absolutely nowhere, or angling for cheap applause.

Ah well. It's the formal dinner tonight. I think I'll skip the 'disco', on the basis that I'd rather not dance to anyone who thinks a disco is still a thing. I accidentally bought some more books from the conference stall, so I might settle down with some Badiou or Baudrillard. Or some other French philosopher whose name starts with B. And of course there's marking to be done… I'll always have the marking.

Choo-Choose Life

Hi everybody. How was your bank holiday weekend, if you're in a country that had one? I spent Saturday and Sunday marking essays. Saturday was fine – a big pile of good work. Sunday was harder: some plagiarism and a lower standard in general. I managed to get 50 done, so I had Monday off to go walking in Consall Woods: a nature reserve, good hills and valleys, a canal and a steam train line. I even got sunburned (it's that pale Irish bog-trotting skin: I evolved to be waterproof, carrying the turf home to cook the family potato, not for global warming – ironically caused by my ancestors draining bogs and burning the peat).

I took a lot of pictures but won't have time to edit them until I come back. But here are a couple.

Sadly this isn't how I'm getting to Brighton

Bluebells, Red Campion and all sorts of other wild flowers were out in force, but I discovered a field of bluebells off the track

So here I am. 50 more essays to do and I'm away at the UCU annual congress from 7 a.m. tomorrow. On the plus side, it's in Brighton. On the minus, I'll be marking rather than taking advantage of Brighton's joys. And at £10 per day for internet access at the hotel, I don't think I'll be blogging much either. Perhaps it'll be a good opportunity to recover my sanity.  Although perhaps not: last year Congress voted to abolish capitalism and to object to street lighting reductions somewhere down south. Now I'm all in favour of abolishing capitalism, but I cannot for the life of me work out how voting for it at a small trades union's meeting is actually going to do anything. Nor do I think a national education union's congress is the right forum for objecting to street lighting changes. Write to your local council!

Still, I can add to my extensive collection of leftwing sectarian groups' newspapers. It's not so much one paper for each groupuscule, it's one for each member. Which makes at least 40 newspapers. Why they aren't all blogging instead, I don't know. It's warm and dry in here.

Justice for the Halesowen 4

Hello everybody. Very busy day today, so no time to chat. But here are some pictures from Saturday's demonstration outside Halesowen College, deep in the Black Country. The college management decided that they wanted to get rid of the mathematics teachers, most of whom are solid union activists and supporters. So they dreamed up imaginary achievement targets for the students, then sacked the staff for not achieving them. The management won't talk to the union, or to ACAS, or anybody else.

So we held a demonstration outside the college, which has hosting an Open Day. All very peaceful, though determined. We got lots of support from passers-by, colleagues and students. People came from Chesterfield, Bristol, London and all sorts of places across the country to support Dave Muritu and his colleagues. The BBC claimed a turnout of 30: judge for yourself from my pictures.

The speeches were good (and short), the samosas were spicy. The only disappointment was the socialist newspaper sellers. They're a constant feature of union demonstrations and I'm a bit of a connoisseur. At last year's UCU Congress, I counted 27 different socialist newspapers, all calling for Socialist Unity (which always means 'read my paper, join my party: the rest are all splitters). This time, all we got was Socialist Worker (the SWP took the morning off from attacking its own members as 'creeping feminists' to support the action), Socialist Appeal and The Socialist. Everyone knows the way to achieve power is to sell each other hectoring newspapers…

Click to enlarge, see the rest here.

A notorious Red caught planning an act of Revolutionary violence

Beards have been mandatory on the left since Karl Marx. 

Bow ties and deerstalkers are very now on the left. 

Dispatches from the Front Line

Comrades, fraternal greetings from the Annual Congress of the Universities and Colleges Union. Ice-picks and kulaks must be left at the door on pain of internal exile to Stoke-on-Trent. Manchester is of course as wonderful as it always is. As soon as I stepped off the train, I was handed a free umbrella, better than the one I came with. It was to promote an advertising agency. Sadly (for them) I have absolutely no memory what it's called, nor any need to engage their services. But thanks anyway!

OK, I'm in a satirical mood, but I'm enjoying myself hugely. Running the gauntlet of the sectarian newspaper sellers at the door was hugely nostalgic - reminded me of my days in the NUS, sabotaging composite motions and introducing Trotskyists to Third Position Neo-Trotskyists and watching the sparks fly. What larks...

This morning I availed myself of the Morning Star, The Socialist, the Socialist Worker, the Socialist Appeal (the fact that the second Google result for that is 'split' tells you all you need to know about the Peoples' Front of Judea/Judean Peoples' Front nature of leftwing micropolitics) and - most ironically - Unity, the bulletin of one of the Communist Parties. For all my teasing, I find it utterly depressing that the various sects would rather spend their time explaining why the other sects have betrayed socialist unity than actually pursuing it. And then pursuing the Tories. I suppose it's a tacit admission that we lack the skills to persuade the public - bickering amongst ourselves is a form of displacement activity.

Everyone here is rather formidably magnificent - years of paper-selling, street-corner hectoring and of course lecturing have equipped them to deliver beautiful, pithy speeches designed to get us on our feet: one guy moved seamlessly from Marx to his toddler son. I contributed a very, very short and nervous declamation and retired, quaking. It may surprise some of you to learn that in person, we voles are shy and retiring creatures.

We've voted to reject the 1% pay offer (which makes it the fourth year of pay cuts, as inflation is much higher than 1%), to oppose the National Student Survey as methodologically flawed and capable of being used as a weapon against individual members and departments, and to achieve world peace, Cuban freedom and an end to sexism. Whether the outside world will act on these decisions is of course as yet unclear. But on the whole, it's wonderful to see people talking out important ideas seriously. Because we're all highly trained academics, we're both right on everything and good at arguing our points - but it's a bit sad that we're speaking into a vacuum. The really important work is the everyday casework and advocacy we do on our colleagues' behalf, that I can't tell you about.

OK, I'm off to a session of media training and political communication. See you on the barricades, comrades.

Cheerio!

I'm not sure how many more of these web-telegrams you'll be receiving from me this week. I'm popping of in an hour's time to attend the University and College Union annual conference, which lasts until SUNDAY? What we'll find to talk about, I don't know. It's been such a dull year in the world of education.

Still, I'm ready. I've opted for summer-weight lovat tweed with correspondent shoes for the day-time - with two choices of cravat - and of course full evening dress for the nocturnal festivities. Armed with a trusty silk umbrella, I'm ready for everything Manchester and the SWP can throw at me.

Glancing through the programme, I can see that we'll have an awfully jolly time reconciling composite motions, but in the rare moments away from the nitty-gritty, I intend to vote for Palestinian freedom, Cuban solidarity, the end of tuition fees, the abolition of misogyny and world peace. And if that doesn't do the trick, I don't know what will!

Actually, despite my teasing - born of many years attending NUS conference - I'm looking forward to it. We've been battered and abused for two years by this government, and it doesn't look like stopping. Students are being exploited, the job's getting harder and we need to follow the Quebec model (now the largest protest in Canadian history) and resist. However, I do dread the tedious sectarian bickering of the various groupuscules who think wresting control of a motion will lead to revolution by Saturday…

Meet the marchers

Contrary to the hysteria of the Daily Mail, which yesterday was openly triumphant at the prospect of 710,000 sackings from the 'bloated' public sector, yesterday's protest was packed with saddened, brave, lovely people. The people who teach you, clean your streets, wipe your bottom (as a baby and as an older person), help you with your benefits, make sure you don't drown in the local pool… all the things you might miss if you're not Jeremy Clarkson.

Apart from the incredible cold, picketing was rather fun. Not many people crossed the line, and those who did tended to look embarrassed about it. The Vice-Chancellor came to have an amiable chat, and loads of people honked and waved in support. No abuse this time, unlike previous actions. I was fed lovely pastries by well-wishers, and another scab managed to hit 'reply to all' when grovelling to management, so that's another one off the Christmas card list.

The rally was stunningly well-attended. I met lots of my students, some of them striking from their own public sector jobs, and even the speeches were short and punchy. Hearing former New Labour MP Rob Marris sound left-wing was very weird. Mind you, after 18 months of Paul Uppal, Pinochet's starting to look a bit pinko.

Here are a few of my favourite shots: click on them to enlarge. The rest are here.

Possibly my favourite of the lot. Lady with Vuvuzela. 

Ah, Vice-Chancellor, how nice of you to join us.

My Nuremberg

In advance of the UCU lecturers' strike (that'll show 'em) on November 30th - defending our pensions - our hitherto moribund SU is hosting a Question Time on Thursday, 5-7, in place of actually supporting us. In the absence of anyone better, I'll be on the panel with Melanie Philips, Alan Sugar and Alex James some SU representatives, students and university officials.

Post questions in advance or just turn up - it'll be enormous fun.

Solidarity with the Elbow Patch Kids

Yes, our colleagues at the 'redbrick' universities are starting their Work To Rule action today, in defence of their pensions. (We're on a different scheme, also under attack from the millionaires in government).

It might come as a surprise to some - especially politicians - that we all work hard. It's not just that there aren't enough of us: unlike some jobs, we don't tend to turn people away. If I have a 7-9 class in the evening (our teaching day is 9-9), students will want to talk to us afterwards. If an essay is particularly good (or bad), we will want to spend longer on it, despite having several hundred to mark within a 3 week period, during which we're teaching. We mark during the holidays, we keep up with our fields, we turn up voluntarily for weekend Open Days, we find the time to help those who are struggling and those who are shining. We happily chat about classes when we bump into students in a pub (or in one memorable case, when we're accosted in a nightclub by someone shouting 'you failed my essay'). We do all the admin that in past times would have been done by administrators (the clue's in the title).

People in other jobs put in extra effort, we know that. But our job is full of invisible extras which aren't recognised because we don't turn out a 'product', and yet our salaries, our pensions and our working conditions are under constant attack from people who think that we're idle layabouts living in a dream world. Our average working week is 55 hours rather than the contracted 40. Universities have grown used to depending on our goodwill to heap more upon us while degrading our working conditions and it's time to stop. We are full of goodwill - you shouldn't be an educator without it - but the intellectual and pastoral wellbeing of your children, partners and parents shouldn't depend on the relative exhaustion of their teachers.

The work-to-rule doesn't mean that your children will be treated badly - but they might start to realise that there's more to what we do than reading off a Powerpoint and giving marks. Support your university teachers.

Subversives, terrorists and other threats to the British Way of Life

In honour of yesterday's Daily Mail front page ('Resist the Union Bullies'), some more examples of those bullies in action at J30, with Mail-appropriate satirical captions). The whole set is here and there are more highlights in the previous 2 posts (go here and scroll down). Click on these to be confronted with the 'enemy within' on a gigantic scale!

Indoctrinated. She'll never fear the working classes now!

Look at her, sitting down rather than working for the minimum wage and a poverty-stricken retirement. 

That's right. Michael Foot has been reincarnated and he's coming for your children

Of course they're delinquents. They're under 65, which is the only qualification Daily Mail readers recognise.

Brown people expressing opinions: every Mail reader's nightmare

Lost to the tennis club and Young Conservatives. A life of drugs and abortions awaits these two.

Bono's really let himself go

Even the middle classes can be poisoned by the Doctrine of Hate peddled by subversive primary school teachers and lefty lecturers. 

Behind that cute expression, she's already planning violent revolution

And what's worse, his sticker was in English until some English people walked in!

(It's Welsh for 'Fair pensions for all')

Another of the usual anarchist suspects to be found at every demonstration

'The Gathering of the Unions', Birmingham 1832. Sorry I couldn't get a better shot. I was engraving as fast as I could, but they kept moving!

More faces of evil

J30 Special: Here are some more of the terrorists the Daily Mail warned 'parents' about (as though no parent is a public sector worker, parent of public sector workers, or descended from public sector workers). Captions are satirising the Mail of course.

That would be the newspaper which blamed us teachers for a girl's death today. That's right. 'Because' we were on strike, she sat under a tree. 'Because' we were on strike, the branch broke. 'Because' we were on strike, she died.

I wonder how the parents of this poor girl feel about the way their daughter's death has been used, and note that no reporter would actually put his or her name to this disgraceful piece:

Full set here: click these to enlarge.

Look at her evil smiling face… bet she's some kind of anarchist communist poisoning innocent children's minds

They can't even march straight

Another child lost to Satan

Ugh! Modern Art!

Celebrating the downfall of British Values!

Some of these strikers wear nice clothes! How dare they complain about their pensions!

Dreads. Brown skin. Happiness. Everything the Daily Mail fears!

He only looks innocent. Inside he's a cauldron of hatred for Middle Britain

Look at her grinning altruistic face! Burn her!