I.07. Organising As Workers In Higher Education: In, Against And Beyond The University

How should university staff organise in their own workplace? Universities are under attack. The political forces of the authoritarian right have universities firmly in their sights. Financial pressures, funding cuts and a rebalancing of international student markets are fostering redundancies in some university systems. These political attacks provide an added layer of crisis on top of university systems that were already deeply hierarchical and, to various degrees, marketised.
In this context, organising as workers to defend and improve our working conditions for all those who work in universities is crucial. In this session we want to bring together university workers actively involved in trades union or labo(u)r organising in their universities. Our aim is not simply to share research but to use the conference as a space to build solidarity and democratic networks of practical knowledge as workers in struggle. We invite papers that stem from practical organising and activism in universities as places of work.

Papers may explore but are not limited to:

• Reports of current strikes and active struggles in universities

• The challenges of organising academics

• Effective recruitment strategies

• Bridging differences and inequalities between different staff groups

• Organising against precarity or casualisation

• Campaigns on pay and/or workload

• Addressing racism/sexism/classism/disability as workplace matters

• Negotiation strategies

• Employment law in struggles in higher education

• The role of education unions in transnational solidarity with Palestine, Sudan and beyond

• Managing data to build union strength

• Union democracy locally or nationally

• Organising department reps

• Political education/training of union reps