Local Action at QMUL: September 2023

Welcome to Queen Mary! Welcome back to Queen Mary! We had hoped to welcome you in person, but unfortunately we will only be able to do so on the picket line. This blogpost (also digested in this leaflet) explains why action is taking place, what shape it will take, as well as some suggestions if you want to help draw attention to what is being done to Queen Mary.

What’s happening?

There will be strikes in Welcome Week and Week 1, so from 18-22 September and 25-29 September.
On strike days, staff withdraw their labour. Your individual teachers and tutors will let you know if a planned session will not go ahead where possible.
There will be picket lines at East Gate and Queens’ Gate in the mornings. Pickets are hopeful places! Everybody is welcome to join for a chat about Higher Education, about QMUL, working conditions in the UK, etc. There will be snacks. Come and get snacks.

What’s happening with the Marking & Assessment Boycott?

The Marking & Assessment Boycott has been called off and is now over – sadly without meaningful negotiations leading to improvements in working conditions
Staff will be marking submitted assessments. But they cannot do so at lightning speed. Students’ work deserves attention, which is why the ordinary turn-over of marks is 15 working days. Senior managers are trying to impose an impossible deadline, but that will only result in poor marking and non-preparation for the new term.
If the local strikes go ahead, these could impact on the timing of the return of marks.

Why these local strikes?

QMUL Senior Management has responded punitively and uniquely to national industrial action. Working conditions across Higher Education in the UK have been deteriorating and while staff has tried to shield students from the worst outwashes, the spiralling student-staff ratio, growing demands on staff’s time, chronic underresourcing is not sustainable – we spell out the deteriorating working and learning conditions in an earlier blogpost and QMUL Community Solidarity explains the situation in this booklet. Staff in 147 universities undertook industrial action to try to get university vice-chancellors to stop punching down to staff and instead invest in a Higher Education that works for all. At QMUL, this was met with threats of 100% pay deductions, not just for strike days (which is ordinary: people don’t get paid on a day they withdraw labour), but also for every day staff refused to reschedule work they had withdrawn on a lawful strike day. During the national Marking and Assessment Boycott, QMUL Senior Management has been equally punitive. They are deducting 113 days of pay, or nearly 1/3rd of staff’s annual pay for participation in the marking boycott. To put that in perspective: workloads allocate at the very most 8% of staff’s time to marking.

QMUL senior management is now demanding staff drop all other obligations and return marks within six working days. Aside from being cruel to staff, this is unfair on students, whose work deserves to be assessed with sufficient time. Piles of essays, exams, and dissertations, all processed at lightening speed: this does not serve students’ interests.

These ‘other obligations’ which staff are supposed to drop aren’t indulgences, they are the preparation work for the new academic year (such as setting up the QMPlus pages, drawing up bibliographies, writing out guidance). This is not feasible. Since we’re not afforded the time to prepare for term, we can’t start term.

Senior Management is issuing threats that non-compliance with impossible turn-over of marks are ‘disciplinary matters’. With a management as unreasonable as this, it is difficult to talk. They seem to only listen when there is industrial action and the spotlight of the local community and the press. That is why there are now local strikes.

Why is there industrial action across UK Higher Education?

UK Higher Education has been put under a lot of strain. Senior managers are choosing to push the pressure onto members of staff rather than address the needs of Higher Education. Universities are overrecruiting students in order to cash in on student fees. And they have simultaneously been aiming to cut all costs by underspending on staff, both through overworking staff and underpaying staff.

Staff have been trying to shield students of the worst outwashes of this, because staff care about students and about what Higher Education could be. While student-staff ratios spiralled, staff tried to support students as best they could despite the increasing demands on their time and being beyond capacity for contact hours. Staff on precarious contracts have been moving across the country to follow jobs, have been uncertain about what teaching job they would have across the summer, and have not shown to students that they prepared for class and did marking without any of that being paid for or properly workloaded.

This pressure on staff is unsustainable. But for years, Senior Managers (through their boards of Universities UK (UUK) and Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA)) had refused to meaningfully engage with calls for change. Industrial Action was the last resort to make managers listen.

We explain the situation in UK Higher Education in more detail in this blogpost from October 2022 – points 4 and 5.

What do strikes look like at university?

Industrial Action makes visible the value of labour by withdrawing it — the value which senior managements deny in their payment and actions, but cannot deny when confronted with its withdrawal.

Staff will withdraw labour on the days of the strike. Individual teachers and tutors will let you know if a planned session will not go ahead.
There will be picket lines at East Gate and Queens’ Gate. There are not scary places! Do join for a chat about Higher Education or QMUL or working conditions at large in the UK. Many students are working a part-time job alongside education; we’re all workers, let’s talk about how to make our work spaces less toxic.
There will be teach-outs. These are organised conversation at the picket lines where staff and students discuss topical conversations, learn about interesting research, engage in meaningful crafting, etc. We occasionally get speakers from outside to give a talk. There is an overview of previous teach-outs here. Everybody is welcome. Keep an eye on our socials for details.

Strikes are always a last resort, when all other attempts at negotiation and conversation have broken down. While strikes are the most visible aspect of unions at the university, it’s far from the only aspect. Students drew up this brilliant booklet explaining trade unions and industrial action.

What can students do?

Students can write to Council, the governing body of the university, and the only ones the Senior Executive Team is beholden to. Contact details and a template you can adapt to your own liking here.
Share information with fellow students! It is difficult to get the right information to students, since any discussion of union participation and industrial action is being used against staff – did you see the snitch forms management set up last year? But it matters a lot to get the right information to students, to avoid management spin as well as demystify some of the concerns about local action. Spreading this blogpost, tweets, instagram posts on socials helps a lot in informing peers.
Sign the open letter calling on the Principal to put striking workers’ wages in the students hardship fund. Senior management is withholding hundreds of thousands of pounds from staff. It is unclear where that is going.
Write to your MP, especially when they’re Labour, to call on them to intervene in the anti-strike policies. There’s template and a link to contact emails here.
Come and say hi on the picket! Pickets are hopeful spaces where we make a better university together. More info about where our pickets are here.
Tell the the QMUL Student Union what is going on. The QMSU represents students, and enabling them to tell management how many students contacted them about the situation will give them more power to intervene. The Student Union prefers to be contacted on su-representation@qmul.ac.uk.

Previous blogposts with info

On the start of action in October 2022, explaining why national strikes are taking place, what shape strikes take at university, and why staff has no other choice.
On local action at QMUL in March 2023, in response to draconian deductions of pay (26 days of pay deducted for 6 days of strike).
On the Marking & Assessment boycott, explaining what it is and what it isn’t.
On the way management at QMUL tried to neutralise the Marking & Assessment Boycott and those mitigations’ effect on students.