On strike

Today should be my first day as an associate lecturer at The Manchester Metropolitan University, delivering my first session on design ethics to an apprentice group I’ve looked forward to meeting. Instead, I’m on strike.

The UCU union has called nationwide strikes over pay, workload, inequality, and casualisation. I’m not yet a member of the union, and as a practitioner working to an unpredictable schedule, casual contracts suit me better than regular commitments. Perhaps this doesn’t look like my fight.

But the minute I’m paid to prep, teach, and mark a module I become an educator and even, to my surprise, an academic. My loyalty has to be to my new colleagues. The cost of living is soaring, but our peers in academia find themselves undervalued, their opportunities squeezed, pensions slashed, and hostile policies devaluing their expertise and futures.

I’ve been absurdly fortunate to fall into a career that’s overpaid me and given me valuable knowledge. It means I have power. I want to engage with academia but I can do it on my terms: I don’t need the work, and to be candid the pay won’t make a difference to my life. I can choose my moments.

So I have to use that power wisely. I could easily, carelessly make things worse, swooping in and working when others won’t, further restricting opportunities for lecturers with better qualifications and a lifetime of pedagogical skills I don’t have. I can’t and won’t do that.

Of course, it’s a dreadful situation for students too. I feel for them. I hope they realise that academics are striking precisely because their working conditions don’t allow them to educate students properly. I should also point out the administrators on the MMU programme have been gracious and totally understanding. My quarrel isn’t with them.

Stepping into a unionised, precarious industry (academia) while also working in a non-unionised, in-demand industry (tech) has been a whiplash-inducing challenge. I’ve had to think deeply and quickly about the power I have and how I can use that to support my values. Showing solidarity and refusing to cross the picket line is my answer. Academics deserve better, as do students. Educating the next generation is perhaps the best way I can help my field, but I can’t lecture anyone about ethics without first standing up for the values I hold myself.