UCU union members picket in Tower Hamlets, east London, during the college strikes (Picture: Sheila McGregor)
Thousands of college workers across Britain are hitting back at poor pay and overwhelming workloads. UCU union members at over 20 colleges across the country have struck this week.
Strike dates differ from college to college, but some workers have already struck for ten days this month and last month. Dan is a rep from the Epping campus of New City College in London. He joined picket lines on Tuesday alongside workers in five colleges in the New City College Group, who have been striking since Monday of this week.
Dan told Socialist Worker that he was striking because workers have suffered, “a decade of below inflation pay rises. Nowadays we feel like we’re doing more and getting paid less. We need to take a stand.
He explained how colleges just feel like a “money-making scheme” where students are seen as “cash cows.” “The colleges in the New City College group used to be individual community colleges and then they were merged and now we have these massive super colleges. They were meant to save all this money.”
But Dan explained that this money is not going to the right places. “When I started here in 2014, there were maybe two or three layers of staff between me and the principal now countless managers have been employed.
“It feels like that’s where all the funding is going. Not into our wages, and it’s certainly not going to the pupils who have to be content with broken laptops, it’s going into employing all these managers. We don’t need more managers we need more teachers. We need time to do things without someone constantly breathing down our necks. If college managers stopped going to work nothing would change, but if teachers stop going in everything would fall apart.”
Striker Raazia told Socialist Worker that the cost of living crisis makes strikes essential. “With inflation higher than 11 percent, an offer of, for example, 3.5 percent just isn’t enough.” Raazia added that since the pandemic, the turnover of staff has got increasingly worse, “We’ve got immense workloads because we really don’t have enough staff,” she said.
Dan says strikers need to unite. “This has to be a movement across all of those in the education sector. We might be fighting on local issues but we are fighting the same problem—-and that is that the system is broken.
“This is why we need to strike together at the same time. On Wednesday strikers in London are coming together for a rally at the Poplar campus. It’s events like this that can really make a difference.
“It would also be great if we could strike at the same time as the NEU union. We have a mixture of NEU and UCU members at our college, if both unions could come out together we would be even stronger.”
There were also lively picket lines at other colleges including Bath College, Chichester College Group campuses, Sparsholt College, Blackburn college and Bournville college. It’s not the time to make below-inflation deals. But at City of Bristol workers narrowly accepted an offer of just over 3 percent. According to two workers at the college, the deal was pushed by UCU officials and went through by 60 percent to 40 percent. The union should not be backing such deals.
The energy and determination of strikers has shown that real victories are possible if the momentum of strikes continues.
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