Breaking the impasse : reflections on university worker organising in the UK

Fox-Hodess, Katy and Harvie, David and Ivancheva, Mariya (2023) Breaking the impasse : reflections on university worker organising in the UK. Global Labour Journal, 14 (3). pp. 289-293. ISSN 1918-6711 (https://doi.org/10.15173/glj.v14i3.5625)

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Abstract

Since 2022, Britain has been in the midst of its largest strike wave in decades, with protracted industrial action across much of the public sector, as well as in industries such as transport. In the twelve months to June 2023, four million working days were lost to labour disputes, a dramatic shift from 2018, when the corresponding figure was just 272 000, the sixth-lowest annual total since records began in 1891. Perhaps surprisingly, however, two-thirds of the working days lost in 2018 were in the education sector, primarily universities (ONS, 2019) – and university strikes have accounted for a significant proportion of the total working days lost in each subsequent year.

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