Southampton Staff Strike

With scenes akin to the 2010 football World Cup, you might have noticed university staff were on strike today making a racket on campus with vuvuzelas and waving flags. The Soton Tab went down to the picket lines to find out what was going on.

Alison Gascoigne, an archaeology lecturer, put the case from an academic point of view.

We’ve got a big problem with pay across all categories, people on minimum wage with really poor terms of employment and academic staff who have taken a 13% real terms pay cut since 2008. We’re concerned about that, particularly with increasing workloads and when we have students paying significant tuition fees obviously we need to maintain the quality of the education they’re getting.

A Unite member who works at the University was keen to tell The Tab

Over the last four years we’ve had a pay cut of 13% with inflation and people can’t take it any more. And all they ever do is offer us a meagre wage and then we ballot and say we don’t want it. We haven’t striked before but they’ve forced us to have it so we’ve had enough and that’s why we’re out protesting.

We also spoke to Ian Woodland, Unite political officer, whose union represent many of the University’s support staff, including catering and cleaning services. He was clear on why they were striking:

The majority of our membership are on very very low pay. They’ve got to get income support, some of them even go to food banks. This is the difficulty, while prices are rising their wages aren’t rising so that’s what we want to fight for.

A Spanish lecturer, Darren Paffey, also wanted to put the emphasis on the University’s lowest paid:

Even Will Hutton of the Work Foundation has said this is the biggest sustained attack on any industry, any sector, since the second world war. So in solidarity with our colleagues, some of whom are on much worse pay than myself, some of whom are on zero hour contracts or minimum wage, I’m out today to cause a bit of disruption to business as usual, because business as usual can’t go on like this.

Darren wanted students to understand the reasons for the strike:

We’re not just saying “don’t go in, go home” but talk to us about what it’s like to be a lecturer in these conditions and what they want from their education because I think they’ll find what they want is what we want. Good education, good rewards for people who are in it and sustainability in terms of the support staff as well. There are a lot of people involved in making the university run well, all of them deserve to have their standards of living maintained as far as possible.

Some students did join the picket lines to show their support, however it seemed that the message wasn’t getting through to most. Many undergrads were quite irritated by all the noise the unions were making on Highfield campus. One student told us:

I’m not sure if it’s effective and it’s a little annoying. There’s not exactly many of them. Maybe if there was one big group. I was worried it was going to be annoying during my lecture but it was fine.