Justice for Workers at Goldsmiths in the fight against casualisation

With traditional trade unions increasingly unable to tackle casualisation and job losses, amid calls across the country for the UCU to step in and respond to the threat of mass job losses amid the Covid crisis, Justice for Workers at Goldsmiths and the Marxist Centre discuss their tactics and how necessity has led them to organise among themselves across Goldsmiths.

Marxist Centre: First of all, can you tell us about the origins of Justice for Workers at Goldsmiths?

Justice for Workers at Goldsmiths: We came out of two landmark events in the recent history of ‘university politics’ in the UK. The first was the cleaners’ inhousing campaign at London School of Economics (LSE) in 2017 supported by the independent trade union United Voices of the World (UVW). Some of us were very mobilised by the basic fact that this was a local trade union dispute in a university and represented a very different terrain of struggle than we had been used to as students. We were also compelled by a campaign that centred the material interests of non-academic workers and that these interests had been converted into a very concrete and legally circumscribed qualitative demand: to break cleaners out of their existing contracts with their current subcontractor (Noonan) and to have them return to direct employment by the university. Not only was this not the kind of quantitative demand (pay rises etc.) we had associated with trade unions, this was a demand asking for nothing less than the reversal of the logic of privatisation, which, for so long, we had been convinced was a one-way street in the neoliberal university. More than anything else we were inspired by UVW’s approach to organising and campaigning which fundamentally re-ignited our interests in trade union activism.

The second event that played an important role in the formation of J4W was the national pension disputes carried out by University and College Union (UCU) in 2018. The strike was peculiar for the significant role played by casual teaching staff. A change in the membership fee system in the lead up to the strike had brought many to the union ahead of the strike. At the time, some of us participated in the strike as casual teachers and as students. We were mobilised by the fleeting but potent burst of rank-and-file resistance against the leadership of the union thar punctuated the dispute.

Shortly after the national UCU campaign, cleaners at Goldsmiths self-organised a presence at a Goldsmiths Council meeting to confront members of the Council about a shift pattern restructure that had been landed on them from their subcontractor (ISS). A group of students, academic and non-academic staff met at the council meeting and following on from the cleaners’ intervention we formed a campaign group to demand the inhousing of cleaners. We took the ‘Justice for…’ name after the long tradition of campaign groups associated with Latin American workers’ struggles in education.    

MC: Those of us who have worked or studied at Goldsmiths are aware that pay and conditions of staff are under assault at present, can you tell us more about this?

J4W: Since taking over as the Warden of Goldsmiths University, Francis Corner has made two attempts at pushing through a recovery plan to address the financial deficit left by her predecessors. ‘Evolving Goldsmiths’ was the first of these recovery plans – a title which evokes Corner’s combined loyalties to the art of ‘change management’ and the soft-power of greenwashing. This first effort saw threats to staff in ‘underperforming’ departments; proposed mergers, module reductions, the centralisation of administrative control away from department autonomy, excessive capital expenditure projects and the implantation of a pretty despotic governance structure. This plan surfaced at the tail-end of the last UCU strike action early this year. Faced with the threat of a local industrial dispute, a vote of no confidence and a mass protest campaign, Corner’s flagship masterplan crumbled. But rather than dying an honourable death, Evolving Goldsmiths has indeed evolved, thriving on the new opportunities thrown up by the Covid-19 crisis. The lockdown period saw hundreds of casual teaching staff threatened with redundancies, leading to a month-long wildcat marking boycott. This coincided with important anti-racist work across the university but especially in the Art Department where the extent and the long history of institutional racism was given widespread public coverage. Both the pressure of these actions and the better than expected recruitment figures meant that the downsizing of casual staff did not pan out as badly as we feared. We did however lose many in those so-called underperforming departments like Politics, English and Creative Writing. Meanwhile, the university has made very little effort to properly address institutional racism. The intersection between institutional racism and casualisation has been especially nefarious, leading many great teachers and personal friends to the point of exhaustion and departure.

Since the beginning of the new term, senior management figures have prioritised reworking and pushing through another version of Evolving Goldsmiths – this while there is a health and safety, equalities and workload crisis blowing up across the university. This time they have enlisted their ‘banking partners’ KPMG to provide fiscal legitimacy to their scheme. Again, we are looking at widespread compulsory redundancies, hitting vulnerable departments especially hard; further cuts to casual staff, senior administrators, and permanent teaching staff; increased workloads for all staff but especially full time teaching staff and departmental administrators; departmental closures and mergers, worsened contractual conditions for casual staff and ultimately worsened learning conditions for students. Of course, in this context, the people who will suffer the most, are those who already feel marginalised in their working lives and learning experiences in the university. 

MC: It would be interesting to know more about resistance to this continued neoliberalisation in recent months, for example the marking strike by academic workers threatened with losing their contracts.

J4W: There were many conjunctural factors that led to the wildcat action. Prior to the first lockdown in March, many hourly-paid teaching staff had just participated in the ‘Four Fights’ UCU national industrial dispute – the first opportunity any of us have had to strike over the issue of casualisation in higher education. This was a good opportunity for us to develop consciousness among casual teaching staff but also to establish links with precarious staff across the university. During the lockdown, hourly paid staff at Goldsmiths were hung out to dry; not only were they refused access to the furlough scheme – leaving hundreds with no recourse to public funds during a global pandemic – they had wages withheld for a period of a month and a half. Then, across the sector, sometime around June, and presumably on the advice of UUK, HEI employers began announcing pre-emptive cost-saving measures to mitigate against potential losses in recruitment figures. It was clear to us then, that this was in no way an exceptional measure, but consistent with the logic of casualisation. Maintaining flexible workforces with the widespread use of insecure contracts allows institutions to remain resilient against market fluctuations so they are prepared and legally entitled to offload staff at very short notice. Because we were alert to this, we began organising among the ranks of casual teachers very early on in the lockdown, preparing for the very likely possibility of mass job losses.

This was facilitated by another conjunctural factor: we were housebound and very online. Having already cut our teeth organising with cleaners and security workers, we were already quite experienced at building confidence in precarious workers to lead their own militant campaigns and to win them. In those previous campaigns we tried to develop long-term organisational strength among outsourced workers by meeting them before and after their shifts. With the wildcat action, we mainly organised through structured Whatsapp groups, video call assemblies and rudimentary structure tests.

We were only able to entertain the idea of an unofficial marking boycott because comrades at UC Santa Cruz had made this course of action a possibility the year before. The UCSC strikers gave us the model and we were able to speak to them when they had reached the other side of their action just as we were getting started. These were constructively sobering conversations.

Casualised staff from across three departments participated in the action. We held out for a month, demanding the renewal of all casual contracts. We were also demanding the university provide equalities data on the proposed termination of fixed term contracts. Just as casualisation is about embedding crisis resilience into the employment hierarchy, it is, relatedly, about embedding white supremacy into that same hierarchy. When a crisis like Covid-19 comes along, it is the diversity hires, those who are tokenised, more often on casual contracts who get dropped first while their white permanent counterparts keep their heads down, resorting to the safety of whiteness in their unwillingness to stand up vocally for their vulnerable colleagues. The action came to an end because senior academics in the Anthropology department not only scabbed on strikers, but actively intimated their junior colleagues from holding out.

MC: As even basic demands necessitate becoming more radical, and so we see academic staff becoming more vocal and the UCU moving further left, how do you feel that this struggle should best continue with both precarious working conditions for academics and a failure of academics to support the struggle of non-academic staff in the past?

J4W: The other important conjunctural factor in the wildcat was what can only be described as an abject failure on the part of UCU national leadership and bureaucracy to respond to these sector-wide cuts to casualised staff. During the summer, there were calls coming from across the country asking for the national union to step in and respond to the threat of mass job losses. What the union came up with was too little and too late.

Notwithstanding our involvement in our own branch of UCU, which is, as it happens, one of the best branches in the country, we have long been alert to what UCU is: a trade union that is organisationally structured to centre and deliver on the material interests of permanent academics. For this reason, we anticipated that UCU national’s response to the cuts would be paltry – though, in all honesty, we didn’t expect them to be quite so negligible – and this meant we were clear about what course of action was necessary to save jobs. 

To us, semi-regular, mass participation in nationwide strikes is not the sole measure of the political orientation of a trade union. Especially when those strikes are very much top-down affairs which give a highly generalised expression to the malaise of higher education but do not really express the direct concerns of members in particular workplaces.

There are very stark objective and subjective impediments to developing alliances between precarious workers in higher education. Not least because casual teachers have different motivations for working at university than cleaners do, even while they work under similarly precarious conditions. The difficulty then comes from dislodging a subjectivity that is peculiar to casualised academics who misrecognise in their professional aspirations their own political interests, which are in fact closer to those of cleaners and other precarious and disqualified labour on campus, than senior colleagues paid £60K+ a year. This is not about giving a voice to the most marginal. As an axis of solidarity, precarious workers represent the majority of workers in the university, they are therefore objectively poised to amass the necessary social power to transform the university.     

MC: The English left remain in crisis, Labour has moved sharply to the right and most of the revolutionary left, whether formally Marxist or anarchist inspiration, remain marginal. And while many of aspire to a revolutionary situation, do you have any immediate practical tips, any does or don’ts for building workplace resistance in higher education that can help us build towards this?

J4W: The class disaffiliations that set in with decades of Tory and Labour neoliberal economic policies, not only engendered an ideology of careerism in certain demographics of the working-class, thereby sabotaging certain established spatial and temporal prerequisites of class power, it did the same to the activist left. One of the worst aspects of this is that there is a terminal fear among leftists of committed localised praxis. The idea that the rightward shift of the parliamentary party closes down revolutionary possibility is symptomatic of this same fear. You do not get an organised, self-determining, anti-racist, internationalist working-class from bona fide leftist politicians creating good policy – no matter how decent they may be. You get it from long-term committed work according to your own capacity and within your own slice of the world. There is a kind of prometheanism that haunts the left, that the horizon of revolutionary work needs to come up with the goods in the here and now, otherwise it’s not revolutionary work. This totality-thinking makes failure and disillusion an inevitability and fundamentally disconnects praxis from everyday life. In this regard, we take a lot of inspiration from Angry Workers who have been working committedly to develop class power in their slice of the world for nearly a decade. Like them, we believe the only way to develop sustainable and effective class power in any workplace is to get rooted, both in the workplace and the surrounding community.