Five years ago, most of UK Higher Education was coming out of four strenuous weeks of strikes. The last day was 14 March. For four weeks, members of UCU went on strike with a progressive schedule to allow for the strikes to be called off: the first week, two days; the second, three; the third; four, the fourth week, finally, all five days. No one expected it to last that long. But it did.
It felt like we could make change. It felt like, despite the failed negotiations over the weeks that had passed, a change was in the air. Better conditions for workloading and stress. Fair pay. Eliminating casualisation. Closing gender and ethnic gaps. These were our calls.
My role on the pickets had been to organize the local teach-outs. These were informal sessions, open to all, held off campus, where lecturers could share our passions and expertise with anyone who wanted to be there – other staff members, union members, students, anyone who happened to come by and be interested. It was an exciting way to try to think about how the university could be.
We had some amazing teach-outs from all areas of our university, and some alongside the University of Southampton's Winchester School of Art, too: 'Statistics for Beginners: Understanding the Gender Pay Gap.' 'The Personal is Political: Young Women's Experiences of Social Movement Activism.' 'Educators Not Informers: Preventing Prevent.' 'Leftist Historians and Medieval Kings and Queens.' 'Striking in the City, Making Love in the Fields!: Educators Learning from Earth Activism.' 'LGBT Life in Britain: Historical Movements and Campaigns for Change.' 'Excrutiating Etymologies: What Words Tell Us About Work.' I gave one on 'Anglo-Saxon' slavery and modern racism, and overall organized somewhere around a dozen or more sessions. Two local businesses donated their space. We would picket, find lunch somewhere, then troop up to the teach out for the rest of the day. It was exhilarating, the change we were trying to make.
Picket time is hard to explain. It can be like a bubble. You spend a four to six hour day standing outside your university, on the pavements, chatting with whoever passes through, trying to hand out fliers and tell people about why you’re there. The Winchester picket in particular is always pretty, well, English. ‘Oh, hello, would you like a flier to read more about what we’re doing here today? How about a sticker? Have a nice day!’ Let’s be honest about who we are – we’re scholars, and we want to educate you. Before pickets, I told all my students to not worry about crossing as no one would stop them, but they were more than welcome to come have a chat because we’re still there doing what we do best, which is try to explain things.
In between those times when you’re smiling and trying to get someone to take a flier, you just do your best to entertain yourselves. Pickets can be boring. We had music. Two of us made picket playlists which we played, loudly, on Bluetooth speakers. Since we also have a music production programme, some of those lecturers would DJ when they were able to come stand on the picket. Facepainting, precarity hopscotch, jumping the gender gap, chalking up sidewalks with slogans and solidarity, gratefully accepting apples and cakes from students and strangers who wanted to show their support. Wishing you were warmer or drier. Considering burning some pallets to warm up (that was a suggestion from - I'm not kidding - a French colleague who was only half joking. For what it's worth, we didn't.) Wondering if it's breaking the line to use the toilet. (Answer: at Winchester, the SU building is considered a neutral zone so we'd freshen up there and buy coffee from their shop.) There's a lot of time just trying to make it though the day.
But when you’re on a picket for up to five days a week, then running or attending teach-outs in the afternoons into the evenings, it is also exhausting. I didn’t have much time or energy for anything other than getting up the next day and doing it again. You live in a strike bubble when you’re trying to keep the pickets going, and keep spirits and morale up. A picket is a grind, day after day.
No one was immune to the news reports that had been circulating since before the new year when we started the strikes, but as the weeks went on, more and more filtered into the picket bubble about what was happening around the world as this new virus spread. A university is, at its core, almost always an international institution. For me on our pickets, I started hearing more of it from our colleagues from Italy. Their worries and concerns about what they knew came from family and friends back home. I remember one colleague on the pickets leaving early – leaving the picket, the university, the country, to get back to Sicily and his daughter and family before the borders closed. I stupidly thought it might have been an overreaction, but he was prescient. There were about two weeks left on the picket when he left the UK, and Italy shut their borders shortly after his departure. I haven’t seen him since as he didn’t return to Winchester, but he and his daughter made it through the pandemic.
Most of us had colds or coughs on the picket. It’s hard not to; February and March in England are not months known for their fine weather. We were standing outside, rain or shine, about half a day, two to five days a week. Temperatures were not warm; sunshine was rare. Nowadays, some people think that they might have unknowingly had Covid very early on the pickets, but at that point everyone just assumed it was the usual picket plagues. I still think we all had colds or coughs rather than Covid on the picket. It's too easy to backfill with ideas based upon threat when we have the knowledge we have now. But we'll never know, I guess.
One of the most bizarre parts of the slow onset of the pandemic in picket time was the whole toilet paper issue. I wasn’t personally eating very much or very well through the pickets; start times were too early for breakfast and I would exist on coffee in a flask (or brought by kind students or colleagues in different unions), cake and fruit brought up to the lines, then whatever I could scrounge during or after the teach outs. Shortages of food passed me by in the blur. But everyone needs toilet roll. I think at one point, since I didn't have time to get to the shops during pickets and teach outs, I may have taken a roll from a bathroom in the SU building. (I'm sorry.)
On the last day of the strike, 14 March, I was in charge of bringing packets of candy for the ‘picket awards’, so I stopped by my local pound store and Sainsburys on my way to the pickets. I had again just run out of toilet roll at my house, and at 8.15am on a Friday, Sainsburys had just been stocked, so I grabbed an eight-pack along with bags of Haribo, chocolates and other prizes for the pickets. When I got there, the regulars – my friends – laughed at me. ‘YOU’RE THE PROBLEM!’ they declared. We found it hilarious. I think we had to by that point of both the strike, and the impending doom of pandemic which was already with us by that last week of picketing.
We all knew at this point that universities were going to close, or move online, or something. It was only a matter of when.
This is part one. You can read the introduction here. Part Two and probably a Part Three will come in the next few days.