Striking Again

How should legal issues affect our industrial action in higher education? Academics are out on strike and ASOS (action short of a strike) in universities across the UK to fight for fair pensions and equality in pay and conditions. Yet we have also been facing intimidation from universities. For example, some universities have been threatening rolling 25% deductions in pay for ASOS, and other universities have been trying to limit picketing and protest on campus land. Legal academics often have conversations amongst ourselves about how law is positioned in relation to our industrial action and wider protest. We get the sense that often, the use of legal language during a strike chills people, makes us more afraid than we should be. Sometimes universities advance legal arguments as fact when the position is far more uncertain. Sometimes, even when the law favours universities, we lose the wider picture of what our political arguments should be by collapsing ourselves into the minutiae of what we can and can't say or do legally.

Law can enable us, but it can also distort our focus, politically. In this blog, we hope to illuminate, debunk, and contextualise what's going on, putting the legal arguments back into the hands of the workers, for us to decide whether and when law is useful.

Don't be intimidated by the law. Read up, challenge, protest, share.