"Students and workers need to organise together"

Submitted by AWL on 29 May, 2016 - 12:42

An industrial dispute at University of Manchester involving extensive student-worker solidarity has just won concessions. One of the central activists, student union Campaigns and Citizenship Officer and Manchester Momentum vice-chair Hannah McCarthy, spoke to Solidarity.

In March, University of Manchester Conferences, which is a subsidiary company wholly owned by University of Manchester, announced that it planned to sack 46 of its 280-odd catering workers and move the rest to term-time only contracts – meaning a pay cut of about one third, roughly five or six thousand pounds a year. After two years of pressure, the university conceded the official Living Wage for UMC workers, making maximum publicity out of it, but what it gave with one hand it then tried to take away with another.

The university claims that UMC is independent, but this is barely even a fiction. The top boss of UMC is the university registrar. During the campaign, we pushed ourselves to not respect this nonsense distinction and to emphatically put the blame on university management.

The campaign demanded no cuts, no redundancies and for all workers to be brought in house. So what’s been won is far from a complete victory. There will still be restructuring, but there will be no compulsory redundancies and workers who lose hours will have them made up to full-time in alternative university employment – so no pay cut. Also it was revealed during the dispute that many people hadn’t received additional shift payments, and now they’ll get five years’ worth of back pay. Lastly, if there are any reductions of hours in the future staff will receive "buy out" payments as a result.

Clearly this is limited and in addition some workers are taking voluntary redundancy – we just don’t know the numbers yet. That must reflect fear for the future and probably lack of faith in their union too. So, far from a complete victory, but far better than what the university sought to impose and than what we originally expected to win.

How did the campaign take off?

A group including student activists and workers at the university, was brought together by an earlier dispute at the university involving lay offs in IT and changes to the redeployment policy - imposing a time limit of six months where there was none before. Three campus unions, UCU, Unite and Unison, worked together on that, and there was a mood to fight, but the unions let it bleed away and settled for very limited concessions indeed – with redundancies and a redeployment limit of nine months.

This time we were more experienced politically and better prepared. We’d kept together a group of staff and student activists because we knew disputes would likely be coming thick and fast, we’d educated ourselves about marketisation in universities and about wider political ideas and organising. We’ve published an independent, class-struggle focused publication for workers and students at UoM, the Bee Hive. We’ve also learnt something about unions, the potential that they have and also the huge problems that are currently quite endemic in the labour movement in terms of pessimism and the bureaucratic role of some full-time and even some lay union representatives.

After discussing political ideas, we used those links to call students and some directly employed workers together to prepare to build solidarity. We achieved a very good collaboration of different campaigns on campus, especially free education and living wage activists. We quickly launched a petition, got social media stuff going, and discussed actions including the possibility of disrupting summer graduation ceremonies.

The other thing we’d learned from the previous dispute was to work harder to make links with the workers involved. I went to one of the first UMC workers’ meetings in the dispute. There was a really strong atmosphere, a real antagonism with management and it’s clear that in that respect at least people were seeing things in class terms. In general workers were very much up for a fight.

We worked very hard to match their mood by getting lots of students out in support, leafleting around campus every week but also making the effort to constantly talk to workers around campus to build links and boost their confidence. We got good support from the SU, easier because I’m a sabbatical officer.

What did the workers think of the students, do you think?

Just a word about the workers – these are pretty much all catering workers – chefs, workers in campus cafes, people at the Chancellor’s Hotel which the university owns. They’re mostly women and a lot of migrant workers, though lots from Manchester too. Very few of them are students. They’re a lot more diverse than other university employees.

In terms of students, I think people have an impression of us as self-interested consumers, and so the support the workers got was quite unexpected. It gave them a boost to see students as on their side and not in line with university management. That was doubly important because due to outsourcing this is quite a separated group of workers, who don’t feel part of the main university workforce. There were some occasions on which workers got quite emotional about the support they were getting, which was quite emotional for us too!

We weren’t sure how workers would feel about us taking militant direct action, particularly because union officials often frown on that, but they welcomed it, particularly because we have more leeway to do those things than they do, for obvious reasons. We burst into the VC’s office and disrupted management meetings where they were talking about spending on money on ridiculous things like new vanity project buildings that hundreds of millions, and people laughed their heads off at that and thought it was great.

We had joint rallies with the workers and some joint meetings. However, we didn’t get to know the workers as much as would have liked to. Most of our contact was limited to meetings and a lot of them don’t use the internet, which is a key way for us to organise.

Were strikes discussed?

The workers voted overwhelmingly in a consultative ballot [96% to strike] but in general the union [Unison] was very reserved about the possibility of strikes. Obviously it’s tough for low paid workers to go on strike but I think people were angry and determined enough with a bit more leadership. Sometimes union officials saying “We’re member led, it’s up to you” functions as a way to avoid giving leadership and thus undermining the possibility of a confident fight.

What wider support did you get?

We got really good wider support, particularly from the labour movement in Manchester, and from all kind of unions. I think if the dispute had gone on we would have got a lot from outside. As it was we got support from all kinds of groups, including strong support from John McDonnell who offered to write to the university board to push them to back down. Getting wider support was an important difference from the earlier dispute I think.

What next?

We’re going to hold together the group of students who want to mobilise around labour disputes, and strengthen our links with workers. There are many different political views in our group but the strong consensus is to continue organising around this orientation. We want to fight outsourcing. I think the big demand should be to bring all university workers directly in house and level up pay and conditions. We need to work around that even when there isn’t a dispute on, though of course there will be more disputes. There isn’t some nice resting place – the attacks will continue as the university restructure on neo-liberal lines and workers also need to look for opportunities to push forward.

More widely, I think people sometimes think student support, or any support, for workers won’t have much effect, but that’s absolutely not the case. I don’t think it downplays the workers’ fight to say that student support, the speed with which we moved and things we were able to do alongside our public campaign played a crucial role here.

What kind of political issues did the dispute raise?

It confirmed socialist ideas about the way the capitalist project in universities is playing out, and about the links between what campus workers are experiencing and what we as students are experiencing. These attacks on workers are coming at the same time as cuts to courses, cuts to bursaries, cuts to counselling services and so on, and of course it’s no coincidence. We have to organise together and fight for a university that’s run in the interests of its students and staff.

A lot of the core student activists were already very left, but not all by any means. We also drew in, for instance, a lot of people focused on the Living Wage. We were able to have discussions linking the immediate issues to bigger things, about the way the university is run but also the economic system we live under. It was impossible not to draw some socialist conclusions, because once you get beyond the social responsibility marketing nonsense, a dispute like this shows the reality of the way the university works as a capitalist entity and the nature of its management.

Because of the limits of our contact with workers, we didn’t have as many political conversations with them as we should have. I’m sure seeds were sown and it got people thinking but developing that is a task for the future. For sure the concessions we’ve won can embolden people for future battles.

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