Universities

Cleaners at the London School of Economics are celebrating a victory. They will be brought in-house and become employees of LSE from Spring 2018. The victory comes after a series of strikes and protests over 10 months. Three more strikes had been planned for LSE′s July graduation days. LSE became increasingly embarrassed by the strikes and protests, and lashed out at workers, issuing legal threats and trying to intimidate workers into not striking. As a result of being brought in-house from infamous contractor Noonan, the cleaners will get 41 days annual leave, six months full-pay sick pay...

NCAFC activist Cosmo Seamus explains why the Labour Party’s manifesto commitment to free education and a National Education Service is important and badly needed. Currently, England is the most expensive country to study in the world. Since the 2010 Tory-LibDem higher education (HE) reforms there have been cuts to government funding, an expansion of the student loan system and of course the famous trebling of tuition fees to £9,000. These sets of changes have been come together with an overall neoliberalisation of universities: more casualised labour and decreased pay and pensions for workers...

Cinema workers at East Dulwich Picturehouse in south London will strike on Saturday 27 May to coincide with the opening of the new Pirates of the Caribbean film. Workers at the other cinemas involved in the dispute have just voted for further strikes, and will be on strike on 3-4 June to coincide with the Sundance Film Festival, which Picturehouse hosts. Cineworld held its Annual General Meeting on 18 May and Picturehouse strikers bought some shares in order to go along and embarrass Cineworld bosses. Three Picturehouse workers asked company chair Tony Bloom for Cineworld to start paying the...

The welfare state created by the 1945 Labour government was a little bit of the “political economy of the working class” carved out of a still capitalist economy (a phrase Karl Marx first used to describe the victory of the fight for a ten-hour working day). To some extent the ruling class has been forced to accept a minimal level of state provision. There is a constant battle over what proportion of profits is redirected, over who should receive support, and what sort of support is given. The ruling class has been winning that battle for some time. The space carved out of capitalism by the...

Staff at Manchester Metropolitan University will strike against job cuts on 24 and 25 May, against a backdrop of hundreds of jobs at risk across the sector. Manchester University is planning to cut 171 jobs; up to 150 are at risk at Aberystwyth; 139 at the University of Wales Trinity St David; Sunderland, Durham and Plymouth are all looking for voluntary redundancies. Publicly, universities have been blaming Brexit’s impact on international student recruitment and research funding. But Manchester Met has £400m reserves, while Manchester Uni is planning to hire an extra 100 junior researchers...

Parliament rushed through the Higher Education and Research Bill — the legislative vehicle for their ruinous agenda of fee-raising, university-privatising reforms — through to Royal Assent on 27 April in advance of the snap General Election. Over the past eighteen months, we’ve fought a major battle against the reforms. We have argued the case against the misleadingly named Teaching “Excellence” Framework (TEF), presented our alternative vision of a free education system governed by democracy not the chaos of the market, and through protest and direct action – most notably the boycott of the...

Security guards at the central University of London site in Bloomsbury took a third day of strike action against the university and contractor Cordant on 16 May, following two last month. They want an end to disguised use of zero-hours contracts, itemised pay slips and a pay rise they were promised six years ago when UoL’s outsourced workers first won the Living Wage. In part the dispute represents the impact of earlier struggles by their union, the Independent Workers of Great Britain, working through. The guards were supposed to get a 25pc pay increase to maintain their previous differential...

The Charity Commission is investigating a number of student unions for their policies on boycotting Israel and may take action against them, amid right-wing calls for such boycotts to be banned. Successive governments, keen to head off organised opposition to their policies, have eroded students’ rights to take political action through their unions. Most student unions have been converted to charities, subject to regulation by the Charity Commission (in England) and to laws banning them from carrying out political campaigning that the Commission does not regard as furthering their “charitable...

“Mrs May”, writes the Tory-leaning columnist of the Financial Times, Janan Ganesh, “could not survive an election campaign saying so little so often if people paid attention”. Since so many don’t, “the repetition of slogans in lieu of answers carries no cost”. Fraser Nelson, another Tory, comments in the Spectator: “She seems to think that, if you refuse to give the press anything, the public won’t care. Worse, she seems to be right – for now, at least”. May’s purpose, so Nelson writes, is not to “seek a mandate”, but to evade one. “That’s what this election is really about: a bonfire of these...

Guards on Southern Rail struck again from 22-23 November, with further strikes planned for 6-8 December, 22-24 December, and 31 December-2 January. Despite widespread calls to do so, government ministers are refusing to meet with the guards′ union, RMT, directly. Instead, the government has handed Southern bosses a £20 million payment in an attempt to improve their service. For Southern to meet the union’s demand for a second, safety-critical member of staff on board each train would involve filling 20 guard vacancies (which it promised to do in January, and then reneged), with a total cost of...