Wednesday 14th October saw the largest strike in recent Irish history as over 300,000 public sector workers assembled on picketlines across cities and towns, taking their discontent at decaying conditions, insufficient pay and a general decline in living standards straight to the workplace. Nurses and doctors, teachers and lecturers, and a breadth of civil servants and public workers mobilised across their unions against the failure of the government and Irish Congress of Trade Unions to agree on a new Public Service Agreement covering workers’ pay.

Postgraduate workers, many of them in the Postgraduate Workers Organisation, joined lecturers and university staff in front of their universities, demanding not only an improved pay agreement but the basic recognition that we, too, are workers. Currently not classified as such by the Irish government and our universities, for whom we take on grinding hours of poorly remunerated and precarious teaching, tutoring and research work, postgraduate workers have to subsist without access to basic protections and support: we have, for example, no protection from unfair dismissals and cannot access any union support in case of grievances, treated instead as undergraduate students who have to labour under opaque agreements and constant overwork.

Generally speaking, the conditions for postgraduate workers in Ireland are significantly worse in comparison to elsewhere in the European Union, falling well behind the standard that are set across many other European countries. As postgraduate researchers are treated as students by law, the years spent doing a PhD also do not count toward Irish citizenship: with Ireland debating to increase the requirement from 5 to 8 years, it would mean that already marginalised non-EU PhD researchers face waiting a minimum of 12 years to obtain Irish citizenship. The postgraduate stipend in Ireland is currently 33% below the cost of living and over €4000 below the annual minimum wage, only intensifying the effects of a severe housing emergency. The generalised crisis of deficit in the education sector, no doubt familiar to readers of The University Worker in the British context, finds an acture expression through the extensive use of postgraduate workers to prop up a creaking system. This is why the Postgraduate Workers Organisation have consistently demanded a living wage, worker recognition and employment rights, access to public support, workplace protection, transparent working conditions and that the years spent doing a PhD are counted toward citizenship.

Although public sector workers continue to work-to-rule, Wednesday’s strike has been called off by participating unions, while possible details of negotiations and a new pay agreement remain behind closed doors. Our central demands remain unmet and ignored, so it’s imperative to use the heightened tension of the strike to affirm our status as workers. Across 8 branches PWO is taking action on Wednesday 21st. At University College Dublin, members voted 100% for strike action, while members across Trinity College Dublin, University College Cork and Maynooth University will all be holding demonstrations and stalls across their campuses to protest (and recruit new members!).

Just as members of PWO last week stood in solidarity with other unions such as IFUT, SIPTU or UNITE, the strike on Wednesday is an opportunity for members of these and other unions in our workplaces to extend their solidarity and build on the moment of too-rare coherence that the 14th October strike afforded us. With postgraduate workers labouring under highly varied conditions across their fields and universities, divided up and disciplined by discriminatory structures, a central challenge continues to be mapping the thousands of workers in the postgraduate system, and working to unite them behind shared principles and demands that can impose national-level change. Industrial action of the sort underway is a crucial step on this journey, as we both demonstrate the university system’s reliance on our labour, and that our fate rests not in the benevolence of our institutions but in the power we hold to transform them.

Against the avalanche of shit! All power to the rank-and-file!

Beir bua!

PWO Members in Dublin & Maynooth