Organising your workplace feels exhilarating. Sending out texts to colleagues to have a private chat, organising dozens of coffees at places where you can’t be overheard by managers. It’s even more exhilarating when you’ve barely started and the colleague you don’t really know already wholeheartedly agrees to join an action – especially if it’s the colleague you thought to be too (neo-)liberal.

What is not so exhilarating is to then lose. We were able to organise the largest movements of tutors at our university – outside of the union! — that we know of. This is also, unfortunately, a testament to how poor our working conditions are. Working as a tutor means income that barely covers rent, a lot of unpaid overtime, and a contract that leaves you without work for nearly half a year. However, our management at SOAS – otherwise considered to be the “Marxist” or “Lefty” university – did not see it that way. Despite our broad mobilisation, they made no concessions, and so our movement failed. Shortly after, SOAS management implemented a new policy that severely cut employment opportunities for tutors (my own job included) – a gut punch for precarious young academics.

In a way, Management’s response also proves how effective our grassroots mobilisation was. Although we didn’t win, we threatened them enough to trigger an aggressive response. This is why I would like to reflect on what we did right, allowing us to mobilise so significantly, and explore why it still wasn’t enough to win. Even beyond academia, our mobilisation is embedded within a larger political economy of how workplaces are becoming ever more polarised while the neoliberal system becomes ever more authoritarian. What’s our way out? In a truly dialectical fashion, we must continue to fail better and better until we inevitably win.

How We Prepared a Grassroots Movement at the University

The very first step to building the movement was to be extremely annoyed and fed up with work as a tutor. This kind of frustration can be very transformative when shared with others who feel the same way and can convince people to collectively make a change. Being angry with five people already feels much better than being exasperated alone. Within this small group – in truly academic fashion – we started to research how bad our working conditions really were, comparing SOAS contracts with those of other universities. The results flowed into a report with a series of eight concise demands, as well as a detailed analysis with numbers: our work pays almost 50% less than at King’s College London, we have half the time to mark assignments, and our classrooms are sometimes more than 30 students (double of what management promised). Our union branch endorsed this report.

But to build an effective movement, you need more than a rubber-stamped report: you need people. This is even more important when you mobilise outside of the union. We did that because lengthy official procedures in the union give ample time for management to get scabs together, rendering the threats effectively toothless. And management would only agree after multiple rounds of continued mobilisation. But as tutors we don’t have that time, since we work at most for 2-3 years in that position. If we want improvements now, we have to hit a hard blow at once. At SOAS we could do that legally by refusing to mark collectively – as our contracts don’t include that – all at the same time.

We thus identified the tutors who are marking the most assignments and organised with each of them face-to-face conversations (with coffees and beers): how is work for you? You know how many other people have these problems? Have you heard of our report? What do you think of taking action? This conversation has to stay a secret for now, ok?

With the commitment to the movement, the relevance of the report became huge, and every single tutor started to have a stake in the campaign. When we created slides about the report and a petition, tutors were more than happy to present them to students (no word on marking refusal though!). Soon enough, the petition had 500+ signatures, and tutors became bullish through experiencing students’ support first hand. We accompanied this petition with social media posts on our Instagram channel which soon had way over 600 subscribers.

How We Failed Our Grassroots Movement

Throughout this period, our union rep was busy negotiating with management. As expected, these negotiations didn’t really go anywhere (turns out hundreds of signatures from students are not so interesting to university management). In response, a few weeks before the end of term 2, we announced the collective refusal to mark course assignments. There were at least two reasons for this timing: first, students and tutors were still regularly on campus and could be mobilised; second, there was still enough time left to seriously negotiate before assignments were due.

We also created additional pressure on Management through uncertainty: we kept our numbers secret and advised everyone to keep quiet even vis-à-vis their line manager. And to take financial pressure off tutors, we collected hardship funds through a fundraiser party (with Notes from Below at Pelican House) and received solidarity contributions from other union branches.

In response, management pushed back on three fronts. First, through centralised emails to students, they tried to avert pressure with management’s mantra that everything is fine. This was very much pointless. We politicised students with our campaign months in advance. In tutorials we already made presentations about our poor working conditions and exposed management’s aggressive tactics. Moreover, we coordinated with particularly political students and student reps, who shared our Instagram account and messages across Whatsapp groups. Despite management’s emails, students regularly came out to our rallies and open townhalls.

Second, management applied pressure on our line managers to confirm that tutors were not participating in the marking refusal. However, tutors’ discipline proved exemplary. We achieved this in two ways. On the one hand, whenever a tutor received pushy emails, they could contact someone from the core organising team – a safe space to express worries and brainstorm solutions. On the other hand, for weeks in advance we held regular in-person workshops with tutors about strategy, creating the trust that we are organised and united. Having pushed our message for almost half a year, tutors were not intimidated, but rather appalled by their line managers and management, further increasing our collective determination.

Third, after management clearly failed on the above, they obliged line managers to scab. This is what broke us. While we didn’t have a contractual obligation to mark, management interpreted the contract of line managers in a way that they would have to do it instead. Despite an overwhelming union membership of academics – including our line managers – their degree of organisation was underwhelming. They were unable to push back individually, let alone organise a collective response. Moreover, many bought into the management narrative, blaming us (namely for not doing the shitty work that academics themselves don’t want to do either). Interestingly, even proudly Marxist academics fell for management’s pressure: material relations were, indeed, more important than the nominal ideology. In the background, union leadership refused to proactively support individual academics or to formulate a collective response. Ultimately, management did not feel enough pressure to negotiate with us. They could rely on unorganised academics, and an absent union, to clean up their ‘mess’.

What can we learn from this?

The number one lesson from this experience is that you have to do everything yourself. To be specific, we could not rely on the union to back us – behaving more as co-management – with collective push-back. This means that in the same way we organised tutors and students, it should have also been on us to organise the academics. There is nothing spontaneous about a movement nor about class consciousness (not even of those studying Marx and the workers movements). Both need to be created – face-to-face over months talking about our issues, management’s BS and so on.

Most importantly though, in order to do everything yourself, you can’t be by yourself. We should have also expanded the core group to increase organising capacity: identify leaders, delegate low-effort actions, feel out hunger for more, repeat. (You can call that building cadres, or democratising the organisation.) The core difficulty with organising academics is: who can you trust to not rat out the plan to management?

Another central conundrum of organising in the (not-so) public sector is how to hit them where it hurts. In other words, how to create financial costs for management. When we are striking at the university – similar to nurses or teachers – we are hurting first the wrong ones: the students. Management relies on students absorbing the cost of our movement, so it can remain uncooperative. How do we hit their money then? Two ideas come to mind: first, working more with large media outlets to threaten international reputation and student numbers; second, motivating students to contact scholarship providers to scandalise working conditions, so that prospective students know about management’s malpractices.

Ultimately though, it is essential to know how to lose. It is actually quite dangerous to feel that we have to win something immediately. Making too many concessions is a double-edged sword: if you win the concessions it looks pitiful, like we made all this effort, put so many hours in and believed in our collective power just to get out so little? It looks like our power is not that great and for the next campaign I would think twice to invest my time. Now, if you lose even these concessions it looks like you’ll never win even the tiniest thing. But, if you lose on your own terms you can demonstrate honesty and determination, blaming management for not making serious offers and that we deserve better. That triggers a wave of bewilderment over management that strengthens cohesion and builds the fundament for the next campaign. To achieve that, organising the end of a movement deserves as much attention as starting it. Otherwise, as a tutor it looks like you lose, you don’t hear from anyone anymore, you are alone with that feeling – a bitter taste that stains the memory. Instead, months of regular check-ins and workshops to hear people’s experiences and reflect with them not only demonstrates respect, but also binds participants (who are the next leaders). So even if this round of mobilising was impossible to win, you maintain the movement for the next.

The University Labour Regime

Another round of organising is more than necessary, as SOAS management further worsened our working conditions. Our movement did not succeed in making improvements, but it was successful enough that management reacted brutally. They introduced a new precarious role, the “Associate Lecturer” (AL), who takes over a large number of teaching tutorials, with only little research time on a year-to-year basis. This doesn’t merely coincide with our movement, as management stated that the role is a reaction to the “risks in the over-reliance on GTAs [tutors]”. Management learned directly from our movement: the AL is employed on the biggest modules (which we successfully tore down) and is an academic on a fixed-term contract (which management most successfully forced to scab). The AL receives a higher academic status with a title that suggests a path to lecturer, which puts them into a different basket than tutors – creating organisational barriers (since before we could organise people with various contracts under the same umbrella of tutor). What makes them even more difficult to organise is that while they get more responsibilities in designing the courses, the AL has only a short-term guarantee of work, with little time for research, and so they are expected to put career development on hiatus. This insecurity and limited career opportunities forces the AL to be very cautious in following management’s directions. In that sense the AL and the tutor fall victim to the same system of precarious work.

All of this is only so effective, because of this system, where universities make young academics precarious thus throwing them on the labour market to compete against each other. Even after a decade of university education and training, the sheer number of other people on shitty contracts makes you still easily replaceable. It’s not education, skill or whatever that determines your income and job security, but rather the set-up of the employment system. This is from the classic capitalist playbook, namely Marx’s “reserve army of the unemployed”: cutting down jobs creates a credible threat that precarious workers lose their job if they don’t fall in line (just like myself as my employment was prematurely discontinued). Obviously, the disciplinary effect is especially brutal for marginalised groups (e.g. class, gender, race) as their financial resources and future job opportunities are particularly slim.

That said, SOAS is not the only place that introduced the AL role. In fact, management stated that this is common practice, for example at LSE. This falls into a larger dynamic in UK academia , where there is a continuous polarisation since 2018: universities added 23,670 teaching jobs and cut 860 research-only jobs, while they added 2,910 professorships vs 20,150 less senior jobs. This marks a clear trend to a stagnating number of privileged researchers and a rapid expansion of precarious teaching jobs. This polarisation is very much in line with Harry Braverman’s model of the labour process in capitalism. He finds that there is an escalating polarisation between conception, i.e. well-paid people who command; and execution, i.e. ill-paid work of following directions. For Braverman capitalism is continuously cheapening labour by constraining workers’ autonomy.

In the case of UK universities we see the polarisation between research and teaching positions. While researchers have the opportunity to develop their ideas, research programmes and theoretical contributions, the other academics are constrained to teaching these to students. Though teaching is not as regimented as a production line, presenting the same slides four or even six hours in a row (as some tutors had to do at SOAS) is not only repetitive but extremely tiring. The aggressive expansion of these teaching positions allows management to cash student fees for the university budget. In comparison, every hour of research has a much more uncertain financial return. At the same time, researchers are on stable contracts and well networked, which is why management is rather holding wages of teaching positions down and creating more of them. In Braverman’s schema, the costliness and creativity of research makes it akin to conception jobs (especially considering researchers’ future careers in the university hierarchy), while the repetitive and cheapened labour of teaching roles make them function as execution jobs.

For SOAS, though, Braverman’s interpretation might be too economistic/ simplistic. In our case teaching actually became more expensive, namely by using the AL to replace the cheaper tutors. To make sense of this we need an understanding of the political economy of the university – namely the academic labour regime. So, the question is not about price, but about the mechanisms (management, laws, ideologies) that make workers controllable. Our movement proved to management that tutors are the most energetic part of the workforce – which is why we had to be cut down.

And just like at SOAS, even the union can become part of the labour regime. Maintaining a core of researchers on open-ended contracts – creating stable relationships in the department, with management and in the union – makes the union more responsive to them than young academics, who are bouncing from classroom to classroom and leave the university again in two years. Now, when management proposes to increase fixed-term teaching staff – for example through the AL – to finance research time for senior academics on open-ended contracts, who will object?

Authoritarian Neoliberalism on Campus

Even academics who would object in solidarity with their precarious colleagues, are intimidated by the budget question. It is a staple argument for management to claim that there are just no funds available. An argument we heard a lot at SOAS – “if we don’t save money, we have to close soon” (even though SOAS just made a profit of 40 million pounds ) – insinuating that tutors are ungrateful for management’s great penny-pinching efforts. Even if it is true that there are financial problems, we should not waver in our demands. When the university’s vice-chancellor makes six figures, why do we have to lose money while working weekends?

Their argument is especially untenable, as these financial problems are actively created by government austerity. The UK government is particularly unhinged in comparison to other OECD countries: the UK is on the last spot for spending on the education budget on higher education , and is far behind as a share of GDP , performing much worse than France or Turkey. In the face of government austerity, I would expect from management that supposedly cares about the university to fight for more spending. Instead, management is the conveyor belt of government austerity, imposing in neoliberal fashion precarious contracts on staff (and increasing fees on students).

This might be due to past rigidity of government, or due to better career opportunities for a vice-chancellor to be considered the iron fist of financial discipline rather than the advocate of staff and students (who are marginalised in choosing and directing university management). As a result, management subjects the university to the same fate as other sectors of society: precarity, austerity, and rising cost of living. The university management becomes the agent of neoliberalism.

And just like government, management’s neoliberalism becomes increasingly authoritarian . In the past, social democratic parties and their trade unions were able to achieve with the state a class compromise: social welfare and public goods were provided by public agencies and real wages increased with profits. This compromise was terminated by Thatcher and social-democratic bodies were squashed to be coopted for imposing the neoliberal model themselves. This neoliberal conquest of the state vindicated the rule of capital: social welfare is administered by privately owned charities, receipt of welfare is conditional and credit-based, and labour unions face ever more legal barriers. That way the state yields control to capital and expands opportunities for profit by undermining workers’ bargaining power and financialising the provision of housing, consumption, and pensions.

The authoritarian part is that democratic control over the economic resources is increasingly substituted with the control of capital-owners. And this substitution is not up for public debate, but presented as an unnegotiable necessity, refusing any serious compromises with workers’ organisations, housing activists, or social movements. And so, SOAS management rejected 6 out of 8 of our demands, refusing real improvements of pay or work (accepting only administrative changes). Instead of a 100% increase of time we get for marking assignments - to align with the standard at other London universities - they offered 12.5%. They will not increase the pay for teaching. They will not commit to the goal of 15 students per class. Are these serious negotiations? Management takes little interest in the union support of our report, the hundreds of student signatures, the regular rallies on campus, or the sweeping participation of tutors in our movement. The economic dictate of management dominates any mechanism of participation.

There are plenty of problems to organise for. And the good news is that this escalating aggression and intransigence can become the motor to draw more people in. When we know how to lose, winning will become inevitable. For this we need to build the social tissue of collective organising through face-to-face compassionate conversations about workplace issues. Identifying some sympathetic people in senior positions and occupying union positions can contribute institutional thrust. During the campaign, we need to distribute responsibilities widely to build individual commitment and collective capacity. Finally, a consistent story in media and social media about who the aggressors are and what we want can drive people and pressure now and in the future. Though this takes a lot of time, it’s fortunately quite exhilarating!