 The university and college union has called an 8-day strike across around 60 of the UK's universities, starting the 25th of November and ending on the 4th of December. This is what you should know about it. Part 1. What is the strike about? The strike is about two sets of things. Like last year's strike, this year's strike is about pensions. That time, we were striking against proposed changes to the university's superannuation scheme, the USS, which would have ended guaranteed pension benefits for university staff and drastically reduced the amount of money they get when they retire. Long story short, there is no real deficit to the USS, but an accounting trick is being used by universities UK, that is, the employer's body that negotiates with employees, to justify cutting pensions and increasing premiums. Although the USS as it stands is doing fine, if these changes keep happening, fewer and fewer new university staff, who are of course usually the poorest and most precarious, will sign up. This could actually make it unsustainable in the long term. Losing their pension scheme would obviously be a disaster for the roughly 400,000 people who are signed up for it. But this year's strike is also about much more. It's about pay, workload, equality and job security. Despite the efforts at cherry picking the data, the university's and college's employer's association, the opponents of the striking workers, their own report shows that staff wages have fallen in real terms by about 17% just since 2009. UCU claims that staff in higher education have seen the value of their pay decline by 20.8% since 2009. Whoever you believe here, these numbers are really bad. Everyone knows that more and more university staff are working short and precarious contracts and getting more and more overworked. This of course gives employers more power over us and means we're not free to do the kind of research and teaching that we think is most important if it takes just a bit more work than the low hanging fruit. And the strike is about different kinds of inequality of pay along lines of gender, race, ability and so on that universities are doing little to end. But the strike is also about much more than just these specific things. It's about what we want universities to be like and the way they're going. Research is increasingly geared towards what can maximize short term gains and not towards what we think is most important for our society. And the same is increasingly true of teaching as well. What striking teachers are saying in America is as true here as it is there. Our staff's working conditions are students' learning conditions. When you squeeze staff, students feel the pinch as well. Very obviously, overworked, overstressed and consciously anxious people aren't going to be able to perform their best. Nor is this any sort of decent way of treating the people whose labor keeps the universities going. It's also worth pointing out that the decision to strike was made democratically by a UCU ballot. The UK has extremely restrictive trade union laws, so strikes can only take place if over 50% turn out to vote. The fact that so many universities, including some of the country's biggest ones, did that. Tells us something about how important this is to university staff. If the university management listened to their staff, cared about what they thought and did what they could to fix things, the strike wouldn't be necessary. That would be nice, but it's not the world that we live in. In the world we live in, negotiations on all these problems have gone on between the union and management, and nothing has changed. Striking is the last remaining option if we want to stop the destruction of the UK's universities. Part 2. How do strikes work? A strike is a coordinated withdrawal of workers' services, with the aim of bringing day-to-day operation to a halt. Typically, this is done by forming a picket line, which is supposed to stop others from entering the place of work and to inform people about the strike's cause and goals. Strikes have been used by labour movements around the world for over a century because they work. They have won things like the 10 and then the 8 hour working day, weekends, sick pay, higher wages, better safety conditions and a lot more. For decades, the numbers of strikes taking place around the world has been dropping, and unsurprisingly, this has coincided with the lives and conditions of working people getting worse and worse. Some people even think that strikes don't work anymore, but they haven't been paying attention. In just the last couple of years, teachers, fast food workers, hotel workers and many others, especially even in the United States, have gone on strike and won better wages and conditions for their members. The recent LA teacher strike is one example. Their wins included a 6% wage increase with no concessions, demands for class size caps and reducing class sizes across the board, a moratorium on charter schools, additional school counsellors and librarians, a nurse in every school and demands against racial profiling and for migrants' rights. Strikes are a form of direct action. They work by disrupting day to day operations enough that employers feel they have no real alternative but to give in to strikers' demands. For a strike to actually be disruptive, things at the workplace must be stopped from running as usual. This means that staff and supporters must not cross picket lines or reschedule cancelled lectures and events. Doing these things directly undermines the strike by limiting its impact. Like lots of other important things, this might be inconvenient, and universities will likely refuse to pay workers while they're on strike. But this shouldn't deter anyone. Losing a bit of pay in the short term is a lot better than losing much more wages and pensions in the long term. Even from a purely monetary perspective, going on strike is much cheaper in the long term than the alternative. Part 3 What's wrong with crossing a picket line? Strikes only work if enough people do it. They only work if they actually manage to disrupt things enough for the people in charge to feel that they have to give in to the strikers' demands. And that only works if people don't cross the picket line. Crossing the picket line isn't a neutral act. If you cross the picket line, you are directly undermining the strike. So on strike days, don't cross the picket line, don't use any university facilities, don't go to any scheduled lectures, seminars or supervisions. Part 4 What You Can Do If you want to support the strike, here's what you can do to help. Do send messages to the head of your department and your university management, such as the vice chancellor's office, to let them know how you feel. Do send messages of support to those you know who are striking, especially those on precarious contracts. Do come and visit staff on the picket lines to help out or just talk. Do come to teach out that staff will be organising on strike days. Do hang out, and if necessary, have fun and enjoy life, read, learn etc. in other non-university places. And do tell your friends, family and anyone you think of about the importance of the strike. Thank you very much.