 Okay, yeah, hi everyone. Thanks for coming. As I said, I'm Dan. I'm a member of UC at King's College London where I'm a PhD student and I'm also a graduate teaching assistant and I'm a member of UC Marxists and Socialist Appeal and I want to talk today about why the UC has been on strike and what we can do to take it further and actually win this dispute. So some of you will probably have heard a number of times like you know what the reasons actually are for what the reasons were on strike for are but there's there's so there's two disputes. One is overpaying conditions called the four fights and one is over pensions and the four fights are against gender ethnicity and disability pay gaps, casualization, unmanageable workloads and pay cuts. Firstly looking at the pay gaps, in higher education there's a gap of around 15% in pay between men and women workers, a gap of 17% between white and black workers and a gap about 9% between workers without disabilities and disabled workers. And we have to call this what it is, it's discrimination and it's discrimination that our employers are doing nothing about. Not only that but you have to see it in the context of real real terms pay cuts. The employers have recently offered higher education workers 1.5% pay increase but that offer is, as it has been in the past, well below inflation and once inflation is taken into account that's a real terms pay cut of over 20% since 2009. Not only that but the lowest paid teachers in higher education are paid only £8.70 per hour and this is while student fees have been rising and the salaries of vice-chancellors have also been rising. Vice-chancellors earn upwards of £269,000 per year with some of the highest paid, including at my own university at King's, earning upwards of £400,000 and that's not including other benefits like accommodation costs, pensions that they get and that's what student fees are going towards. They're going towards paying for vice-chancellors and it shows that it's simply a lie that there's no money to spend on stuff. If universities have the money to pay vice-chancellors these astronomical and rising salaries then they have the money to give what we're asking for a £2,500 pay rise to the people who actually do the excellent teaching and research that the universities rely on for their prestige. Not only is our pay falling but more and more work is being squeezed out of us for it. In the sector there are about 300,000, 3,500 staff on exploitative zero-hour contracts and 68% of academics are on fixed-term contracts with no long-term job security and this includes GTAs like myself and universities are relying more and more on these casualised fixed-term low-paid workers to do really the essential work that the university couldn't run without like running seminars, marking exams, this kind of thing. A survey carried out by the UCU revealed that four in five staff are struggling with their workload and 78% are reporting an increased workload due to the pandemic and 86% have been directed towards mental health support for managing their workload. Not only that but 3,000 university workers were actually made redundant during the pandemic and all of these issues exist and management knows about them but they haven't addressed them and they don't nothing to address them. So that's the four fights. The other dispute is about pensions and pensions are they're not a gift from the from our employers. Workers earn every penny of them and they're owed every penny but pensions in higher education have been cut by 240,000 pounds since 2011 and the employers are also now proposing a further 35% cut along with higher contributions from workers and all this is based, this current offer is based on a valuation that was done of the pension fund at the very lowest point of the coronavirus stock market crash so the proposed cuts are completely unnecessary, the markets recover from them and they can choose when they do their valuations. It's quite transparent really but so people go into academia for the for the love of their subjects right they want to work on them and think about them and teach teach them to students but you can't do that when you're being paid less and less for more and more work if you're if you're on insecure and or casual contracts and that's doubly so if you're if you're black if you're a woman if you're disabled. Only to have you know nothing to show for it at the end of your working life because your pension's been gutted and this is why we've been forced to fight for our conditions by going on strike these last three days. But this isn't just affecting university workers and it's and I want to talk a bit about the reasons how we've got here. One of the things is the increasing marketization of higher education, sorry a symptom of the increasing marketization of everything but more and more universities are seen by their management teams as businesses complete with students as paying customers and that's the reason that universities are spending more and more on fancy buildings and on the salaries of their vice chancellor as I've said while spending less and less on the budgets less and less of their budgets on staff. It's the same race to the bottom we see in every industry. We're also seeing the private sector having greater and greater influence in higher education through schemes like the PFI and increasingly small amounts of public investment in higher education. We have to strongly oppose this. Students aren't our customers and education should be free and publicly funded. University should be run democratically by their staff and students not as businesses by out of touch management teams. I think we've got to understand all these changes this marketization in the context of a more general crisis of capitalism. Since the crash in 2008 the capitalist system has been limping along stagnating and although there's a huge amount of wealth and excess capacity most of that in the pockets of vice chancellor's universities it can't be profitably put to use and so the capitalist regime just doesn't work and the pandemic's only exacerbated this trend. Our Tory government and governments around the world can't point to a way out so they're attempting to make workers pay for the crisis through austerity measures and cuts and stuff. And those measures explain why university workers are facing these conditions but they also explain why all workers are facing these conditions. Other unions and other sectors unite actually going to strike at Kings next week as well. They're all considering and taking strike action in the face of cuts and erosion of their conditions which are fundamentally no different to the ones that university workers are facing. We're going to hear in a minute from Aaron who's a representative of the NAU. The crisis of capitalism is affecting workers in all industries and across the globe and they're fighting back. To take two recent examples we've seen fights over fire and rehire practices at the Weetabix factories in the north where workers have recently escalated their action to indefinite strike four days a week. In America you've seen this phenomenon of strike tober where like a hundred thousand workers have voted to go on strike in industries like healthcare, construction, coal mining, communications, food manufacturing. It's really exciting to see I think. But what can we do about it here in the UCU? Joe Grady the general secretary of the UCU said in an email to members yesterday that we know we're right but being right doesn't win disputes action wins disputes and I think she's right about that. It's absolutely right that we've been on strike these past three days you know not just convincing people but showing that we can put our money where our mouth is. We've made a great great progress in showing students and the public that we're in the right and that we're winning and we're winning them to our side. But we're not just striking for the sake of it we have to strike to win. If we don't win then we're gonna have been out in the cold and losing pay for no reason really. How then can we win? I think we have to show the employers just how serious we are about these demands. If they won't come to the table then we need to escalate the fight. We need a plan for a marking boycott over Christmas and indefinite strike action in 2022. We won't work until our demands are met. This and that's going to be hard and it's going to require all the solidarity we can get. But taking this bold step is really the only hope we have of anything coming of this dispute. We should learn from the brilliant example of workers at the University of Liverpool who recently were faced with redundancies and responded with three weeks of strike and a marking boycott and those redundancies were stopped. They won their dispute. But this action can't be taken and shouldn't be taken by the UCU alone. To really have an impact this kind of action should be coordinated with other trade unions with other workers who are affected by the same crisis and by the same cuts. With a bold coordinated fight by the whole working class we can not only win this dispute we can also mobilize to kick out the Tories who are making us pay for the crisis and ultimately we can mobilize to overthrow the capitalist system that caused this crisis in the first place. So thank you. Great thanks so much Dan it was great to hear from yourself. Yeah so my name is Aaron I'm a primary school teacher and a member of the NEU Marxists and a proud member of Socialist Appeal. This has been a really inspiring strike and it really shows us the way forward in the NEU. It's been great to see the solidarity between the students and the lecturers. It's also been great to see the speakers from other campuses coming over and talking of cross-campus campaigns and the teach-outs as well. Obviously showing what is possible with regard to free access to education without the profit motive of capitalism. We've also been battling in the NEU with pensions, pay and workload for over a decade just like yourselves in the UCU. Let's start with pay. Rule terms pay for teachers is 20% less than in 2010. Does that sound like deja vu to you? Because it is you know it's the exact same thing for primary school teachers as what's happening to university lecturers. What does this show? It shows that it's a conscious policy of the Rotentory government. It's a blanket pay cut across the board from nursery to PhD. Teachers are getting 8,000 less a year than in 2010 and that's even before the increased pensions contribution set in 2014. It's before the stagnating pay, the pay freeze or the scandal of performance-related pay. Now performance-related pay is the idea that teachers pay is linked to students' outcomes on a test and obviously the schools with the most disadvantaged pupils are hit the worst in this situation. It's essentially treating children like cars on a manufacturing line like they all start from the same point and they're going to end at the same point. You can't relate a teacher's pay to the outcome of individuals who are all so different. Obviously it was brought in as a way to attack workers pay and conditions. The Institute of Fiscal Studies has dubbed it the long squeeze on teachers pay but we call it a slap in the face to education. Workload is rising all the time and the goalposts are moving constantly. I was shocked to hear that a service lecturer was expected to mark 900 assignments one term. Similarly, one in four teachers are working more than 60 hours in a week. The impending threat of OSTED hangs over teachers insuring unbearable conditions, workload sorry, and the government's focus on exams, exams, exams are breaking the children and teachers alike. Not only would any teacher tell you that neither OSTED nor exams help learning in any way but it's also led to an endemic mental health crisis in schools. It's no surprise that 25% of teachers leave the career after three years. Rather than properly funding education, increasing pay, bringing more staff on, and reducing workloads, the government has instead decided to lengthen the time it takes for new teachers to actually get their qualified status as a fully qualified teacher. So rather than improving the work conditions to convince teachers to stay, they've simply made it harder for them to leave. So I'll move on to academies. Now academies were originally sold to schools as a way to, it was like the answer, like the answer to poor performance of disadvantaged pupils. And not many teachers were sold by this, but for some reason the leadership of the schools were. I think the pay packets will be the reason why, as you'll see in a minute. But yeah, it's shown, since it's shown not to be the case at all, that disadvantaged pupils are helped by this, all the standards of the schools are improved. In fact, quite the opposite. And it's an intentional policy of eroding workers' rights and attacks on pay and skyrocketing workloads to squeeze more and more out of workers and the pupils. Billion and intimidation is widespread in these academies as it sort of takes a move towards more of a business model. I'll give you an example of a school at, it's called Holland Park School. And the teachers there, they reported a toxic culture of public shaming for poor work and exam results in the staff room, at a staff meeting. Apparently there's teachers have reported seating plans for these staff meetings, where the more favourable and hardworking teachers are at the front and the ones that they want to shame are shunned to the back of the room. So that gives you a kind of idea of the kind of environment here. But not only that, if you then decide you don't want to put up with that any longer and leave, they threaten to give bad references. And not only threaten, they actually did it. And there's a situation where a teacher had to plead with the new school and explain the situation. Luckily, they understood. All this is happening while they're reducing teachers wages in academies. And increasing the number of school leaders on six figure salaries. In the 20 largest academy trusts, CEOs are receiving an average of 236,000 per year. The highest paid academy boss in the country, Sir Dan Moynihan of the Harris Federation, is receiving a basic salary of 450,000 pounds. So you see the issues that we face in primary schools are strikingly similar to the university's lecturers. And they are dense cool in the fact that they are linked by the crisis of capitalism. Staff are being squeezed for every drop. And this attack on education staff is a direct attack on learning conditions and the quality of education that students are receiving. Despite Boris's level in up nonsense, schools are receiving less funding now than they did in 2015. So where's the extra money going? And certainly not the university campuses. And it's not going to the NHS workers. And it's not saving workers from the rise in redundancies either. It's going to save the capitalists, the ones who have become incredibly wealthy during the pandemic, and to repay the mountains of debt that the government have got themselves in. And why is this is to save this impressive capitalist system? I think it's clear to me that the NEU should take inspiration from this current strike and combine it in a joint struggle with the UCU and other unions all across the education sector. You know, we're hearing of like great solidarity between workers of different education sect sections because we're facing the same fights. It should be a joint struggle. This was done in July 2014 to some extent with over a million workers, which resulted in Michael Gove leaving office in a sort of a bit of shame really. But of course, he only got promoted. But this kind of shows what what can be done. And also in November 2011, there was a strike across the whole public sector with two million workers and over 60% of schools closing. This was at the peak of trade unions fight back against austerity. That was a response to the 2008 crisis and capitalism. But unfortunately, it was cut across by a right wing leadership in the trade union council. And the top of the and the top of unison in particular who struck a rotten deal with the Tories. But a lot has changed since then. And it's still changing now. And we've learned some really important lessons from that time. Sharon Graham's election to unite on the basis of back in the class struggle, and boot in the right having the right wing booted out of the unison's NEC are clear signs that workers are not going to stand for these attacks and these cuts in their conditions. And they are voting for leadership that represents their class interests, but not only represents their class interests, but who are willing to fight for those. We're now in the midst of the biggest crisis of capitalism for 300 years. And it stands only to intensify as once again, we're being made to fit the bill. So I joined my comrade Dan from the UCU. When I say that the strength in our unity comrades, you know, your fight is our fight. And you've shown us the way forward. The NEU must join the UCU in this struggle. And there's no better time to wage this joint struggle across the whole of the education sector, and rally for a one day general strike as a starting gun to bring down this rotentory government. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, everyone who's spoken. Thank you to the speakers and also everyone from the floor. I think it's been really good for us to get a feel for the mood on the picket lines and lots of different universities. It's been a cold couple of days. So it's really important that all of that morale stays put. It was really good also to hear a report from Goldsmiths in particular, which was noted as in this kind of epic three week strike, which might even continue in the new year. We'll see what happens. And we've been trying to report as much as we can as the Marxist Student Federation on everything that's happening in on all these campuses on all the different strikes. But in particular, at Goldsmiths, you know, we reported on the strike at Goldsmiths where the title of that article, I think when I saw it was fighting for the soul of Goldsmiths University. And I think that's really kind of that's really important because that's what we're doing. That's what this whole strike is about. It's fighting for the soul of universities of education of higher education as a whole. Because we have to ask as has been the point has been made, I think quite well by many people here this evening, who is central to the running of a university who facilitates the teaching who facilitates the learning who creates the environment the safe environment that is necessary for students to learn in the first place. And the answer is its lecturers, its teaching staff, its admin staff, cleaning staff, security, and much more. But right now they are being attacked. It's not the vice chancellors who are having a hard time as has been said, they're sitting on lovely six figure salaries. Meanwhile, the workers are being attacked and it's a sustained attack. The UCU are currently on their third wave of strike action in four years. But we're seeing a lot of this kind of anger develop on on campuses. Unison workers and higher education also balloted for strike action this year. And also cleaners and outsourced workers in particular, especially in London over the last couple of years have been consistently actually engaged in different industrial battles and having different elements of strike action as well, due to the conditions that they that they're faced with. So this strike is not just a flash in the pan. It is the result of what has been said many times the ongoing marketization of higher education. But what does that mean? Tuition fees are higher than ever before classroom sizes are increasing. The mental health epidemic that rages on and university management are completely criminal, I would say actually in their response to this and the horrific conditions that students have been left in, especially after the pandemic, they face nothing but contempt students from from management. But as has been said, things are equally fraught for staff burdened with casualization, precarious contracts, late payments, not even being paid time in the way that they should be, all of the reasons that have been explained by Dan as well today in terms of why they're on strike, which might potentially continue in the new year as well. But all of that all of the conditions that are facing students and staff right now, they're not isolated to higher education. We are living through the deepest crisis of capitalism ever. An austerity is not over. In fact, harsh austerity is set to come. And they're going to attack pensions. And this is against all workers, they'll attack pensions, they'll attack conditions, the scourge of fire and rehire has already been mentioned in London right now, we're seeing the RMT, the tube drivers are going on strike. The point is that the bosses are trying to claw back everything that they lost in the pandemic and they're trying to make us pay for everything that they did to bail out the system during the pandemic as well. But actually the marketization of higher education started a long, long time ago and it was happening before the pandemic. Because capitalism is always looking for new avenues through which it can make a profit. It's always looking for new areas of society to break open and subject to the laws of the market. And the pandemic has only accelerated that process, not only in higher education, but across other sectors too. But what we're seeing is that workers aren't putting up with this, right, that they're fed up and actually they're beginning to fight back. And that includes young people and that includes students, the conditions of life today are radicalizing young people, climate change, job insecurity, austerity. All of this is making young people question the world. It's bubbling up a certain mood in society that eventually will explode. And that's why the majority of students support the strike. And they do because it's not just about their learning conditions, which are of course important. It's a part of the wider problems that are taking place in society right now that young people in particular are questioning and are angry about. They're angry about what they're seeing. And so all of this anger that young people currently have won't be solved by this or that movement or this or that particular thing. There's a growing feeling that something bigger and much more fundamental needs to change because we're in a war, right? We're in a class war. And this strike, this use to use strike is a part of that war. And it's a part of the fight back that's currently taking place. And students and everyone here today can and must be a part of that fight back and must be a part of that war. And it is an absolute outrage that certain student unions have come out against the strike. We really can't not make this point enough. And let's be clear in doing so, they are doing the job of university management and bosses, they are doing their dirty work. We've already heard about the scourge of media propaganda, that you know, the Daily Mail coming out against the strike, although I think if the Daily Mail don't like you, you're probably doing something good. So we don't need to worry about that. And here you have these student unions following in their footsteps, echoing the line of the Daily Mail. It's an absolute scandal. KCL, Loughborough, Leeds, other places, and we should name and shame those student unions that are playing this dreadful role in the strike. And in particular Leeds, we have to point it out because their justification for opposing the strike was particularly egregious. They said, those most affected by the strikes will be our marginalised students, specifically our disabled international and working class students. This added burden on our members is something that we want to avoid at all costs. Now, this is absolutely unacceptable. These sort of ideas are a complete poison to our movement. And that argument, by the way, is something that can and will be used to disrupt any strike of all kinds, whether it's higher education or any other sector of the economy, which is why we have to really firmly come out against such ideas. The reason that UCU staff are going on strike is due to the ongoing marketisation of education. And that marketisation doesn't solely affect the UCU staff. It impacts students, especially working class students and marginalised students and disabled students who won't have the proper access that they need to learning due to the cutting of costs and the squeezing of students and staff that's taking place in higher education. The Leeds Student Union, you know, there's part of the statement says that they want to avoid the burden that this is putting on members. Well, you cannot avoid the marketisation of education. Lecturers cannot avoid the fact that their pensions are being slashed and attacked. Students cannot avoid that their access to learning is being diminished and squashed every single day, year on year on year. So we have to be really firm against these people and against these student union leaders who have played a really terrible wrecking role in this strike and we completely condemn them. I mean, Edgar mentioned the UCL Student Union that didn't consult students before they came out with this statement against the strike. But in some student unions in Loughborough, they did consult students, they ran an online survey on whether they should support the strike. The majority of students said yes and they still came out and opposed the strike because they said that the people who were against it felt really strongly. So we feel like we can't we can't we can't oppose what's going on. It's an absolute scandal on all of these places they should be fought because the point is we need student unions that genuinely fight in students' interests. And I think it's been explained really well today while why those interests perfectly align with the interests of workers. And we need student unions that fight for free education. Let's talk about free education in the midst of this of this strike. The struggle of academic staff today is totally connected with our struggle for free education, which is something that's not spoken about that much anymore in general. And we have to talk about it rather than student unions who pretend to care about the needs of working class students. We need our student unions who are fighting unions who say that education should be free. And by that we mean for everyone throughout their whole lives. We reject and we should get rid of this idea that education ends artificially at the age of 16 or 18 or 21. That's not at all the case. And so this strike and the anger that everyone feels around it really has to be something that is escalated and that we play a part and we mobilise to build to become bigger and better. Because this strike really should be the beginning of an effort to build towards a public sector general strike. And this is something that Aaron mentioned as well. Because the mood is there. The mood is there across public sector workers who are being crushed by inflation right now. They're being crushed by the Tories and their policies. But something like that obviously needs to be planned. It needs to be a coordinated campaign. But such a strike would make a huge statement, as has been said by comments from the floor today, on who runs society. And that would be the first step towards bringing down the Tory government. Which is also what we stand for free education and bringing down the Tory government and everything that comes along with that. So the point is if we want this strike to play such a role in being the beginning of a light of a wider movement that we clearly need, then this strike has to win. And if this strike is going to win, then we have to step up our work. We have to step up our solidarity as students and workers coming together. And I would say in particular that includes building and supporting the strike fund. So we are going to ask for donations. We've got some collection pots. We've got some card readers. And I would ask you to donate to the strike fund for the UCU that we can offer them as the MSF, as a symbol of our solidarity, not just in the abstract but real, genuine solidarity on the picket lines and with the strike fund. And so finally, I would say if you're not a member of the MSF or you're not a part of the organisation or the Marxist societies, as has been spoken about today, and you believe and are convinced that this strike needs to win to be a part of a general fight back against the Tories, against austerity and against capitalism, which is the system that upholds all of the dreadful conditions that we've spoken about today, then you need to join us and be a part of that. Thank you.