Workers of the World Unite!

Or, at least, “tens of thousands” of middle-class ivory tower academics across the United Kingdom.  Judging by the comments to this BBC article about the one-day walkout, it’s not a universally popular position.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t support the strike action, but would find it abhorrent to cross a picket line.  Hence, I’m at home today . . . working.  I get an unscheduled research day that I’m using to finish up my conference paper for the MPSA and progress on my paper for the WPSA next month (as well as an unplanned and un-budgeted day of unpaid leave).

Which, of course, is ironic, opens the question: is the nature of work as an academic compatible with the idea of withholding one’s labor through strike action?  I know several of my colleagues here at LGM experienced first-hand the organizing of graduate student TAs at the University of Washington, which I just missed out on due to having the temerity to graduate.  Unionizing graduate students and adjunct lecturers makes sense to me.  Here in the UK, we don’t have the benefit of a tenure system, and aside from those who have achieved the rank of full professor, we’re all on the same nationally negotiated pay scale (and poof, there goes my 0.4% pay increase this year) so I am somewhat swayed by the suggestion that a union can be beneficial in this context.  Yet, here I am working regardless, although I’m not giving the two lectures I was scheduled to deliver today.

Discuss.