The UK higher education sector has been in decline for some time. True, Brexit threw European research partnerships into chaos and led to a rapid drop in EU student applications to UK universities. But substantial transformations had been taking place for much longer. From the early 2000s, the UK Labour government’s call for 50 percent of young people in higher education expanded the sector even as state funding diminished. The expansion was forged, instead, on a diversification of funding: from domestic students via ever-rising fees; from even higher-fee international students; and from partnerships with private enterprise. At a time of historically-low interest rates for borrowing, university administrators chose to invest in new physical infrastructure. The 2015 lift on the student cap led to a consolidation of student numbers at certain universities, leaving a range of departments at less “prestigious” universities under threat.

COVID-19 exacerbated all these trends. Worries abounded in departmental meetings about how to obviate students’ (and their parents’) request for refunds for their now-hybrid teaching offering. The same was true for accommodation costs, with a number of universities refusing to refund students in lockdown, leading to rent strikes. The years since COVID-19 spelled the end of low interest rates; in response, university administrators announce cuts and austerity measures to service the debts their real estate decisions engendered. For staff, this has all led to ever-increasing workloads, as student numbers grow without commensurate increases in staffing, and a rise in the percentage of precarious contracts (which, are overwhelmingly held by minoritized staff).

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These transformations impact all academics, but unevenly. Specifically, they are a generational predicament. Many junior academics, like myself, have spent years on zero-hour and one- or two-year (or six- or nine-month) contracts. If you try to stay in the sector you will rack up multiple of these kinds of contracts, at different institutions, moving cross-country and internationally. Between each contract, you will have open-ended periods of under- and unemployment. As such, when we look at our senior colleagues, we do not see our own futures but, instead, are haunted by specters of futures past. This subjective disconnect became all the more apparent during the COVID-era University and College Union (UCU) strikes of 2021–23. For precarious staff, this industrial action crystallized a new (and politicizing) sense of themselves as contract workers, in contrast with the sense of academia as a vocation that a number of our more established colleagues cling onto.

This manifested in the following ways:

Material interest. The strikes saw an impressive, if only partially successful, mobilization against labor precarity and pay gaps, commonly referred to as the "four fights" (pay, equality, workload, and casualization) and for the defense of pensions. Aligning these yoked together a coalition of junior and senior, and precarious and permanent, academics. Our senior colleagues were sympathetic to the four fights—but it is one thing to be sympathetic, another to strike and lose pay over it. They were very motivated, however, to protect their pensions. And so were those of us earlier in our careers and precariously employed—but not a single person from this demographic, on the pickets or in conversation, expected to see these pensions.

Labor relations. Acceding to shifting between different institutions relies on the cruel optimism of potential ongoing employment. It also, however, strains any sense of membership to an academic “community” across levels of hierarchy in any given university. So, while impermanence makes labor organizing harder, perhaps, it also undercuts any organic attachment to an institution which might calm labor agitation. I remember the genuine sense of betrayal senior colleagues felt in relation to academics who were now members of senior management. For those of us who were precariously employed, we reacted with some degree of bafflement: why on earth would someone in higher administration see things the way that we did, just because they were also an “academic” (or had been before)? The vision of academics all working for the common good simply had not corresponded to our experiences of employment in actual universities.

Worker solidarity. To not see our future in the working lives of senior colleagues also serves to focus our minds on who our situation does resemble. It opens possibilities for potential solidarities with our students and other workers, on the basis of our equivalent labor situations. The LSE pickets saw the MayDay Rooms archivists show up with materials on the histories of student-staff and staff-staff solidarities in London across the decades. Students, academic staff and cleaners, who had been involved in the Justice4Cleaners industrial action at LSE, part of a wider wave of insurgent trade unionism in the United Kingdom, were able to focalize the connections between these different labor struggles and emphasize the physical university as a shared space of struggle. While the (re)new(ed) sense of themselves as workers delineated a labor fracture for precarious and junior academics with established academics, then, it also made a labor alliance possible between precarious staff and students and other workers on campuses.

Physical presence. Pandemic-era working and labor agitation alike showed the importance of sharing space. Lockdown-era work from home atomized us—in my case, I taught and recorded lectures alone from my bedroom, as I lived with roommates (a situation shared by my precarious colleagues and in contrast to senior colleagues with spare rooms or offices in their homes). Physical presence, together, on the LSE pickets reversed this atomization—such that we cajoled as best we could colleagues who lived further away (invariably more permanent and more senior) to come in on strike days and experience these transformed intersubjective connections in space.

Labor solidarities, whether intra- or inter-sectoral, do not naturally arise, but rather are the product of shared experiences. They benefit from physical co-presence, in work and in struggle. And manufacturing moments (and spaces!) for collective action clarifies fractures. Whether those solidarities can be nurtured and continue beyond those moments/spaces, and for more of our colleagues, senior and junior alike, is the question.