The Mediated City: Observing the Digital Picket

Publicly Sited

This is a short message to listeners of The Mediated City podcast series. UK listeners, and certainly my students, will know that the University and College Union (UCU) is currently taking industrial action. This action centres on two disputes. The first is focused on pensions: a typical member of the USS pension scheme is set to suffer a dramatic 35% drop in their guaranteed retirement income if planned cuts go ahead. The second dispute relates to four wider areas: pay, casualisation, pay gaps and workloads in UK Higher Education. These are all areas which really are reaching a breaking point; at many institutions, including my own, for example, an inexcusably high proportion of teachers are paid by the hour, and more often than not, deliver their excellent teaching by working many extra hours unpaid. While it was tempting to imagine that this podcast could continue around the strikes, it didn't take too long to remember that this whole thing is possible because of what I (your host, Scott Rodgers) do for my job, teaching and researching at my institution, Birkbeck, University of London. In that workplace, I am a member of the UCU, and am joining my colleagues on the strike action. The strike action means we are withdrawing our labour, including our teaching. And it also includes a digital component, called the ‘digital picket’ which is meant to underscore that the digital spaces in which we labour are no different than the physical ones. The upshot is that our sixth episode, and possibly our seventh as well, will be withdrawn from this season.

If you want to know more about what’s going on in this dispute, in the meantime, you can find general information on the main UCU website: https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/12100/Ten-days-of-strike-action-begins-at-UK-universities

Music: ‘The Mediated City Theme’ by Scott Rodgers License: CC BY-NC (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)