Six days into the current Universities and Colleges Union (UCU) strike against pension cuts, Universities UK (UUK), the representative body for British higher education management, launched a series of tweets and videos in support of University Mental Health Day. In a move that is now pretty familiar, the presentations shifted attention from a toxic environment in which staff and students now experience unprecedented levels of mental distress, to a series of tips for self care – joining a club, eating well, pursuing a hobby – in which much of the responsibility for well-being is placed back upon the shoulders of the individual sufferer. As the UUK Mental Health Policy Officer advised in a Twitter video, ‘Don’t be afraid to take time for yourself.’
I guess to many of the viewers, this advice must have seemed spectacularly mistimed. At the precise moment that the UUK was outlining its commitment to ending anxiety and depression in higher education, the wider organisation was working to significantly change pension conditions, undermining the secure livelihood once promised to university staff. It would be foolish, however, to dismiss the advice out of hand. The idea of ‘making time for oneself’ has been a central part of the labour struggle for the last three centuries. As E. P. Thompson argued many years ago, once employers had hammered into modern workers the idea that ‘time is money’, employees’ struggle shifted from the preservation of traditional rights to the recovery of lost time.[ref]E.P. Thompson. ‘Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism’, Past & Present 38 (1967):56-97; (4), p. 34. [/ref]
The attack on future pensions, and the different analyses offered by UUK and by EP Thompson, all point to ways that different notions of temporality are caught up in academic work: not simply in the way it is organised but also in the way that it is experienced. The unremitting busyness of academic life, mostly complained of but occasionally worn as a ridiculous badge of honour, throws colleagues into a relentless present in which prospect and perspective are all too often lost to the insistent clamour of everyday demands. This sense of the overwhelming present is only heightened, as the critic Mark Fisher noted, by the precariousness of modern casualised labour, which offers no secure place from which to understand our past or project our future hopes.[ref]Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is there no alternative?(Chichester: Zero Books, 2009), p.34 [/ref] Strikes offer us an opportunity to disengage, to escape a constricting present and get a sense of where we stand in time. Many strikes, certainly most of the strikes I have participated in, are kind of nostalgic: they mark a world we are on the brink of losing, or perhaps have lost. Others, like this current strike, quickly go beyond that, taking us out of the present to remind us there is a future to make. They give us, as UUK recommended, the opportunity to take time for ourselves. In our present crisis, strikes are the best medicine we have.
Rhodri Hayward is Reader in History in the School of History at Queen Mary University of London, and one of the editors of History of The Human Sciences.
The accompanying image, ‘Image taken from page 5 of “The Universal Strike of 1899. [A tale.]”‘ has been been taken from the British Library’s flickr site. The original can be viewed here.
This article represents the views of the author only, and is not written on behalf of History of The Human Sciences, its editors, or editorial board.