On the 10th of April, 2013, I received an email from X on behalf of UNISON Senate House Branch. In this email I was notified of my position of steward and asked to fill out a form in order to ratify this position.

I would like to take advantage of this opportunity to inform you and the members of the Senate House Branch committee that on Saturday 6 April, 2013, after much debate in a democratic and participative assembly, we have decided to leave UNISON en masse for the following reasons:

1. The UNISON Senate House Branch is run as a dictatorship by A, B, C, X and Y (the first three are employees of UNISON);
2. We have never received moral or financial support for the 3 Cosas Campaign;
3. On the contrary these people have continually put up barriers and obstacles to our campaign;
4. The London Region UNISON employee A wrote public letters attempting to smear our campaign protests and confuse the university community;
5. The period for which the current committee leadership was elected has lapsed and hence any actions or policies of these individuals are deemed illegitimate;
6. With what can be considered at best flimsy pretexts, our elections of 8 March, 2013 were annulled;
7. We the outsourced workers feel offended, humiliated, disrespected, played for fools, and we have even entertained the notion that there is discrimination and racism within UNISON Senate House Branch.

In light of the above-listed reasons, and respectful of the democratic decision taken in the assembly of 13th of April, 2013, and as just another militant in the 3 Cosas Campaign, I hereby announce my irrevocable resignation from the position of steward and my cancellation of my UNISON membership.

Robinson
The Marginalised

Over the past few years, the outsourced cleaners of the University of London have been at the forefront of the struggle over wages and conditions. But over the past month, they’ve had to spend more time fighting their “bosses” in UNISON than their bosses in the workplace.

This election was, for the first time in many years, an actual contest. There were candidates running for almost all positions, and a political campaign to bring the rights and struggle of the outsourced workers to the fore. A slate of outsourced workers and in-house allies from across workplaces in the University of London, including the student halls and ULU, stood for election. They put forward a vision of the branch which would represent all workers, rather than racistly ignoring half the workforce, and which would stand up to University management in negotiations. Faced with high inflation, soaring rents and the violent tactics of UKBA, surely this is what should be expected from a trade union branch?

But the Unison bureaucracy were intent on ensuring that the cleaners would never claim a victory. From the start, there were attempts to disqualify candidates on spurious grounds, and often by specious reference to an otherwise overlooked constitution. They attempted to disqualify some candidates for irregular payment of membership fees, the same tactic used against the RMT in recent years by their employer. Others were attacked for not having permanent addresses. Both of these accusations are related to the cleaners’ status as impoverished, international workers: many have no expendable income, and consequentially also have to move house every year.

Worker militancy 2010-2013

These are the same cleaners who, in 2011, won £6000 in overdue wages from the contractor, Balfour Beatty, through wildcat strike action at Senate House library. Unison were quick to come in and mediate between the workers and the University once the strike was off the ground, though they abandoned this role soon enough. On the back of this militancy and a vibrant campaign, the cleaners also won the London Living Wage – effectively a 50% wage increase.

Unison have gained members, a recognition agreement, and the aura of success through the rebellious action of the cleaners. Thanks to this, membership has boomed. Every endeavor of the outsourced workers’ struggles (English classes, London Living Wage, the 3 Cosas campaign) has been met with either sympathy or outright support form the majority of branch committee members. There are 300 workers in the branch, of which 120 are outsourced workers. Despite the enormous increase in membership which the cleaners’ campaign has brought, the Unison bureaucracy was happy to reject these members at the first instance of losing control.

In 2012, the cleaners decided to campaign for full equality with the in-house workers, demanding the full wage package: pensions, sick pay and holiday in line with workers employed directly by the university. The Unison branch, however, decided not to back the campaign: perhaps it was too militant, perhaps it simply did not reflect the interests of a few members on the committee who blocked the vote. Frustrated by this turn of events, the cleaners’ first response was to continue to organise an autonomous campaign without the support of the union. The 3 Cosas campaign was launched. It has met with huge support from students and workers alike, both outsourced and in-house.

The activists stand for election

It was on the basis of this support, that the cleaners decided to stand for election to the branch. Despite the attempts to disqualify leading members of the campaign, the election went ahead, with the candidates fighting with the bureaucracy to remain in the competition – and recall, these are workers almost all of whom know English only as a second language, usually holding down three jobs, and working all hours of the day, arguing with paid union officials over their right to stand in a branch election. At the same time, the University of London attempted to distance itself from the demands of the 3 Cosas campaign by branding it as violent, while maintaining that all worker negotiation should happen through the Unison branch. 

The elections were meant to be held in the last two weeks of February and the first week of March by a postal ballot, and the results to be announced on March 8th. That day came and went, and there were no results. At the end of March, the cleaners organised a protest outside Unison HQ, to demand the results be released. On the evening before that protest, Unison announced that the results would not be released, and that the election was being made null and void. When the workers tried to enter the Unison offices, the union called the police.

Why did UNISON cancel the vote?

The reasons cited by Unison for not releasing the result are that there was “outside interference” and that a high number of the ballots had to be re-sent. The first of these excuses is in relation to an article printed in the London Student newspaper, which has covered the activities of the branch and raised serious questions about the way the election has been handled. The second excuse is simply a result of the cleaners’ having to move a great deal, due to their extremely low wages and exploitation at the hand of racist landlords. In sum, the branch cancelled the election because there was propaganda it didn’t like, and workers who don’t count in their union because their living conditions are too impoverished.

The necessity to re-send ballots was easy to predict and and entirely preventable. The campaign informed UNISON early on that there would be an issue having a postal ballot (rather than a secret ballot on site), as many of the addresses would not be up to date. Unison went ahead with a postal ballot nonetheless, presumably to better their chances of defeating the cleaners’ campaign. No process of ‘data cleansing’ (i.e. ensuring the lists were correct) occurred, which is Unison’s own ‘Code of Good Branch Practice.’ Before ballots were issued, branch activists attempted to help members update their addresses, but the the London Region Unison officials insisted that only a member herself could make such a request – for which they employed only one Spanish speaker, available only in work hours, by phone.

Unison has announced that there will be a new election soon, administered by the Electoral Reform Society. But the issue was clearly never about the counting of votes, but the attitude of the union from the start. Unison has acted in a manner far more discriminatory and oppositional to the workers than either Balfour Beatty or the University of London. If that attitude continues, why on earth should these workers remain part of the union.

The next 3 Cosas protest is on April 10th – please come and show your solidarity with the workers of the University of London.

The demo was great – around 60 or 70 people came on their lunch breaks, and with the aid of the samba band drums and a lot of shouting, the crowd made itself heard by management in the building. Management decided to close some of the doors on the ground floor, although these were not being blocked by protesters – but this did mean that they were forced to explain to members of the university why there was a protest going on at all. Despite the attempts by management to escalate the situation, everything remained good natured, as the security staff are well aware that it is the 3 Cosas Campaign which has always been more concerned about their health and safety than their bosses, who force them to come to work when sick.

After about an hour the University seems to have called the police. This was the end of people’s lunch breaks, so the demo wrapped up independently. Nonetheless, after most of the crowd had dissipated, ten police took one protester to the side, a worker who had joined the protest in solidarity, and arrested him on suspicion of ‘common assault’ against a security guard. He was hand-cuffed, driven to the police station, put in a cell and his mug shots and DNA samples were taken. He was then offered two options: either admit guilt and accept a formal caution, or claim innocence and accept an interrogation and investigation from police. He chose the latter. Twenty minutes later he was released on bail on the conditions that he would reappear at the police station on 26th February, would not approach the security guard, and would not go to Senate House. 

In the meantime, the University of London claimed that they do not believe the 3 Cosas campaign has any student support, despite all the petitions, demonstrations, and student union motions passed which back all the demands in full. Following on from this outrageous claim, the University began to respond to students’ messages of support with this claim:

“We will not enter into any discussion with the 3Cosas group, whose violent actions against our staff and those of our contractors at a demonstration at Senate House on 5th February resulted in the police arrest of a 42-year-old man on suspicion of common assault.”

On the 21st of February the police called the worker and told him there was no need to reappear as the investigation was being dismissed because there were discrepancies between the allegations in the security guard’s statement and the record of events as per the CCTV cameras. So lets put the record straight. The University responded to the demonstration, organised and attended by both students and workers, by calling the police. It then seems that someone, possibly the university, had the police arrest a man for common assault. “Common assault” is the least serious kind of assault anyone can be accused of, for which no injury needs to be proven, only fear of injury, and that the fear was caused either intentionally or ‘recklessly’. The abandoning of this case by the police can only mean that with both the security guards’ statement and the CCTV footage, it was not possible to show any proof of any action which might – even unintentionally – have given rise to someone being scared of assault.

The University and the police responded to the demonstration by falsely arresting a supporter for the simple aim of discrediting the campaign, a campaign which they know full well has wide support across the Bloomsbury colleges and – thanks to the support of ULU – support is growing in other universities across London. Students and workers in London are becoming increasingly familiar with the underhand tactics of both police and bosses, and are well prepared to face it down. The workers’ demands for pensions, sick pay and holiday pay is just and reasonable – it is an indictment on the university that they are taking so long to meet them.

There are several questions we have all been asking over these last few years: Where will we live? How will we be able to afford such expensive rent in London? How will we find jobs that pay enough to enjoy ourselves and live in comfort? When will we pay back our student debt? How?

We must be clear from the beginning, all the questions articulated above maintain a certain tie to one another. They are not unrelated problems, haphazardly assembled by the hands of mundane serendipity, the chaotic and capricious whim of fortuna, the inevitability of everyday life. No, we insist that they are all preciously constructed, maintained and reproduced in order to cultivate a certain set of social relations and a particular way of doing things. What ties them all together is debt, your debt, and the surplus that it creates being appropriated by Swiss private equity firms, Gulf state sovereign wealth funds, US and Japanese pension funds.

The Financial Times writes with earnest regularity on how the London student residential market represents a major source of income in these hard times for our mendicant investors, now on average making ten times the returns when compared to residential property from elsewhere in the UK. The student housing sector has ballooned from a fringe investment 10 years ago to a global market worth $200bn today with it becoming a ‘must have investment for most large funds’.

At the same time that we observe huge speculation on student accommodation and the ferocious entrance of private equity into the sector, we also see universities, now both sides of the Atlantic, issuing bonds secured against future earnings from tuition fees. The primary example here is the University of California which is presently in $13 billion debt as a consequence of various bond issues over the years and now, much as is the case with the sovereign debt of Greece and Spain, has to issue new bonds to ‘roll over’ the repayment of old ones. For institutions such as UCSC within the University of California the fact that there is no cap on fees, combined with the perpetual demand for college degrees (this is after all the only way one may enter the labour market for the overwhelming majority of ‘well paid’ jobs) means that despite their status as heavily leveraged institutions which for potential investors would not seem like a particularly good bet – they remain investment grade.

Subsequently the capacity of UCSC to raise tuition fees to whatever level it likes is advertised in every bond prospectus. Despite its high levels of debt UCSC is still seen as investment worthy precisely because it can charge what it likes, and as is meant to be the case, there are more applicants than places. This is not regarded as academic competition by university management however, rather it is seen as a situation of over-demand and insufficient supply, and hence the signal to further increase tuition fees until equilibrium and the ‘just’ price is found. Market equilibrium magistra vitae est.

We feel it important that students are in full receipt of these facts and are confronted with the inevitable outcome that the present cap of £9000 on tuition fees will not remain with us for long. Already we expect that the Russell Group of universities is lobbying to have it removed. Elsewhere those institutions such as De Montfort who, like UCSC, have begun to issue their own bonds will also need the cap to be abolished in order to guarantee the lowest costs for the debt-financing of future projects – a necessity in light of government funding being all but scrapped.

The present cap will soon go, and institutions as disparate as Cambridge and De Montfort are now issuing their own bonds. The university increasingly resembles little more than a debt factory. This is not glib comment, a casual and speculative refrain, but merely a statement of observable fact. Our future looks like Santa Cruz, only without the beach.

University College London have recently embarked on a £1 billion project – the extension of their London campus into Stratford. The fact that an institution which is failing to balance budgets in the short-to-medium term amid the most volatile period for higher education funding in decades is choosing to embark on such a large and unprecedented expansion is remarkable. Remarkable, but also of its time, in so much as it brings together many elements of the present moment and various catalysts for future crisis and present suffering. The dispossession of the land of those 300 people who still live there and the debt-financed investment in real estate and speculation on student housing, primarily for wealthier non-EU students. Social housing replaced by student housing funds run by private wealth managers, education no longer about capabilities and learning but merely a means by which to create returns from a relationship of debt.

UCL Stratford thus brings together many of the problems that you yourself face – impossible rent, debt, high fees. As a fee-paying student you are a cash cow – not just when you study, but even when you live in student accommodation. The institution does not serve your needs, rather you serve its need to service its debt and finance an ever larger number of managers who wish to ‘invest’ in land speculation and high-end residential buildings and perhaps even a few research centres. You may think of yourself as a part of the student body, but for the ‘bond guys’ and the more intelligent ones in university management you are simply thought of as what creates ‘returns’.

Universities are increasingly disposed to entering into what can only be described as PFI agreements with private equity and these ‘student housing funds’ to fund the construction of housing that students can live in throughout their university ‘experience’. We see this in the recent £1billion development in Cambridge that will see 3,000 new residential units for students  - paid for in part by a £350 million 40 year bond – in partnership with private capital.

As UK universities increasingly employ financial instruments like those seen in California such as long-term bonds (which should really be called securities) students will be seen as no more than producers of the means of repayment, their debt the axis that produces the wheel turning for private investors seeking safe and strong returns and keeping the university afloat as public funding contracts to the point of an almost infinitesimal gesture that borders upon nothingness. This is your future as a debt, a debtor, the guarantor of returns for private equity and pension funds. You will be the assurance against loans that will pay for building facilities and housing that will mean more students who can pay more fees and more rent in order to secure yet more facilities and housing. And so on. All the time fees increasing in order to find equilibrium, rent increasing as there is quite literally nowhere else for you to live and the sons and daughters of the wealthiest families from across the globe are willing to pay.

UCL Stratford represents an active act of dispossession, taking people by force from their homes if necessary. It is pure, unadulterated violence. It has a direct relationship to your debt and the fact that rent in London is increasingly untenable for all but the very wealthiest individuals. Like the university, student housing is a debt factory. UCL Stratford, much like this whole miserable future on offer, can not be allowed to happen. If it does, if these projects and this system continue unimpeded, our lives will be miserable, brutish and shit – make no mistake about it.

Find each other. Educate, Escalate, Destroy.

On Wednesday 28 November, UCL Council will discuss the university’s proposal for a £1 billion new campus in Stratford. This would mean demolishing Carpenters Estate 300 families currently live. The residents of the estate have rejected the plan. The student union has rejected the plan. Academics at UCL – including at the Urban Lab – have rejected the plan. Yet UCL Council have shown no signs that they are listening to the students, staff and communities to whom they are – or should be – accountable. On 28 November at 2.30pm, a demonstration will take place to draw attention to the unacceptable sacrifice of 300 families’ homes and communities in the name of UCL.

On the same day, Princess Anne is visiting Senate House to mark Foundation Day, the annual celebration of the University of London’s first charter in 1836. Yet, the University of London continues to employ and contract cleaners at Senate House without sick pay, pensions or holidays beyond the statutory minimum. On 28 November at 6pm, student unions and trade unions across the University of London’s constituent colleges are standing up to decry this injustice.

In our names, universities are bulldozing and impoverishing communities. University management continue to be unresponsive to the students, staff and communities to whom they should be accountable. Evicting 300 families from their homes and community demonstrates the urgent need to democratise our universities. Universities must listen and respond to students, staff and communities, and act in the public good rather than as if they were private businesses and developers

Join the 28 November Bloomsbury demonstrations!
Save Carpenters Estate demo: 2.30pm-4pm, UCL Quad
Justice for Cleaners demo: 6pm, Senate House

Having seen the protest posted on facebook, I went along last Saturday fuelled by hatred for Michael Gove, pleased to go and meet fellow haters and share my disgust that he would be invited to my university. I also booked a ticket to the all-day event at which he was the opening speaker.

It was a small but vocal demo, with members of the IoE branch of UCU joined by students, teachers, and members of the Anti-Academies Alliance, who had their new ‘Gove-buster’ suits, with which they intend to harass him wherever he goes. The majority of the conference attendees were forced to wait in the rain as sponsors of the event and exhibitors (mainly private education companies) were allowed in first. This provided a supportive audience for our armfuls of flyers and information, and appreciation for our home-made Gove puppet (‘you might think from his policies that this man is evil, but he is merely a puppet, with academy chains and private education companies pulling the strings…’).

The event itself, an all day ‘Festival of Education’, was organised by ARK (the UK’s biggest Academy chain, set up by hedge-fund managers, along with TES and the IoE, with a large amount of sponsorship coming from the growing private education industry. If there was any doubt about the real motives behind the Academies programme, this event made it pretty clear, with the privatisation agenda well-represented in almost every session, including titles such as “does it matter if education makes a profit?” Currently there is little appetite for staight-up profit-making schools and the academy chains are having to make do with paying massive salaries to top management; outsourcing even more aspects of school life such as training, SEN support, consultancy etc; and undermining pay and conditions agreements, as well as financial shenanigans. However, there is a quite transparent pro-privatisation agenda that hopes for much more, and which the academies programme has taken a huge leap towards. This corporate arms-fair style event is clearly the future of education in Gove’s hands, and it is disgusting that the Institute of Education allowed such an event to happen on its premises given that Gove’s policy model repeatedly seeks to ignore academic education research in favour of the findings of his friendly policy think-tanks.

It was heartening at least to know that I am not alone in my opposition. As Gove walked on, I was definitely not the only person booing, as Gove’s cosy interviewer David Aaranovitch was forced to acknowledge and try to make an awkward joke of it. When it came to questions and Gove was forced off his cautious script, the hostility felt by the audience became clear, with widespread heckling, derisive laughter, and outrage as he tried to tell an audience mainly made up of teachers that current teaching standards weren’t up to scratch. It was exciting to be in a room of so many people who shared my hatred for this scourge, but also disappointing, as one woman said to me afterwards, why did we listen at all, why weren’t we throwing eggs?

On the 24th of October, Newham Council approved UCL’s proposal to build a new campus on the Carpenter’s Estate, despite opposition from residents, leading UCL academics, and UCLU. If UCL doesn’t pull out now or radically revise its plans, this would mean destroying hundreds of people’s homes, their community, and their history. There is still time to save the Carpenters Estate.

Is this how a university should behave? Come hear from Carpenters residents, housing experts, UCL staff and students and make up your own mind – is UCL bulldozing a community?

Food & refreshments will be provided.

UCLU.org/Stratford (coming soon!)
Fbook: http://www.facebook.com/events/331562460275775/

There already are shared-services in Bloomsbury. ‘The Bloomsbury Colleges’, established in 2004, incorporated a selection of the institutions on campus (excluding UCL) into one body which employs staff for administrative labour across those different institutions.¹ It’s no secret that there are two big players in Bloomsbury’s microcosm of the HE sector: UCL and the University of London. Both are surely interested in shared services as a means of capitalising on their already substantial workforces. The term has also cropped up in discussions at SOAS. For all the universities, shared services is seen as a means by which they can outsource as many of their workers as possible, and potentially merge workforces across the Bloomsbury campus in order to make savings.

This is far from simply a Russel Group affair however. London Metropolitan University, always at the forefront of changes in labour in the HE sector, has passed through corruption, wage cuts and the instigation of mass deporatation of its ownr students; this avant garde of the recession has now flung itself into the latest mechanism of social immiseration.² Now that the legislation is in, at London Met three companies have been short listed: Wipro, BT Global Services and Capita.³ The last of these is the front runner for the bid, and the management have been quite explicit that this is about creating a shared-service.

Shared services are the jargonistic outcome of a piece of legislation introduced in 2011 as part of a fulfilment of an EU directive from 2006.⁴ The law allows a new kind of legal body to be formed by tax exempt institutions for the purpose of lending out that service to other bodies. So long as the initiating group is supplying a service which is part of its non-taxable activities, it will not be taxed on selling those services. This incentive is there in order to encourage public sector institutions to put their funds into private sector companies. This means that the money which is given to hospitals and universities through grants, fees, etc is then ploughed into private companies.

‘Services’ 

The collective worker at the base of these companies suffer the main effects of the change. An advantage to management is that by finding new employment for their staff they can extract more labour from them for the same pay by ‘rationalising’. For instance, let’s say that both UCL and SOAS have to each employ a computer engineer full time in order to make sure that if there are any problems, then they will get fixed promptly. It turns out the computer engineers are each only engaged in any actual labour on each campus for half the time, because they do the job competently and the computers don’t break much. If UCL were to form a shared-services body, they could then make their computer engineer work at SOAS half the time, and SOAS would sack their employee. This is known as ‘efficiency’.

As with all outsourcing, the transfer is from the structures of the public sector into those of the private sector. What needs to be emphasised is that while the rights of workers in the public sector have been constantly trampled over for the past 30 years, they are still far better than those of private sector workers. Privatisation is perhaps not the best term – universities have always been private, and never nationalised. But what the public/private sector division does reflect is a series of nationally agreed pay deals which were won through mass organisation in the 1970s. These are the same pay deals which the government is now trying to rip up – which is why the failed strike ballots by Unison and UCU members pose a threat to wages across the board. But shared services is a means by which the national fight can be sidestepped on a local level, albeit with a national incentive scheme. It encourages universities to remove those pay deals from all of its workers and invite private shareholders in, without national union agreements or charity law standing in the way.

An example: a cleaner employed by a university might get £8/hr, whereas her equivalent in Ocean or Balfour Beatty Workplaces will usually be paid £6/hr.⁵ The University employee will be able to take maternity leave and still receive a basic pay and return to her job afterwards; her equivalent will only get statutory sick pay from the benefits office. The university employee is probably in a union which has a legal, binding agreement with the employer, so that if there are any issues over immigration, sick pay, promotions, bullying, harassment etc, the employer is legally obliged to negotiate with paid, trained union officers; the private sector employer probably doesn’t recognise the union, and so the employee is less likely to be a part of any union which could represent her. The university employee will have a pension topped up by the employer; the private sector employee will have none at all.

Cleaners are an apt example. At Hinchinbrooke Hospital in Cambridgeshire, now run by Circle Healthcare, the ‘savings’ have been made through sacking some of the cleaners and reducing their wages.⁶ As always, the process of capital accumulation starts at the bottom of the labour process. But once there are a minimum number of women of colour doing the maximum amount of corridor mopping on minimum wage, zero hour contracts, these companies will have to work their way up the factory line in order to continue making savings. They have to keep moving up the chain because they are competing with other contractors: if the current company doesn’t make the change, then when the contract is up for renewal a different company will show how they can sell their service to the university for less by making even sharper ‘savings’ and undercutting them.

John Baldwin, outsourcer-in-chief at Warwick university, has this to say: “Shared services will help free up new resources to spend on the student experience.”⁷ The convenient link presented between student experience and cost-cutting technologies gently glides over the fact that the students, and their sanctified experiences, also bow under the weight of the new labour regimes. This is best seen at nowhere less than Warwick, which boasts of its initial experiment with an early form of shared services in 1997, through the creation of Unitemps – an ingenious company which specifically targets students and graduates to work as zero-contract, no-conditions workers in the universities which trained them.⁸

‘Sharing’

So much for the ‘service’ – but what of the ‘sharing’? There are two kinds of sharing which are implied. The first is with the private sector company who actually runs the project. Warwick’s pioneering projects – for which their John Baldwin seems to have cast himself as a modern day Benjamin Franklin – are facilitated through a consultancy firm called Tribal Group. Like other leading companies in the new privatising sector, Tribal are mainly a software application company whose ‘solutions’ involve complex databases which ‘do the work for you’.⁹ HEFCE seem to be extremely excited about the possibilities shared services offer up for cloud computing and data sharing.¹⁰ Another good example of such applied software companies is ATOS, well known for it Paralympian hypocrisies.

The new legal body is owned by the university – which is why they get to claim that they are still the employer.¹¹ This body is in partnership with a private sector company (like Capita), who essentially runs everything it does. The advantage for the university is that it gets to ‘save’ on paying for its contractors, because they don’t have to pay VAT on the deal. The advantage to the private sector company is not only that there’s a whole new, vast swathe of labour to take on (and exploit), but that it also doesn’t bear the full brunt of the financial responsibility. If the new body goes bust (due to mismanagement and corruption, more common that we might like to think), presumably the University will be liable, and the rest of the private company’s projects remain intact.

A second kind of sharing are the ‘efficiency savings’ made by sacking superfluous workers during the initial setting up of the body, explored above as ‘efficiency’.

A third and final kind is between the different institutions who pay for the service after it has been set up. It’s easy to imagine that universities, schools or hospitals might see an attractive option in bringing in a company (say, UCL services) which has the veneer of a public body but is actually a method of driving down workers’ conditions and pay. However, historically there are two general groups which have been exempt from VAT. On the one hand, there are tax-funded bodies which qualify as a public good – universities, hospitals, housing associations etc.¹² On the other hand, however, in order to facilitate financial flow, credit transactions and certain banking activities are also exempt.¹³ It seems possible then that universities could team up with banks and insurance companies to ‘share services.’ Time will tell, though its unlikely that the charity commission would be sympathetic to the argument. Perhaps it’s more likely that a university could team up with a Housing association in order to manage student accommodation.

What’s more certain is that the new company created for the shared-services can sell shares – something which a university, as a charity, can’t do.¹⁴ By selling shares, the university would then be able to make steps towards being a truly private company, sidestepping the inconveniences of charity law.¹⁵ The creation of a new legal body also means that the entire entity could be sold on, which is arguably the plan at London Met.¹⁶

What will management say?

University managements will tell us that shared-services are good for students because it means saving on space, money and resources, and that it’s good for staff because it might even bring a pay increase. These savings, however, will be due to redundancies and the VAT exemption – and will be short lived. Over years, workers and students have demanded that staff be brought back in house, employed directly by the university for the reasons given above: the better conditions, won through a previous round of struggle. This demand is now being met in a distorted form – through a subsidiary vehicle which will ensure that the benefits of direct employment (and 20% increased profit margin) only accrue to the institution, and to dividends for its shareholders.

It should be clear that this is a private sector solution to a problem brought about by previous rounds of marketisation. With London Met’s finances crashing on the rocks of marketisation, management probably believe that selling on their new shared services body will be the only way to bring about financial security.¹⁷ Similarly, Hinchingbrooke Hostpial was handed over to Circle HealthCare in order to ‘deal’ with the enormous debt inherited from the toxic private finance initiative in which the hosptial is embroiled.

The differences between the institutions are irrelevant from the standpoint of capital- whether rolling in a turnover of nearly a billion (UCL), or bowing under a debt of millions (London Met), shared services are being proposed as a solution. The parallels to national economies are striking and not coincidental: UCL is the Uk to London Met’s Greece. London Met’s vice-chancellor provides another good parallel: “What underpins the recent stories about the institution is one impulse: affordability. A university that lived beyond its means must now pay its way.”¹⁸ This is, of course, the same argument being used against workers throughout Europe to stamp down wages and smash collective organisation, both in Greece and the UK.

But what next?

Well, the PIGS, of course, are everywhere; every sausage factory needs pigs.  But these are no ordinary pigs, and they’re not being turned into sausages.  They’re here to break up our picket-lines, to violently arrest us when we protest, and to control us with targeted immigration raids.  They’re here to monitor our Social Centres for signs of banner making and other ‘terrorist activity’, to count the keffiyehs and the shadows they suspect might be anarchists.  In other words, to begin increasingly to do to us in Bloomsbury, what they’ve always done to the poor, the non-white, and the potentially insurrectionary, from Tottenham to Ulster to Anaheim.  To those who plead for ‘workers in uniform’, having never felt a truncheon, we reply that these remarkable pigs-turned-abattoir-hands are here to uphold the smooth running of the machinery that turns human beings into sausages, to batter us back into its pipes and grinders, and scrape off the over-spill.  This structural role is flatly incompatible with realising that they are themselves ultimately made of pork.

So much is obvious.  More difficult to unravel is the PRODUCT itself.  Just what is the end result of all this alienated labour, this mashing-up of flesh and bone?  And who’s eating it?  Much has been said about the power of fees to transform students into consumers, ignorant debt-puppets, munching on the ‘student experience’.  And this ‘experience’ is surely a sausage of sorts, a melange of pre-masticated half-knowledge, jargon, and club-nights, encased in a smooth, synthetic skin.  A neatly individual experience, one link per person, the same for everyone; a propagandistic light-show designed always to dazzle and never, ever, to illuminate.  The spectre of the student-consumer, though, is ultimately a distraction.  Or rather, this particular piece of consumption is only a preliminary to the main event, the great spewing out of these transferable-skills-made-flesh into the requisite niches of capital production (the contorted liberal plea for ‘social mobility’ demanding merely the occasional unexpected result in niche-allocation).  Thinking critically about just whose interests are served by the creation of graduates gets us further.

Let us not forget, though, that a graduate is not literally a commodity, no matter how many times she is ordered to ‘invest in’ and ‘sell’ herself.  The same cannot be said of that other core product of the university machine – that ‘out-put’, relentlessly bled from academic workers, which is simultaneously input for the ever-expanding technologies of bourgeois power.  Academic research.  Currently we see the connections which have always existed between allocation of research funding and the interests of commerce, government, and military being elevated to the status of natural laws.  This logic – the details of whose deductive schema certainly deserve our scrutiny – is inherent in the sublime farce of philosophers scrambling desperately to prove that their products have as much ‘impact’ as nuclear weaponry.  It stands exposed and dripping in UCL’s £17 million SECReT labs (a.k.a. Security Science Doctoral Research Training Centre), which, embarrassing acronym aside, do not appear to be making empty promises when they assure the prospective researcher that his every Orwellian wet dream can be  ‘implemented in the “real world”’, courtesy of valued industry partners G4S, Thales, BAE Systems, SELEX Galileo…  As they shamelessly conspire with Old Corruption to bulldoze undesirables out of East London, razing homes to make way for more of these eminent research facilities, the UCL management, at least, are under no illusions about what ‘community’ their institution exists to serve.

However, our critique must go further.  For now the liberal steps up, reinvigorated, to the podium.  He spies an opportunity for cooption.  Defend academic freedom from political interference!  Knowledge for its own sake!  The dogma of the BBC interview – that every argument has (at most) two sides – has given these slogans a resonance simply because of what they are not.  It is easy to forget that the liberal vision they embody – the university as a pure community of practised minds; an oasis in the desert of capital, which must merely be defended against pollution by foreign elements; a ‘private sphere’ which is simultaneously a ‘public good’, which coincidentally ‘boosts the economy’ while transcending its imperatives – is, in all its bewitching incoherence, ultimately a tool of the master, and as such will never dismantle his house.  Make no mistake, the liberal is not on our side.  He demands that we trust in the pure judgements of the intellectual elite, as though this had only incidental connections with any other elite.  He cries ‘peer review!’ as though the ruthless hierarchy that is academia was in any meaningful sense composed of ‘peers’: witness the hives of departmental intrigue crouched over by notorious but tolerated lechers, the post-doc drones scrambling over each other to lick, suck and publish whatever it takes to escape the abyss of the zero hour contract…  His fundamental premise is that sheer force of fantasy can detach knowledge from application, distil its intrinsic value out of its instrumental role in the service of capital.  Against this we say: what needs to be confronted is the extent to which this ‘knowledge’ is already political, and the role of academic quite simply that of good, old-fashioned bourgeois ideologist.  From philosophy to neurophysiology, history to political science to urban studies, we need to confront the ideological nature not only of what is acknowledged as the mainstream in any given ‘discipline’ (the name is apt for more than one reason), but also the majority of what proclaims itself critical.  And what’s more, we need to expose the machinery which generates and enforces this convenient conformity.  This machinery is constructed of the clawing limbs of all those ostensible peers. It is oiled by college management structures and their corresponding pedagogical models, by standard textbooks and the exams for which we memorise them, by institutional pomp and framed degree certificates, disciplinary conventions and notions of ‘professionalism’ which exclude anyone who looks like trouble; its operations are multifarious but are everywhere reflections of the rule of capital.  The product in turn reflects – cannot but reflect – its production process.

We say that our most urgent task here, now, is to disrupt this machinery.  It is to this end that we offer our critiques, although we recognise their incompleteness, their provisionality. For it is, as ever, only through the acts, the process, of disruption, that the true nature of our object is revealed.