Timing the strike: the temporalities of industrial action.
| Author | Elliott, Cathy |
Time is out of joint in the UK and around the world. But even before the COVID-19 crisis and the lockdowns which are sweeping the globe, time was already out of joint in UK Higher Education. Last November, on the eve of the first wave of industrial action in the current dispute between the University and College Union and employers, a senior and well known academic tweeted out this question (or, perhaps, humble brag): 'Can I ask academics of any seniority how many hours a week they reckon they work. My current estimate is 100. I am a mug. But what is the norm in real life?' (1)
It didn't take long for fellow Twitter academics to do the maths. That figure works out at over fourteen hours per day, or 8am to 10pm every single day, including weekends. When, in such a life, would there be time to eat or wash or take care of the usual daily chores of 'lifemin'? What sort of competitive standard does it set to students, and academics just starting out, if this way of thinking about time becomes normalised?
Leaving aside the strange claim that this particular academic does not inhabit 'real life', there are three things that I want to point out about the temporality that animates this tweet and other competitive approaches to how much time we all spend working. First of all, it views time as a scarce resource; and secondly it assumes that this is a resource that must be used for work and not other valuable projects. Finally, it seems to pit humans in a battle for supremacy over time. All three of these assumptions take time to be a phenomenon outside of human control, and which we must submit to or vanquish. Is this a useful way of thinking about time, though? To answer this question, it may first be helpful to consider the range of temporalities that inform the life of the education sector and of universities.
When I was small, in my village primary school, it was a great honour to be the child chosen to ring the school bell that signalled that it was playtime or lunchtime or lesson time or home time. When I went to secondary school, the bell had the same purpose but it was automated and mechanical. You weren't allowed to start putting your coat on when the bell went, though. The teachers used to say, 'That bell's for me, not for you'. We were being carefully trained to understand that we were not in charge of our own time. This mechanised progression through the day is a reminder of a time when the school bell existed to instil the discipline of the factory floor into school pupils, who were learning to be compliant and to live according to clock time. (2) The ringing of that bell, until very recently, had been replaced in the lives of academics by the University Hour, in which classes must end at five to the hour and begin again at five past. This gave us just enough time to sprint between classes - so long as we were not so excited and engaged by learning that we forgot not to over-run. Since the strike ended, however, just before lockdown began, that sprint has been superseded, and instead we must remember to log into the next remote teaching session online, with the five minute buffer usefully repurposed as enough time to make sure everyone is connected and their microphones are working.
Our time in education is also cyclical and seasonal. Every year we notice as freshers' week or exam season comes round again. The years seem to go faster and faster but these recurring events come round the same, reminding us of the rhythm of the earth's motion round the sun. It seems to be a myth that our long holidays in summer derive from the agricultural calendar and the requirement for children to help with the harvest; (3) but that myth itself nevertheless reminds us of other ways of living that are also closely based on the passing seasons.
These mechanical and cyclical temporalities also jostle with the familiar linear and teleological temporality of 'progress'. We are all going somewhere, we all have a goal in mind. It might be to get a degree. Or another degree. It might be to publish your research. It might be to get great student evaluations or do better in the Teaching or Research Excellence Framework this time. The idea of 'progress' or 'development' is deeply engrained in how we think about time: as Emily Robinson has argued, the idea of...
To continue reading
Request your trialCOPYRIGHT GALE, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.
