analysis 08 / 11 / 2019 06 / 12 / 2019 · 2019-12-10 · rosa luxemburg stiftung from johannesburg...
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Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung
FROM JOHANNESBURG TO LONDON: STUDENT-WORKER STRUGGLES FOR FAIR LABOUR PRACTICES ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES
ANALYSIS 08 / 11 / 2019
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In 2015 and 2016 students at South African universities campaigned
under the banner #FeesMustFall for the abolition of tuition fees.
It was widely reported that students were pushing for far-reaching
change: Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid rule they were
calling for the decolonisation of the country’s education system. Little
public attention however has been paid to the alliances of students
and workers in parallel #EndOutsourcing campaigns for fair labour
practices for all university workers. What were the trajectories of the
student-worker movements for insourcing of all workers at public
institutions of higher learning? What did they have in common with
similar campaigns that arose at the same time also at universities in
the United Kingdom? What are the common aims of these struggles,
and how successful have they been?
In early October 2015, just days before the massive
#FeesMustFall student protests hit South African higher
education campuses, the Oct6 movement (named after October
6, the day the activist group presented its manifesto) raised
concern about the conditions of ‘support staff’ such as cleaners,
security staff, and maintenance workers in the public university
run on corporate principles in the contemporary era of
neoliberalism. Protest action focused on the University of the
Witwatersrand (‘Wits’) in Johannesburg. The signatories of the
group’s manifesto included student activists, radical academics
and labour activists from universities in Cape Town and
Johannesburg. They called to action against the outsourcing
practices that marginalised the most vulnerable university
workers. The manifesto argued that, “while some progressive
gains have been made in the post-apartheid period, South
African universities have slid into more conservative practices.
One of the most serious instances of this conservatism
has been the treatment of university workers. The mass
outsourcing of university workers to private companies since
1999 is a blight on the record of post-apartheid universities”.
Next to the issue of tuition fees the labour conditions of the
low-paid workers providing auxiliary services have become
a key issue of contention at South African universities. The
outsourcing of functions to private companies has typically
meant that workers, who were previously directly employed
by the universities, had to take a cut in their already meagre
earnings; they also lost social benefits, including pension funds
and tuition fees rebates for their own and family members’
university studies. South Africa’s student protesters carried
“#EndOutsourcing banners along with their #FeesMustFall
demands. Concerned academics entered, sometimes heated,
disputes with University managers. Workers went on strike to
demand better labour conditions.
These are not just South African concerns. Similar conflicts
have been fought over at British universities. In both countries,
protests revolved around the exceedingly low salaries – and
lack of social security benefits – paid by contracting companies
to outsourced workers. There is more at issue though: In
London as much as in Johannesburg and Cape Town battle
lines have been drawn between workers, contracting companies
and university managements. They have been fought by new
alliances of workers, students and academics. In some places
they have seen the rise to prominence of newly invigorated,
independent labour unions. A particularly strong example
of this is the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain
(IGWB), a young union, established in 2012 that mostly
organises transnational migrants who work in Britain under
precarious labour conditions. The IGWB broke away from the
HEIKE BECKER
06 / 12 / 2019
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established trade union federation, which the immigrant labour
activists felt did not properly represent their constituency. In
their campaigns they employ vigorous, colourful and noisy
forms of activism instead of the conventional rather dreary
picket lines of the established union representatives.
Students and critical academics have further raised concerns
about the practices of corporatized academia and deepening
inequalities in the neoliberal Global South and North. In
South Africa as in Britain the struggles for insourcing have
involved arguments between academics and senior academic
management (some of them with leftist credentials) about the
core spirit, social and political responsibility of the university.
What the Oct6 activists from Johannesburg and Cape Town
wrote, captures the hardening battle lines from the Cape to the
Thames: “The raw inequality of campus life is a sign of a deeply
undemocratic system. Universities cannot imagine that they
can serve as the cultivators of future democracy in South Africa
if their own terms are saturated by such inequality. It provides
a tacit education to all who learn at our universities that such
inequality is an acceptable feature of our society. If we cannot
sustain a practice of equality in our universities, how are we to
expect other institutions to work against inequality in the most
unequal country on earth?”
In this paper I show the different trajectories of movements
for insourcing of all workers at public institutions of higher
learning through recent examples from South Africa, with a
focus on Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and the
University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, as well as the
University of London in the United Kingdom. What are the
common aims of these struggles, and how successful have they
been?
South Africa: student-worker alliances
In South African universities outsourcing of auxiliary services
was introduced some years into the post-apartheid era.
On the cusp of the 21st century, the country’s universities
privatised cleaning, catering, and grounds maintenance, that
is gardening and other tasks to keep university campuses in
good shape. Interestingly, both of the country’s leading ‘liberal’
universities, Wits and the University of Cape Town (UCT) were
led by vice-chancellors of impeccable leftist credentials when
they introduced outsourcing. Wits vice-chancellor in 2000
was the historian Colin Bundy who had been instrumental
in the production of revisionist South African history from
both Marxist and Africanist perspectives, while UCT’s
principal in 1999 was Mamphela Ramphele, physician and
anthropologist, and a prominent formerly banned activist
of the Black Consciousness movement. That South Africa’s
leading universities turned to such problematic labour practices
while under the watch of former activist-academics leaves no
uncertainty about the pervasiveness of the neoliberal turns the
country took soon after the end of formal apartheid.
Typically, outsourcing resulted in massive job losses and drop
in wages. When Wits handed over cleaning, catering and
grounds maintenance to private companies in 2000, more
than 600 workers were retrenched and only about 250 were
re-employed by private companies.
Outsourcing was accompanied by drastic attacks on wages and
conditions: typically, cleaners’ wages dropped by almost 50
per cent, without social security benefits such as medical aid,
maternity benefits, or pensions, a report on labour conditions
at the university said in 2011.1
The 2011 report concludes that outsourcing— reproduce[d] the
apartheid legacy at Wits and continues to do so to this day”.
The contracts that workers have signed with private companies
since 2000 allow the university “to absolve itself of any
responsibility for workers”.
Wits stood out among the South African universities for a
continuous history of worker activism around the labour
conditions in the corporate university. In 2013, for instance,
workers went on an industrial campaign to protect their jobs
when new sub-contractors took over the provision of auxiliary
services at the university.2
While the university executive mostly washed their hands of the
conditions under which the lowly-paid support staff worked,
the institution’s new vice-chancellor Adam Habib – a political
scientist and former anti-apartheid activist – claims that already
early in his term, in 2013, he told the university governance
structures, such as Senate and Council in no uncertain terms
that he regarded outsourcing as a violation of human rights.3
Habib claims that the battles over insourcing were never
between advocates and opponents of outsourcing, and that
he personally had stated unequivocally at the time that he did
not “need to be convinced that outsourcing exploits vulnerable
workers and needs to be changed”.4 However, and that became
the major bone of contention of the next few years, at Wits as at
other institutions, he also took the line that insourcing would
come at a significant financial cost, and that it was crucial that
insourcing would not compromise the university finances.
Hence, the point was whether “institutional stakeholders were
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prepared to pay the costs associated with advancing the human
rights obligation.”5
Habib’s stance was indicative of the attitude of university
executives. However, as he freely admits, the student and
worker protests of 2015 changed the terms of the debate. The
dispute was no longer over whether to insource or not but the
only issue now was, how to do it. He comments: “In this sense,
the student and worker protests were essential for enabling
change. They demonstrated the power of social mobilisation in
opening up the systemic parameters of what was possible.”6
Following student and worker protests in late 2015, at Wits
a ‘task team’ of university executive management, workers’
and academics’ representatives as well as student activists
developed and implemented a two step plan. Starting from the
introduction of a top-up allowance — to be paid to the sub-
contracting companies to ensure a minimum wage (initially
R 4,500 from January 2016). In June 2016 the task team made
a detailed recommendation on the insourcing of workers in
catering, cleaning, grounds, waste and security, and drivers
of Wits branded buses. Insourcing was to happen by January
2017, “provided that this coincided with concluding contracts
with service providers- or that these contracts could be
terminated early without cost to the university.”7 Negotiations
with the companies that provided the auxiliary services were
tricky. However, by mid-2017, about one and a half thousand
Wits catering, cleaning, grounds, waste and security staff
were insourced at a minimum salary R 7,800, and officially
welcomed back into the university community with “a bit of
fanfare”, as Habib writes.8
Wits presents a success story when it comes to the
implementation of reasonably fair labour practices. However,
Habib’s account as he tells it in his personal reflection on
the #FeesMustFall battles, also is ripe with dismissive, even
aggressive retorts at student and worker activists, who were the
most active proponents of the campaign to bring all university
workers back in house His most venomous invectives he
reserves for the academics who pushed hard for insourcing. He
dubs those Wits academics who supported the students’ and
workers’ struggles as the ‘far-left’, or with even more rancour,
the ‘Pol Pot brigade’.9
One of the academics who seems to have earned the Wits
principal’s wrath was the anthropologist and senior humanities
professor Eric Worby, who consistently spoke out about the
importance of a university such as Wits meeting its human
rights obligations by ridding itself of outsourcing. Habib
expresses his clear contempt that “very few of the activists
ever wanted to confront the choices and trade-offs we had to
make.”10 He, like other senior university executives also kept
an authoritarian stance. Typically, riot police and, increasingly,
private security companies were brought on to the campuses,
and student and worker protesters were warned that no
‘disruption’ would be tolerated and that anyone involved would
be suspended and banned from the campus.11
Nonetheless, the recent insourcing trajectories at South
Africa’s comparatively wealthy formerly ‘White’ universities
such as Wits and UCT appear to have been rather smooth.
Similar to the developments at Wits, at UCT an agreement that
committed the university to insourcing was signed between the
vice-chancellor and the National Education, Health and Allied
Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) on 28 October 2015, and by mid-
2017 most UCT workers were back on the institution’s payroll.
Universities such as Wits and UCT had comparatively smooth
routes to getting workers back on the institutions’ payroll, other
universities however were more disinclined. The University
of the Western Cape (UWC), where I teach, is one institution
where until today the auxiliary services are outsourced to
several sub-contracting companies. This is in spite of the fact
that at UWC as on other campuses insourcing was a demand
of the student protests from October 2015, and outsourced
workers have recurrently come out on protests about their
labour conditions and reiterated the strident demands to be
brought back into direct employment by the university. In
February 2016 this took a particularly militant form when
about 100 workers, mostly cleaners, tipped over bins and strew
litter over the campus.
UWC’s executive management initially responded with a
R 2,000 monthly salary top-up from December 2015 and
offered that those working on the campus in the employment
of sub-contractors would receive the same study benefits for
themselves and their children as those directly employed by the
university, that is, tuition-free undergraduate enrolment and a
75% rebate for postgraduate studies. However, during meetings
with the protesting workers and in public pronouncements the
UWC executive management repeatedly claimed that this was
the best they could do, and that insourcing of the outsourced
workers was impossible since this would compromise the
financial sustainability of the university. In early 2017 the
UWC spokesperson said that the university could not bring the
about 600 outsourced workers onto the staff “without facing
retrenchments and possible bankruptcy”.12
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There is some truth in this. Insourcing, despite different cost
estimates presented by South African institutions, would
be costly, especially in the transition. Unlike the leading
historically white universities, UWC, founded by the apartheid
government in 1960 as a university for ‘coloured’ (mixed-race)
students, cannot rely on private endowments bequeathed by
wealthy alumni/ alumnae or corporate investments to subsidise
the costs of insourcing. While UWC is today among South
Africa’s leading research universities, the institution remains
financially vulnerable.
Yet, a number of outsourced workers at UWC faced a particular
hardship when 144 workers employed by one of the six
companies that provide the auxiliary services, were dismissed
in January 2017. When due to the student protests the campus
was shut down in October 2016 they had stayed home until the
university re-opened a month later. The company, SECURITAS,
which provides security services to the university, claimed
that they had been absent from work without permission. In
March 2017 the case was heard at the CCMA (Commission for
Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration) but no resolution was
found. The case of the 144 dismissed workers has been raised
through repeated labour action, and most recently an online
petition in November 2018 that demanded their re-instatement
and an end to outsourcing. The petition appealed to the
university’s responsibility for its workers.
The petition used strong language, accusing sub-contracting
companies of paying ‘slave wages’; it claimed that not even a
quarter of what the university pays the company is spent in
salaries for its employees. Outsourcing was described as an
“evil system” and “modern-day slavery”. The petition concluded
that, “the fight to end Outsourcing is the fight to end slavery
and promote human dignity.”13
The cries for human dignity provide a significant moment that
links the struggles in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London.
London: struggles of precarious workers
Struggles to end outsourcing at universities are not confined
to South Africa. Between September 2017 and May 2019 there
have been 17 days of strike action at the University of London
(UoL), where cleaners and security staff, most of them of a
migrant background, began a campaign to end outsourcing in
September 2017.14
Like in South Africa, the wages of outsourced workers at British
universities – employed by subcontracting service providers -
are generally much lower than those of their colleagues who are
directly employed by the university. They are also discriminated
against in terms of social security benefits,
The strikes have been coordinated by the Independent
Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IGWB), which has called on
the university to end outsourcing, implement pay rises, and
stop the bullying on racist, sexist and homophobic grounds
of migrant workers and especially women who work for
outsourcing companies. The IWGB is a new union, founded
in August 2012, which represents mainly low paid migrant
workers. The union represents sections of the workforce which
have traditionally been non-unionised and under-represented,
such as the UoL’s outsourced cleaners and security guards, as
well as workers in the so-called “gig economy”, such as bicycle
couriers and Uber drivers.
Labour action for insourcing at UoL has included vibrant,
creative and noisy picket lines, protest marches, and
interventions during university functions. The university
authorities however did not back down; instead almost half
a million pounds were spent on additional security over two
months in 2018 to police the industrial action and student
protests that took place in solidarity with them. In the strike
on 30 October 2018, the University even used bailiffs with
handcuffs and extendable batons in an attempt to intimidate
workers and solidarity student and academic protesters.”15
Following on these events, in December 2018 the IWGB called
for a boycott of Senate House, the administrative centre of
the university. The union asked academics, public figures and
organisations to pledge “to not attend or organise any events at
the University of London central administration (… ) until all
outsourced workers (including cleaners, receptionists, security
officers, catering staff, porters, audiovisual workers, gardeners
and maintenance workers) are made direct employees of the
University of London on equal terms and conditions with other
directly employed staff.”16 IWGB organiser at the UoL, Jordi
López, said that this campaign was particularly significant, the
IWGB and campaign organisers believed, since it would help
to achieve victory at the epicentre of London’s academic hub,
which would “sound the death knell for outsourcing in the
sector”.17
By August 2019 the pledge had been signed by more than
400 academics, politicians (including the shadow chancellor
John McDonnell and five other MPs), public figures (including
veteran film maker Ken Loach) and 23 branches of the
University and College Union (UCU), the leading British union
and professional association of academics and academic-related
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staff. In May 2019 the national congress of the UCU officially
voted to support the campaign. With arguments echoing the
South African OCT6 manifesto, Christiane Paine who moved
the motion at the UCU congress, said: “I believe that inequality
is legitimised by precarious work… Universities should aspire
[to be] institutisons where every worker has the same terms and
conditions.”18
As a result of the boycott, over 180 Senate House events
were relocated. However, the campaign has not been without
controversy. In one rather bizarre spat in February 2019, for
instance, leading academics stood accused of undermining a
protest about workers’ rights when the boycott was broken in
order to give a talk about a historian famous for his support of
workers’ rights.
Richard Evans, emeritus professor of history at Cambridge
University launched his new biography of the late Marxist
historian Eric Hobsbawm at the UoL Senate House, thus
breaking the boycott advocating better employment conditions
for outsourced staff.19
Evans expressed his support for the cause of the protesters in a
letter to The Guardian newspaper and wrote that he had taken
a bundle of leaflets distributed by the boycott campaign into
the meeting for the audience to read. He argued that, “this was
a far better way of publicising their cause than cancelling the
meeting and sending 150 people home disappointed.”20
Yet, he argued against the boycott in even more strident terms,
accusing it of ‘sectarianism’. He even called on the late Marxist
historian for support (“I don’t think Eric Hobsbawm would
have approved of the boycott.”) and expressed his disapproval
of the IWGB, whose credentials he doubted since it is not
affiliated with the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the national
federation of trade unions in England and Wales. He claimed
that, the fact that the IWGB union split from the established
unions representing workers at the university to operate
independently would have struck the Marxist historian as
undermining the trade union movement.
The UoL branch chairwoman of the IWGB union, Maritza
Castillo Calle, doubted this and in turn claimed “that we are
sure [Hobsbawm] would be on our side in this struggle”.21
A member of the London Socialist Historians Group responded
to this skirmish over the late historian’s possible standpoint
with a rather laconic comment: “What would Eric Hobsbawm
have done? As a Marxist I am materialist so can only note
that he is no longer available to tell us.” However he argued
that he maintained that it was “a basic act of solidarity” not
to hold events during the boycott campaign since it was not
for the academics to prescribe to the workers how to wage
their struggles; rather they should accept that it was up to the
outsourced workers and the union they choose to represent
them to determine strategy.22
Opponents to the boycott repeatedly pointed to the fact that
the insourcing process was already under way. In response
to the UCU Congress resolution in May 2019, a university
spokesperson, for instance, emphasised that the remainder
of the process had been agreed with the recognised unions
– including UCU and the public service union Unison,
thus excluding IGWB, which the university does not
consider a ‘recognised union’. Reminiscent of the South
African responses, the UoL spokesperson further raised
an authoritative, if not authoritarian voice, claiming that,
“Staff at Senate House have been subject to intimidation and
abuse online in relation to the boycott which is completely
unacceptable.”23
The IWGB has not entirely questioned that progress has been
made but pointed out that the process was very slow and that
maintenance workers, cleaners and catering staff would remain
outsourced art least until the current contract with service
providers are up for tender again, some only in 2021. The
union maintains that thus the university’s handling of their
policy around insourcing has been twofaced.
While campaigns for insourcing have been particularly
effervescent during the past two years, they go back even
longer. The beginnings of the struggles in London have been
told, with some creative license, by the activist, academic and
novelist Leo Zeilig in his novel, An Ounce of Practice. Published
in 2017, this is, in part, an account of a strike and campaign
for justice of a group of mostly Zimbabwean workers on a
campus in London. It also shows their disappointment with
the officially recognized trade union and their resolve to carry
on despite the discouraging stance of union officials. While
the real-live workers and activists are mostly immigrants from
Latin America and the Caribbean rather than from southern
Africa, the author who witnessed the earlier battles when he
worked as a researcher at the University of London has been
engaged ever since with the struggles of workers of migrant
background who are “so often invisible, patronised, abused”.24
In a scene in An Ounce, an unofficial strike is in its second day,
and a union official named Terry turns up to tell the workers
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they must return to their posts. He is shouted down by Tendai,
one of the main organisers of the strike. It is worthwhile to
read this longer excerpt from the novel:
“Terry blustered again. ‘Management have told me if
we don’t clear the car park and move away from the
main entrance they will be forced to call the police,
who may make arrests. I don’t know your individual
circumstances, but they will check papers. As you are on
an illegal strike, your union can’t support you.’
A woman screamed from the back: ‘Bastard. Go back to
Mummy or we’ll spank you!’
Terry turned to Tendai, his eyes wide, his lips puckered
and tensed. Tendai raised his arms in a slow, dramatic
shrug. There was a cheer. Tendai’s locks flowed over his
shoulders; his coat was too small, the sleeves above his
wrists; a silver chain was visible on his open neck; his
taut body, stripped of fat, stood tall. When the cheering
subsided the same woman jeered affectionately and
called out, ‘It’s Jesus. It’s the black messiah!’
Tendai’s insolent, drawn face was serious. He
shook his head and spoke in English: ‘This man says
we must return to our jobs, to the insults. He says if we
don’t, the police will come and arrest us and send some
of us home. The union won’t fight for us.’ Tendai paused,
then spoke more loudly. ‘I say that we are the union, and
if we fight then the union is with us!’ There was another
cheer. Tendai’s voice carried over the heads of the strikers
to the offices and departments above the car park. ‘There
are no foreigners here except the bosses.’
That was the end of it. Terry was jostled from his place
and the crowd rejoiced as though they had already won.
They embraced each other, linked arms, kissed. Then
they marched around the university singing in Spanish,
Polish and Shona – exclaiming, encumbering the streets,
the road filled with their bodies.”25
The novel follows the strike and the lives of the workers over
several weeks. Then the action shifts to Zimbabwe…
Outsourcing, struggle, and the corporate university
When the insourcing battles in London resurged in 2017, Zeilig
commented that in his novel he had “attempted to create a
cast of Zimbabwean migrants at the centre of labour protest
in London, who were once active in the movement against
Mugabe’s dictatorship. An Ounce of Practice is a story about the
connections of the Global North and South, the link between
how we live, love and struggle.”26
The struggles of university workers connect Cape Town,
Johannesburg and London in a number of ways. In both the
Global South and North institutions of higher education have
become ‘Thatcher-ite’ corporate businesses, even though
the University of London, Wits, and UWC are all public
institutions. The universities’ decisions to outsource auxiliary
services were rationalised with the argument that this would
allow them to focus on their ‘core functions’ of teaching
and research. In reality, it meant that universities added to
inequality and social injustice by chucking out their most
vulnerable workers into working under conditions of super-
exploitation without the social security benefits they grant those
directly employed, such as pension funds, health insurance etc.
The worker protests also demonstrate the importance of new
forms of labour struggles and organisation. In South Africa,
it was the student and worker struggles that forcefully put
insourcing on the agenda in 2015-16. The established trade
union NEHAWU did not play a significant role on most
campuses. At Wits, the insourcing process was agitated
and negotiated by a student-worker alliance under the
#EndOutsourcing and #FeesMustFall banners, with substantial
support from radical academics. After they were employed
directly by the university, the vast majority of the workers joined
the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA)
that had broken away from the ANC-aligned Congress of South
African Trade Unions (COSATU).27 At UWC, too, strident
demands for insourcing were raised during the student and
worker protests in late 2015. For several reasons, though, at
UWC they did not succeed. Unlike at Wits (or the historically
white, comparatively wealthy UCT twenty kilometres down the
road), UWC’s executive management was adamantly opposed
to an agreement to bring workers onto the university’s payroll.
This was, partly, owed to the historically black institution’s lack
of financial resources. Also, the UWC struggles received less
public support and media attention than those at the formerly
white universities, and there was comparatively little support by
UWC academics, except for a rather marginal informal network
of some ‘concerned academics’.
In London, the ongoing struggle has been led by a new kind
of union, IWGB, which has taken up the organisation of
formerly non-unionised sections of the workforce, especially
immigrants employed in the most vulnerable, unprotected
and low-paid jobs. The young union has thus introduced new
politics of workers’ struggles; it has also made its mark with
new aesthetics of struggles, known for the vibrancy of salsa and
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the noisy blowing of vuvuzelas (the plastic horns that achieved
global prominence during the 2010 football world cup in South
Africa) on their picket lines. It has also garnered substantial
support among academics and public figures.
To sum up: the struggles for insourcing of all workers at
universities in South Africa and Britain points to global
connections of neoliberal university governance; it equally
indicates however new forms of workers’ struggles emerging
from below, and hopefully connecting those fighting for social
justice and progressive academic practices in the Global South
and North.
It is interesting indeed that similar battles for fair labour
practices on university campuses have been fought at academic
institutions in both the Global South and the North. The
bottom-line is the precarious situation that the workers
find themselves in. Irrespective of whether they work for a
university in London, Cape Town or Johannesburg, cleaners,
security personnel and other auxiliary labourers receive poor
pay and, importantly, are deprived of the employment benefits
such as pensions and other social security benefits because
their labour has been ‘casualized’.
The battles for insourcing have been successful to varying
degrees, as the discussion of the two South African cases
exemplifies. After a long and hard struggle the IGWB has just
won an important concession for university workers in London
although the boycott campaign has not yet been called off.28 It
appears, sadly, that it is the least affluent and well-resourced
academic institutions attended mostly by students from black
working-class families, such as UWC, that are particularly
prone to perpetuate the conservative labour practices of the
neoliberal age.
Heike Becker teaches social and cultural anthropology at UWC
in South Africa. Her work explores themes at the interface
between culture and politics and focuses particularly on the
politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social
movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and
Namibia). She has just, with her third year students, completed
research on the September 2019 Global Climate Strike in Cape
Town.
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1Nkosi, Bongani; ‘”Abused” workers at their Wits’ end’; Mail & Guardian, 28 October 2011.2Nkosi, Bongani; ‘Wits workers prepare for more strikes’; Mail & Guardian, 31 May 2013.3Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 774Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 775Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 776Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 777Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 82.8Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 839Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 24.10Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 49.11Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 67.12Furlong, Ashleigh, ‘Insourcing at universities: uneven progress; GroundUp, 14 March 2017.13vernac.news.com 22 November 2018.14Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 201915https://iwgb.org.uk/page/hidden/why-support-the-boycott16https://iwgb.org.uk/en/boycottsenatehouse17Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.18Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.19Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019. 20Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm would not have backed University of London boycott, The Guardian, 11 February 2019.21Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019.
22Flett, Keith. Richard Evans should have cancelled his book launch at Senate House, The Guardian, 13 February 2019.23Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.24Zeilig, Leo.‘”There are no foreigners here except the bosses”: Precarious workers strike back’, RS21, 26 May 2017, (https://rs21.org.uk/2017/05/26/there-are-no-foreigners-here-except-the- bosses/)25Zeilig, Leo. 2017. An Ounce of Practice. London: hoperoad; pp. 188-189.26Becker, Heike. From London to Harare: an activist yearning for an ounce of practice. The Conversation, 23 March 2017. (https://theconversation.com/from-london-to-harare-an-activist-yearning-for-an-ounce-of-practice-74857)27Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 89.28‘Major concession won – boycott continues until full victory’; email sent by Jordi Lopez to Boycott Senate House mailing list, 18 October 2019.
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