Dear Colleagues,
There’s been a lot happening recently in terms of unionization and union revitalization in a number of countries. The ballot for the next General Secretary of the UCU (the union which represents 120K+ academics, instructors, researchers, managers, administrators, computer staff, librarians, postgrads in universities, colleges, prisons, adult ed across the UK) opens tomorrow (and runs till 23 May 2019) — and comes in the wake of the longest strike in UK HE in 2018.
There are 3 candidates: https://www.ucu.org.uk/GS-election
In terms of the specific interests of this list: one is Dr Jo Grady (full disclosure: I am part of her campaign team), who is a sociologist of work, a labour historian and a Marxist. Her writings include research on industrial relations, Spanish anarchist labour movements, and pensions under neoliberalism (https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/management/staff/jgrady/index https://grady4gs.com/). If elected, she will be the first academic to become Gen Sec of UCU.
She has close collaborations with critical/radical geographers and has presented at the AAG. Indeed in 2018, in addition to presenting her own research on under-pensioned workers in the gig economy, she was part of the special emergency session organized by Andrew Baldwin on “The Great Strike of 2018 – UK Higher Education after Marketisation” (https://aag.secure-abstracts.com/AAG%20Annual%20Meeting%202018/sessions-gallery?query=Jo+Grady&searchContent=false&searchAbstractBody=true&searchAbstractBody=false&Affiliation=&SessionTypeId=&pin=&SponsorGroupId=&Theme=&Availability=0&EventDayId=&sortBy=)
Regards,
Felicity Callard
Dept of Psychosocial Studies, Birkbeck, University of London
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