Here in Canada, May Day is a relatively neglectezd holiday because the labour movement is in a historic rut. But we think it’s important to recognize its contribution to improving working conditions for all sorts of people, including us.
It might seem strange that we, a small business, are saluting the labour movement. But this business wouldn’t exist without labour organizing at the University of Toronto. We were fortunate to participate in a protracted, month-long strike, and we experienced the difference it made. Our union participation is what gave us insight into the conditions of academic work beyond our own individual circumstances; that experience empowered us to offer our services.
So today, in honour of May Day, let’s focus on structural issues facing academics. The solution to all structural issues is simple but hard: get organized and demand better.
Structural Issues
Structural issues are complicated but intelligible. They are the big factors operating above the level of the individual that constrain us all. Difficult working conditions are one kind of structural issue; there are many others: repressive laws, uneven labour markets, poverty, racism, sexism, and many others. Individuals respond to structural issues by resisting, by moving, by internalizing the system, by grifting, or by organizing. Only organized resistance can address the structural issue at scale. Another term for structural issues is “collective action problems”, which nicely foregrounds what the solution is—collective action.
Our culture tends to place too much emphasis on individual factors. For example, difficulty at work tends to be discussed as laziness, lack of discipline, an attitude problem, etc. There’s something to this way of thinking, since structural issues never determine what an individual can do. But our experience as coaches has convinced us that most of those discussions aren’t very helpful.
Many people think that discussion of structural issues is somehow obscure, but this is usually a bad-faith argument. We all live in a society, having to navigate systems that constrain us; when the constraints are especially bad, that’s a structural issue. For example, complaining about traffic is complaining about a structural issue; traffic can be bad even if all the drivers you encounter are responsible and responsive.
Academic Structural Issues
The fundamental structural issue facing academia is overproduction of academics. There are simply not enough good positions for everyone to remain in academia and make a life of it. Because of this, academics usually overwork, overproduce, and compete with each other for scarce positions. This results in chronically chaotic, uncertain, and anxiety-fuelled working conditions.
There are also wider social structures around academia: the devaluation of liberal arts in favour of STEM, the narratives that academics are solitary figures, the myths around genius, the drive towards hyper-productivity, and all sorts of self-serving discipline-specific narratives.
As we’ve discussed before, deciding to be an academic, or deciding to stick it out in your degree, means accepting some of these structural issues as givens and working around them. But no sensitive human being should become fully adjusted to the system as it stands.
Interventions: Individual and Structural
Many academics learn to survive in the system, and some thrive. This process of learning usually depends on extensive mentoring support from other academics and the individual’s community. We consider our work to be part of this service. We work at both the individual and systemic level, as appropriate. Often, just naming and sketching the structural issue helps normalize the struggle and neutralizes it as fodder for self-blame. Knowing that you’re not alone in the struggle, and that the struggle is not of your own making, is usually very effective for getting academics to be a bit less anxious.
But individual and community support can only go so far. There have to also be periods of large-scale, organized pushback to the direction of the system, lest it fall apart completely. This is where associations and labour unions come in. There seems to be a general momentum in this direction in the past few years in academia, although it’s hard to make predictions. Academics are increasingly organizing and recognizing the structural issues that have beset their working conditions for decades. The only thing that has succeeded in making change is large groups of organized people. May workers of all sorts—academics included—get organized and demand what’s fair!