Hundreds of lecturers at the University of Leicester (UoL) have been out on strike since the start of term in September 2025. This is in reaction to an attempt by the university executives, headed by Vice Chancellor Nishan Canagarajah (chairman of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association), to make large parts of the workforce redundant. They announced this in June, just before the summer break – likely an intentional choice of a time when students and staff are separated.

Over this time their plans have slowly been unveiled in gleeful press releases: a sacking of 25% of the history department; almost 50% of the School of Geography, Geology, and the Environment (GGE), mainly in human geography and paleontology, and almost 30% of the School of Chemistry, which will then be merged to focus on ‘applied geology’; an as-of-yet unannounced amount of the School of Education; Modern Languages and Film Studies to be closed entirely; and the remainder of the gap on their balance sheets to be filled by sacking professional services staff (administration, IT, cleaners, maintenance, HR, etc). All in all, over 150 workers are under threat of redundancy. They began their assault with a voluntary severance scheme, which has already led to so many losses that the School of Education was unable to find teaching placements for some courses this year. This comes only a few years after the last round of redundancies in 2020-21, the intelligence-insultingly named ‘Shaping for Excellence’ which targeted maths and business: many staff members understand all too well that if their department is not currently up for cuts, it might be the next time around. Meanwhile, the university pumps millions into real estate projects and a satellite campus, many of which turn out to be dubiously useful.

As usual, this only confirms what we have been saying for years: the bosses’ crisis will drive them to viscerate our jobs and working conditions, while they resort to more and more risky investments in a desperate attempt to make some kind of profits. Certainly, they won’t invest in a human good as unprofitable as education.

Particularly, it’s not hard to speculate that GGE is being reshaped to focus on industrial applications (such as mineral and oil extraction) as starved universities naturally adapt to suit the demands for skilled workers of a capitalism refocusing on profitable industry, trimming the fat of the humanities. History, formerly considered a cash cow by universities as it has very few costs aside from labour, can no longer stand on its own two feet now that each home student is a drain of several thousand pounds. Applied geography, on the other hand, can expect grants and industry partnerships. No doubt industry will only become more important as the drive to war continues.

Similar stories are playing out at many universities across the country, as a sudden retraction of international student applications triggers a deficit in university budgets that have come to rely on exorbitant international fees since 2010.⁽¹⁾ Leicester is only exceptional in that staff have been on strike for so long: a total of five weeks and three days as of 26 January. It appears that management believes they can wait out the strike and there is little sign of them budging. There are important signs of cross-sector solidarity. Many lecturers from non-targeted courses are on strike, and large numbers of students have joined them at the picket line. Over 500 staff and students marched together on 12 November, including some from the nearby University of Sheffield and De Montfort University. Leicester Student-Worker Action Group (LSWAG)⁽²⁾ was immediately founded in June to encourage cross-sector struggle and facilitate discussion, and now boasts over seventy members from both students and staff across the university. Despite this, the strike still has a long way to go to break free of the joint shackles of university management and unofficial management – the unions, who are keeping the strike isolated and treating it like a routine annual dispute (contributing to the defeat of all three national Unison, Unite, and UCU ballots in December due to low turnout). The bulk of students and other sectors of staff are almost asleep. How long will the working class remain a sleeping giant?

CWO militants, alongside other internationalists, have had a constant presence at the UoL picket line. These two speeches were made by a CWO militant and student on 22 January, the first day of strike action in 2026, and provide an example of our intervention in favour of self-organisation, class unity, and the revolutionary perspective.

Putting Solidarity Into Practice

This speech was delivered as part of a series of three speeches given by students and staff, on the theme of ‘solidarity’.

I won't blame some of you if your eyes glaze over when you hear the word ‘solidarity’. Over the years, it's become something of a cliche. Often it’s lost its meaning in the process. To some, it means having a union official make a cameo at another picket. To others, it’s a word to throw out at the end of a speech before crawling back to the cushy seats of parliament. To some, it’s branding for yet another project to invent a solution to the system’s endless problems while leaving the system itself safely intact. To others, it’s a way to string together any vaguely left-of-centre political movement with another one. To others still, it’s basically a leftist version of saying hello.

So I wanted to talk about how we actually put this slogan, ‘solidarity’, into practice in our struggle.

Now I'll get the miserable part over with first. In our sector, in the wider British economy, and even in our single workplace, we are critically isolated. We are leading the way, but this also means being out in the open at the front. The number of hours lost to strikes this year have been a fraction of the last strike wave, 2022-23 (which in turn have been a fraction compared to struggles in the 1970s). Lecturers have gone on strike around the country at universities which have threatened redundancies, but the national ballot has failed to extend the strike to others. At other universities, the bosses have been able to keep things contained and negotiate with individual branches, leaving others (like us) in the wilderness. Workers who are not members of the UCU, i.e. students and most professional services staff, have not been able to join the strike either. If we stay a single ember out on the ground, the bosses will be able to stamp us out easily.

In fact we are not alone. Last year saw strikes in basically any sector you can think of, most visibly binmen and resident doctors who are still on strike now. But just like us, most of them felt alone in the middle of a desert, and were stamped out easily before they could dream of expanding.

We are fighting our individual bosses in our individual workplaces to try and save the dying wages of our individual trades. In this period of crisis, where the bosses are constantly compelled to relentlessly attack our conditions to restore their falling rate of profit, this is a losing battle. The proof is in fact that we have been trying this for decades, and even when small victories have forced the bosses to hold off for a moment, the result overall has only been continuously falling real wages and worsening conditions. Just in recent memory, as one astute lecturer on this picket told me a few months ago, ‘it feels like we've been on strike for a decade’. It's especially a losing battle for workers facing redundancy. When the bosses think they can get rid of us anyway, a strike bothers them a lot less. The miners learned this tragically in 1985, when they attempted to defend themselves alone on the basis of saving their trade, under the sectoral slogan ‘coal not dole’ which failed to extend the strike to other workers.

How can we put solidarity into practice and break our isolation? Fortunately, the one perk of capitalism lasting a hundred years more than it should have is that other striking workers have already figured this problem out for us. And time and time again, they have come to the same solutions.

To give one example, let’s look at the workers in Iran who are showing the way forward for all of us. Massive strikes have raged openly in Iran since 2009, led by the oil, petrochemical, and sugar workers.⁽³⁾ The workers have gained valuable experience over these years, especially in how to organise themselves. In Iran permanent workers’ organisations such as unions are illegal and suppressed by the regime. It prefers its own ‘Islamic Councils’ to pretend to represent workers. So workers are experts at organising themselves. And these organisations exist for and by each outburst of struggle. In 2021, they formed the Council for Organising Protests by Oil Contract Workers, which has coordinated strikes across the entire country. Every attempt by the bosses to split workers up has failed thanks to the council: especially its demand that no worker should get paid less than 12 million Toman. The council also allowed the oil workers to link their demands to other sectors of the working class. Decisions such as demands are made at general assemblies made up of real representatives of the workers. Whenever protests spread out of the workplaces and into the streets, mass assemblies are held in cities to discuss and make decisions, which the striking workers take a lead in speaking in. The Iranian workers’ wealth of experience shows us not just how we can organise resistance, but how a future society could be run: in 1978, before the Islamists stole the Iranian Revolution, it was workers’ councils, not dissimilar to those forms we see today, that toppled the monarchist state and could have posed the question of power for the workers themselves.

Another example. In 2009, workers at the Spx diagnostic equipment plant in Sala, Italy, went on strike as the multinational group owning the plant made 45 workers, a third of the workforce, redundant in a first step towards shutting the plant completely. After the bosses refused to back down from this diabolical plan, the workers immediately called a one-hour strike during the shift changeover. This allowed a mass assembly of all workers to be held to discuss the situation and decide the next steps. The strike involved both warehouse and production line workers, allowing the tactic of a rolling strike. They reached out to workers at other factories in the area, almost three thousand of whom were threatened with layoffs through plant closures or restructuring, and received words of solidarity from around the country. But the Spx strikers didn’t just leave their horizons at the local region. They also contacted workers in the same multinational group in other countries, agitating them to join the struggle.⁽⁴⁾

Or maybe you’d prefer something closer to home. Coincidentally, this year marks the 100th Anniversary of arguably the largest episode of class struggle in British history: the 1926 General Strike. After over 1 million miners went on strike against a pay cut of 13.5%, up to 2 million other workers followed the call to join them. Transportation and even the printing of national newspapers came to a standstill. This shows the real power we have when we strike like this – after all, workers produce everything. Although the strike was ultimately organised by the TUC, strike committees and Councils of Action were formed to coordinate strike action at the local level. Things were messy. In some cities, there were competing strike committees for different industries and unions. But some of them united the efforts of workers in all sectors in an entire city. They produced strike bulletins, organised mass picketing, and provided canteens for strikers and their families. In some cases, they had to organise groups of armed workers to defend pickets and striking workers from the police. And in some cities, they even managed to enforce some control over the movement of people and goods. As well as the armed forces and police, the British government had prepared for the general strike, in this moment of honesty about its real purpose of saving capitalism, by absorbing the right-wing Organisation for the Maintenance of Supplies, which had been founded a year earlier to mobilise middle class volunteers to replace striking workers in the event of a general strike. But only a few thousand strike-breakers answered their call, and lacked the experience to do many of the jobs. The general strike was only gaining strength.

Unfortunately this episode also taught us another lesson about how we organise ourselves. Like I said, the TUC remained in control of the movement. And again, this was a moment of honesty for every institution on its role of shoring up capitalism. Every issue of the TUC’s paper printed for the strike, The British Worker, included a declaration assuring the government that ‘The General Council does NOT challenge the Constitution. It is not seeking to substitute unconstitutional government. Nor is it desirous of undermining our Parliamentary institutions.’ After just ten days, the TUC met with the government, and without consulting any of the workers, called off the general strike. The day after, even more workers joined the strike than before! But the unions were eventually successful at bringing the workers back to work. Left alone and literally starved out, the miners surrendered.⁽⁵⁾

Clearly, the solution we have discovered to unite our struggle is self-organisation. The key weapons of our class are mass assemblies to decide our courses of action and bring new sectors into the struggle; strike committees elected by them to coordinate our struggle across all sectors against our common enemy, the bosses and their vicious, unending attacks on our lives and livelihoods.

To us solidarity means much more. It means realising that these attacks are not only happening at our university, or even only at universities. In the last few months, there have been general strikes and protests, sometimes played down as ‘gen-Z protests’, in at least 28 countries.⁽⁶⁾ Whether in Belgium, Togo, or Mexico, they have all had the same complaints: low and falling wages while prices rise, with longer and harder workdays, high unemployment, no job security, austerity cuts and underfunding to social services (especially education and healthcare), and the salt in the wound of inequality, blatant corruption, and bonuses, cars, and mansions for the bosses. Sound familiar? That's not a coincidence! This is occurring everywhere because the capitalist system that governs our entire global society has been facing a crisis of profitability since the Seventies, when the post-war boom truly ended. As a consequence, for the last 50 years, the bosses in every country have ruthlessly attempted to claw back as much profit as possible from capital that would have been “wasted” on wages and social concessions. Not to mention, they have terrifyingly increased the temperature of their imperialist competition over the world's markets and resources, starting new and bigger wars in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South America, in which workers are always the ones sent to slaughter each other. To us, solidarity means realising that the billions of us around the world who have to live by selling our lives for a wage, even workers as seemingly different as textile workers in Nepal and lecturers in Britain, are in that same class predicament. It means realising that the bosses’ attacks are facing all of us and are caused by the same capitalist crisis, and so a dispute put up by any one group of workers must be supported by the whole class, not just our own sector or this or that acronym. It means that we all share the same worldwide class struggle. It means we can only win that fight when we unite, yes, worldwide, to break out of the rotten fate capitalist society has promised us.

We cannot rely on representatives to negotiate our decline with the bosses. We cannot work through legal and institutional channels – this is fighting the bosses at their own game. We need to fight all of the bosses together, because of the situation we all share as wage-workers, and against the situation we all share as wage-workers.

We need to take our organisation into our own hands and expand the strike by all means. We should continue and intensify our efforts to bring any and all nearby workers into our strike. We should immediately make contact with other striking workers to really unify our efforts. Resident doctors in Leicester hospitals and teachers at Ash Field Academy were recently out on strike against cuts, falling wages, unsafe workspaces, excessive workloads that cause rampant physical and mental illness, and a generally unbearable life (again, sound familiar?): they would be an easy start to make contact with. Then a mass assembly, open to all workers regardless of sector or union membership, could be held as soon as possible to coordinate our efforts. Not only will this increase our chances of winning this battle, even if we lose this time around, we can set an example for other workers, grow our experience and confidence, and set ourselves up to be even stronger the next time around.

Our Shared Class Struggle

This speech was delivered at a student-organised post-picket rally.

It’s easy for us to condemn Sir Nishan Canagarajah. And why not? After all, he’s struggling with the oh-so-difficult work of sacking hundreds of workers, who just won’t back down and take it, from his rent-free uni-provided mansion, with no appreciation for his hard sacrifice except a pay rise and a knighthood. But the real root of this universities’ crisis goes far deeper than university management. It’s part of a crisis of the whole capitalist system, a crisis that has unfolded on us since the Seventies. Universities all over the country are deep in financial problems today because of decades of government funding cuts and marketisation, which has led university managements to over-rely on absurdly high international student fees and gamble on new campuses and accommodation. These days many universities are essentially real estate businesses that also do education. At the same time, they have cut academics’ and professional service staff’s pay, outsourced them, casualised them, made their livelihoods precarious, and massively increased their workload. An essential lever of theirs for this assault is imposing an authoritarian, antagonistic management style. We all know the mental — and even physical — impacts a life like this has. Meanwhile, students have had to pay higher and higher fees – £1000 a year in 1998, £3000 in 2006, £9000 in 2012, and now £9535. While students from rich families can quickly cover it before it accumulates interest, most of us will never be able to pay this off, and will be paying from our paychecks until the loan expires. And on top of that, our rent is always being increased every year, while we literally watch our halls fall apart around us!

But this is in no way something unique to universities. In the last few months, there have been general strikes and protests, sometimes played down as ‘gen-Z protests’, in at least 28 countries around the globe. Whether in Belgium, Togo, or Mexico, they have all had the same complaints: low and falling wages while prices rise, with longer and harder workdays, high unemployment, no job security, austerity cuts and underfunding to social services (especially education and healthcare), and the salt in the wound of inequality, blatant corruption, and bonuses, cars, and mansions for the bosses. Sound familiar? That's not a coincidence! This is occurring everywhere because the capitalist system that governs our entire global society has been facing a crisis of profitability since the Seventies, when the post-war boom truly ended. As a consequence, for the last 50 years, the bosses in every sector, in every country, have ruthlessly attempted to claw back as much profit as possible from capital that would have been “wasted” on wages and social concessions. This is why they have, in just this one case of many, resorted to cutting funding for education, forcing as much of the cost as possible onto working class students, and structurally transforming universities so that their lieutenants, university management, can beat down staff to the same low pay, poor conditions as all other workers. Saving government expenditure means saving precious profits. No wonder the government has decided to honour Nishan with a knighthood for his services to British capitalism!

Billions of us share the same economic position. The work we do produces all the world’s wealth, yet we are forced to survive by selling that work for a wage. The difference between that wage – plus spending on social welfare programmes, which is essentially a delayed wage – and the value we produce is pocketed by the bosses as profits. As the rate of profits falls in this crisis, the bosses try to compensate by pushing down wages and social spending. As a class, we are facing the same attacks worldwide, stemming from the same capitalist crisis. It’s time we fought back as a class as well!

A real victory isn’t when we force the bosses to hold off their attacks for a minute. Even when we win this, it’s only a temporary, defensive victory. The crisis will push the bosses to attack us even further. A real victory is when we grow in confidence, organise ourselves better, and bring more workers into the fight. Class struggle comes in waves, rising and falling, and the important thing is to make each wave bigger than the last. In fact, the happy flipside of defensive victories being temporary is that even if we lose this battle, we can still get a step closer to winning the war. Fighting as a class not only makes us stronger, but unlocks the possibility of going on the offensive. Through united class struggle, we alone have the power to end capitalism’s crisis and free ourselves from this mess. We produce all of the bosses’ wealth and fight all of the bosses’ wars: if we rebelled from their rule together, they would be powerless to stop us!

We have done this as a class so many times before. In those experiences, from Russia in 1905 to Argentina in 2001⁽⁷⁾, we discovered that delegates elected by the workers in each factory or neighborhood, bound by mandates set by us, and recallable by us at any time, are the way we can coordinate our struggle at the highest level. And in a moment of revolution, when we decide we don’t want to live under the bosses’ hell any longer, it is through bodies like workers’ councils that we can take control of political power and production for ourselves. Mass assemblies and recallable workers’ councils are the way all the billions of us can really run society. This proletarian democracy would be real democracy, not the fake democracy we’re all used to, where the bosses offer you the choice between 5 different varieties of hell, maybe even make a few promises of tiny reforms, only to do all the cuts and attacks capitalism demands anyway. But the real rule of the vast majority of the population, the working class.

Once this is established over the entire world, we would then be free to dismantle capitalism and build a new society, where production is based on the principle of ‘to each according to their need and from each according to their ability’ – for the needs and self-fulfilment of humanity, not profit. In doing so we would abolish all classes, and therefore even the temporary need for the working class to rule over others. We would abolish capitalist imperialism and the nation-state, which send us to slaughter each other in countless wars around the world to determine which bosses get to control which markets and raw materials, and today are visibly gearing up for world war once again. We would abolish wage-labour, which keeps the vast majority in miserable, mind-numbing jobs. Nowadays even academics, who are supposed to be passionate for their subjects to the point of lifetime dedication, can’t help hating their jobs, when capitalism twists them into an endless rush to publish or perish, habitual antagonism from shitty management, and the constant sword over the head of being sacked! Expecting education reforms in the current system is pointless: politicians would rather invest in raising military budgets! Only in a communist society will we be able to free education from the shackles of the profit motive, and make it the service to humanity it should be.

We cannot separate our struggle for wages and jobs from our struggle for power. If we stop here, it’s only a matter of time before the bosses come for us again. We need to go beyond defending ourselves from the bosses’ attacks in little isolated guerilla fights. If we unite across sectoral and national boundaries, we can make an all-class assault on capitalist society itself, for a new society. Then, instead of having to fight for the right to a decent life, we will fight to overthrow those who will deny us one!⁽⁸⁾

Notes:

(1) Universities in Crisis: The Fight is On

(2) To follow LSWAG and their activities see linktr.ee

(3) For more on Iranian workers’ struggles, see Iran Oil Workers' Strike and Haft Tappeh Struggle.

(4) In Support of the Struggle of the Workers of SPX, For Proletarian Internationalism

(5) For more, see our article on the 1926 General Strike in the new issue of Revolutionary Perspectives: leftcom.org

(6) The Working Class is Still Fighting! But What World Are We Fighting For?

(7) The Piqueteros Movement of Argentina

(8) This line is taken from Nurses Strike - It's Time to Fight as a Class!