In the essay linked below the writer makes some very good points about the ways in which public sector unions hopped into the Covid bandwagon and, quite possibly, started to drive it.
The writer is sceptical about, or doesn’t want to see, the bigger picture. He clearly feels most comfortable in the relatively shallow waters of pluralist, two-dimensional analyses of power. As an account of the last two years or so, within that limited framework, his narrative reflects my own total, long overdue, and irrevocable alienation from trade unionism and all other attempts at gradualist activities.
See what you think, its a lengthy read and skip the initial paragraphs perhaps.
Hi @KarenEliot , is this what is meant by the term “rabid Tory”?
I have also in the past pointed out the strange move by Teaching Union leaders to push for all sorts of crap covid policies but to go from there to :
"socialists dominate Britain’s public sector and its unions, as well as academia and the media", takes a seriously wrong turn imo.
When was the last time unions ever made Governments do anything - Scargill was the last one I think and he and the mining communities paid a frightening price and suffered the full weight of State violence under Thatcher.
The politicians and the spooks aided by all types of media manipulators played the major role in the panicdemic - the public were frightened into their roles by these bastards and union members are just members of the public. Obviously union leaders and anyone with political clout pushed their own agendas so as to not waste the crisis but it’s hard to see anything but correlations here. Any journalist of principle could have discerned the truth with only a few telephone calls - probably the same was said about the death of Kennedy and 9/11 but principles have been easily sold off over the years and we are all aware of this on this site.
I was thinking today why the Davids from Media Lens never progressed in their thinking on the pandemic beyond their anti Boris stuff in March 2020 and pro-mask surface review in July 2020. They seemd to gain comfort in the benefits to our environment from lockdowns without thinking the whole thing through. Maybe Chomsky warned them about the dangers of low parapets - the fact is I could find nothing for the last year on the most egregious example of media propaganda we have ever seen. The same of course can be said of other sites but then most are not media activist sites!
The contrast with The Conservative Woman is quite stark on all covid issues.
The impression I had was that the unions couldn’t quite believe their luck that, suddenly, they seemed to be gaining traction with the H&S mania of 2020. They were (largely) blind to the fact that parroting what they’d read in yesterday’s Gordian was what they were being groomed to do. They ululated when their newly received ‘beliefs’ magically became ‘policies’ and became drunk on their ‘power’. But all along they were being played.
When the author says
Socialists dominate Britain’s public sector and its unions
…he means this in the same sense that Keith Starmer means it when he pretends to be a “socialist”. Gradualist. Reformist. Progressive. Whatever.
Once upon a time campus socialists were ever so slightly edgy, minor heroes to sociology grads, writing in Spiked and enjoying the sense of being on the margins. At weekends they ran on home to mummy and daddy.
Those kinds of socialists are still very common and they are the exact ones who elbow their way into trade union leadership.
Interesting article and take on the unions. It certainly aligns with my experience of the UCU. Totally convinced of lockdowns and no measure deemed too harsh. they’ve called for all students to be vaccinated in September. Even amongst the more radically left. In a way they wanted even more, eg being further concerned with cleaning staff having the right masks and handsprays etc.
However, as you both mention, I also have my doubts to what extent they were instrumental in bringing more lockdowns. They may have had some influence but when did their threats of strikes ever push government policy? More likely, their view just happened to coincide with a majority view amongst the elites. Thanks largely to incessant media induced fear. And who was responsible for that?
Another quibble I had (which you just clarified) is in calling them `socialist’. Many in the UCU management (and I guess the same goes for the teaching unions) are libdems or Blair types.
UNISON at A Certain University represented about 60% non-cowering types: cleaners, hospitality, security staff, most of whom worked fairly normally or on a partly-furloughed basis throughout 2020 and 2021, and seldom raised anything other than legitimate concerns.
The remainder are softies like me: administrators, technicians, librarians, and other Bullshit Jobs**.
It’s a vocal minority of the latter who are the ones who are used to being listened to, no matter how irrational they are. They’ve never been unemployed, never been properly skint, in quite a few cases they left the uni as students and became employees straight after. They have never known a workplace other than a university. They absolutely loved working from home and are keen to carry on.
They’re the ones driving the agenda.
I can’t describe how much pleasure it gives me to still receive plaintive emails saying “my boss is bullying me into turning up to work even though I’ve got [insert imagined illness here]” from a few of these colleagues.
They didn’t get the memo saying Kaz retired from union bs (assuming there was one) and think they can bypass the official ‘corporate’ inboxes by emailing me personally.
These members see trade unions as a service, the same as insurance or BUPA. “I pay my dues, I know my rights”. (They frequently only join when they know trouble is on the horizon. They want their money’s worth.)
To be fair, this is the marketing hook that UNISON and the others have used for years, so the members can hardly be blamed for taking that at face value.
** I used this phrase in a conversation with one of the myriad Deputy Vice Chancellors last year. He assumed I meant that the jobs under discussion consisted of bullshitting people (as for example Corporate Communications folks do) rather than in the sense David Graeber popularised.
That phrase ‘deceived influencers’ is a key idea of Iain’s in dealing with the current madness surrounding the scamdemic. Awful lot of 'em about amongst the bourgeois troobleevers. The ‘experts’ and ‘scientists’, etc. Graunoid suckers all!
Soon I hope, but some prolonged fence sitting first. Not that UNISONs current advice is any more coherent than it has ever been. There’s probably an idiom that covers this, possibly mentioning cake, and eating it.
I have two sons, both completely cynical about the scamdemic I’m proud to say. The younger has a girlfriend, 18, who is considering going into care work. She has few marketable skills - like I said, she’s 18 - and there are apparently jobs galore. But the compulsory jab is, to her credit, giving pause for thought.
Those fleeing the sector (and UNISON, yay!) will probably find it tougher in the job market when furlough is ended.
A surplus army of pliable minions? The devil take the hindmost a.k.a. the unvaxxxed.
If a shortage of staff leads to reduced services and an uptick in Care Home euthanasia that will inflate the Covid death stats for at least the third time AND be framed as all the fault of stubborn cowards who won’t roll up their sleeves and get with the programme. The Virus is the gift that keeps on giving.
Hi folks. Has anyone read this guy before :
from Whitney Webb’s site:
“John Klyczek has an MA in English and has taught college rhetoric and research argumentation for over eight years. His literary scholarship concentrates on the history of global eugenics and Aldous Huxley’s dystopic novel, Brave New World. He is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education (TrineDay Books); and he is a contributor to several publications, including New Politics, OpEdNews, and Counter Markets. Klyczek is also the Director of Writing and Editing at Black Freighter Productions (BFP) Books. He holds a black belt in classical tae kwon do, and he is a certified kickboxing instructor under the international Muay Thai Boxing1. Association. His website is schoolworldorder.info”
His article below raises a possible answer to my earlier question - why do some education union leaders want to maintain covid controls. Is Fintech as deeply entrenched in the UK as it is in the US, I know so little about the education union hierarchy?
This is a fascinating analysis, if true! Whitney Webb has proved to be solid on the stuff I’ve read to date, interested to know the views of others.
I only skimmed the article but it looks like a plausible scenario.
Sinead Murphy covered some similar ground on TCW a few months back. Her article is much more concise and her style of writing is exponentially more engaging, but the underlying point is broadly similar: “schooling” (or “drill” as Foucault put it, in Discipline & Punish IIRC) is about discipline not knowledge-transfer.
We make a mistake if we focus on what Simon has not learned during his science lesson. He has not learned much about the make-up of plant cells – that is true, and inevitable. But he has learned something of far wider relevance. He has learned that it does not matter.
Wholly online schooling for a percentage of kids destined to spend their working lives gawping at computers seems pretty likely and School World Order sounds worth hunting down. For those of us who read books. Two classics that I’d recommend, both fairly short, are Deschooling Society (Ivan Illich) and Pedagogy Of The Oppressed (Paulo Freire).
Hi @KarenEliot , valuable material on “education” from the child’s perspective - my grand kids have been home schooled to their teens but fortunately appear to have engaged socially with others following the same path on a face to face basis. This is a massive subject on its own but I was focussed on the political and material corruption that may play a part in union policies towards the tech takeover of education of kids.
I’ve read the first few pages of his book. It looks like the emphasis is on the Private-Public Partnerships approach to schools, in the US (“Charter Schools”).
Here in the UK these are called “academies”, tending to be run on corporate lines. I think that teaching unions are very fragmented, and very weak, and poorly led. Defending jobs/pay leaves relatively less time for campaigning. Obsession with identity politics diverts far too much energy.
A company that runs a chain of academies can easily invest in slick studio-produced online learning (and the pupils can help in production) and can then roll that out across their corporation and deskill/offload ‘human resources’. Younger, trendier teachers will love all this “school in a box” stuff as Klyczek calls it.
In HE the UCU have recognised this threat and tried to discourage engagement with online learning. The 2021-22 academic year will have blown that out the window. You can’t credibly claim that you want to keep your members safe from the pandemic, avoiding the classrooms yet still refuse to engage with online learning. If the classroom is too ‘dangerous’ what alternative is there?
Zooming out: the outlook is that smaller/skinter unis are jettisoning the programmes that are nearer the margins, though ironically they are cheapest (no lab costs etc). If students can be educated online they will for sure prefer a Harvard degree to a Loughborough, or whatever.
Unions are not conniving in this, as such, but when they choose to focus on pronouns and BLM instead of seeing the true picture then they might as well be.
I always reminded the UCU of this push for “online learning” from university management, under cover of health and safety. But they wouldn’t have any of it. They assumed – quite rightly – that management wouldn’t care for the health of its staff but were completely oblivious to any other possible agenda. Even their [the uni’s] own documents spoke of “Phase 2” (i.e. after Covid) changes involving reallocating space and selling off buildings. Now it’s clear as mask wearing and working from home are still recommended, despite the country having no restrictions.
- the fact is I could find nothing for the last year on the most egregious example of media propaganda we have ever seen. The same of course can be said of other sites but then most are not media activist sites!