Taking strike action is difficult. Some difficulties are obvious: sacrificing my pay as a lecturer creates immediate financial difficulties. Other difficulties are more hidden, like the pervasive anxiety of a strike day as emails roll in.
Strike-breaking colleagues remind me about pressing deadlines and students ask about class, marks and supervisions. I feel guilty for letting them down. Again, there is the threat of financial instability: will I be punished for papers I haven’t written, the student work I haven’t marked, the grants I haven’t submitted?
This is all compounded by the sense that when I stop working I stop contributing in some small way to action on environmental issues which, for me, is the point of my academic career. My research aims to support efforts to build a different, more sustainable, economic system. Through my teaching, I aim to help my students build the critical capacities and technical skills they need to support an ecological transition.
