Apathy Sketchpad

You never know how much you really need something until it’s taken away, when you would give anything to have it back. This is the idea behind striking; if enough employees of the same industry just stop working for long enough society is disrupted enough that their demands are met. It doesn’t always work, but it can be very effective.

Today is Day One of the two day strike by the AUT, and tomorrow is the one-day strike by the NUS. The AUT is the union the lecturers belong to, and is campaigning for equal pay. The NUS is the student union and is a little miffed about fees. Unfortunately, neither strike will have any effect on anybody at all. I will use myself as an example here, simply because it will require minimal research on my part. As a member of the NUS, I am pressurised to skip university tomorrow. There are several small problems with this plan:

1. All students (in theory) have Wednesday afternoons off anyway.
2. I have the whole day off thanks to cunning module selection.
3. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
4. If the AUT is on strike there won’t be any lectures to skip.
5. Students have no power.

Students do not provide a useful service to society until they graduate and get real jobs, at which point nobody will notice that they all took a day off a few years ago. Therefore, striking will not effect anyone. In our department, the students who strike will still have to do the work, they’ll just do it later. That won’t inconvenience anybody except the students.

Similar problems affect the AUT’s proposed strike:

1. There are (in theory) no lectures on Wednesday afternoons anyway.
2. Most students routinely skip lectures anyway.
3. If the NUS is on strike there won’t be any students to lecture in any case.
4. You will only inconvenience students, and students have no power.

In my specific case I have only three lectures on a Tuesday. Two of them are given by the highest paid lecturer in the department, so the chances they would be cancelled in favour of an equal pay campaign were never very high. The last one is Physics in Review, which is a waste of time anyway and only generally has three students turn up. And they were glad it was cancelled.