Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Episode 24: Lessons from the Teach-In Part 1
89 Plays10 months ago
In this episode, we bring you the first of two episodes recorded at the teach-in held during the October strike. Here you'll hear talks from members Jathan Sadowski on the Luddites, Kate Murphy on the history of staff-student solidarity and the teach-in, and Kathleen Neal on the labour movement in the 13th Century.
If you have questions you'd like answered, or any topics you would like to hear covered on the podcast, drop us an email at [email protected]
You can also stay up to date with everything happening with bargaining at our new bargaining website, and with the branch on Facebook and Twitter. All of which can be found here - https://linktr.ee/myunionwroteaneba
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Enterprise Bargaining Agreement
00:00:18
Speaker
G'day, everyone, and welcome to My Union Wrote an EBA. This is a podcast to chronicle the progress towards a new enterprise bargaining agreement at Monash University and is brought to you by members of the Monash branch of the NTEU. We're here to take the old agreement and hashtag change it. And unlike our namesake, my dad wrote a porno to everything we can to avoid being fucked in the process.
00:00:41
Speaker
Those involved with the podcast would like to acknowledge that it is being recorded on the unceded lands of the Kulin nations, on whose lands we live, teach and work. We would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the traditional custodians and elders, past and present, and to the continuation of the cultural, spiritual and educational practices of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Always was, always will be, Aboriginal land.
00:01:08
Speaker
Hi, everyone.
Teach-In Episode Announcements
00:01:09
Speaker
Welcome back to another year of My Union Road and EBA. To start the year off, and whilst things are ramping back up behind the scenes, we're going to put out a couple of episodes from our teach-in from the strike in October last year. The first episode will include the three talks with a more historical bent, those from Jathan, Kathleen and Kate. And the second episode will include the two talks that were loosely framed around the truism that HR is not your friend, those from Chris and Marjorie.
00:01:35
Speaker
You'll also hear the voice of Tao, who was the emcee for the teach-in, and who is an amazing facilitator of those discussions. I won't say too much more, other than to say that if you are interested in more of what you'll hear in this first episode, here are some threads that you can follow.
Podcast Recommendations
00:01:50
Speaker
In the last few months, there have been a couple of podcasts that have done good episodes on the Luddites.
00:01:55
Speaker
One from the podcast 99% Invisible called Blood in the Machine, which is episode 552, puts Jathan's talk into a bigger historical context and fleshes out some more of the points that he makes in his talk and also points to some of those echoes of the similar dynamics today that are mentioned by Jathan.
00:02:15
Speaker
The second is from the podcast Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford, which was released in August last year called General Ludd's Rage Against the Machines. And that gives a more narrative description sort of putting you in the headspace of the Luddites and in the world in which they were operating.
00:02:30
Speaker
And if you're interested in the kinds of stuff that Kate and Kathleen talk about in their talks, check out the unit that Kate runs, and the full disclosure I teach in, called Struggles for Justice, a history of rebellion, resistance, and revolt. It includes more on both of the topics, as well as a bunch of others. And now, on to the talks.
COVID Experiences at Monash University
00:02:49
Speaker
So I'm here with Jason Sadowski, who's a senior lecturer in the faculty of IT. Jason, how long have you worked at Monash University?
00:02:59
Speaker
Yes, I was not expecting to be the first one to talk, but I'll stand up to the plate. Now, I've been at Monash since January of 2020. It was a great time to move to Melbourne from Sydney Uni to start a new exciting job. I had about two months to meet all of my excellent colleagues, and then I saw the four walls of my apartment for a very long time after that.
00:03:26
Speaker
I mean, truly, if it wasn't for the amazing colleagues, I'm at the Emerging Technologies Research Lab with Tau in the faculty of IT as well, and if it wasn't for my amazing colleagues in the ET lab, I think I would feel even more isolated and
00:03:45
Speaker
you know, out to a float than I did moving to a new city to start a new job and then being shuttled into COVID. It was the extraordinary care going above and beyond what was required to make me feel like I had a home, an academic home, colleagues, even though I never saw a lot of them for, you know, well over a year face to face.
Unrecognized Labor Exploitation
00:04:11
Speaker
So, you know, I think it's that kind of stuff as well that
00:04:15
Speaker
It's not required, but it's because we love our job, it's because we love our colleagues, we love the students, we love what we do, that we spend all of that time doing that unnecessary but extraordinarily important care work, effective labor, the overwork, and it's the kind of stuff as well that
00:04:35
Speaker
The chancellery, the people in those offices depend upon. They say, you love your job, so you would do it for free. We don't need to pay you because you love your job. But as we know, our job won't love us back. We can put all of our love into the job, but the job won't love us back.
00:04:55
Speaker
And I think a lot of that is starting a new job, moving to a new city right before COVID really emphasizes how much of that kind of labor that is unpaid and unrecognized, but everybody deeply depends upon, but nobody wants to acknowledge. It really underlines how important that is.
00:05:18
Speaker
Yes, I think that's so important to say. Things like affective labour, reproductive labour, all the kinds of labour that actually go into making, showing up to work worthwhile each day is immeasurable. And because it's immeasurable, a metrics-driven university will never acknowledge it.
Luddite Movement History and Misunderstanding
00:05:36
Speaker
But aside from that, one of your grand passions is the Luddites, am I right? That's right. I am a proud Luddite. And so when I was asked, you know, when the teaching was being organized around kind of histories of rebellion and revolt, my work focuses on the political economy of technology.
00:05:56
Speaker
And for me, the Luddites are a lodestar of the politics and the legacy that really influences my work and really recapturing that history, the original history of who the Luddites actually were, what they really stood for.
00:06:12
Speaker
Not the slanderous or derogatory way of all, you know, you're a Luddite means you're against progress or you're against technology or you don't know how to use Zoom or anything like that, right? You know, really recognizing that the Luddites were one of the first and I would argue one of the most important
00:06:34
Speaker
Labor movements at the birth of industrial capitalism right and the reason why we don't know that history of the Luddites if you do then it's a kind of you know a little bit of a trivia that you know that nobody else does is because it's it's also one of the first cases I think of
00:06:51
Speaker
the cap of capital and the state really coming together to not just physically and violently suppress a organized militant workforce fighting for their rights, but to also erase their memory to erase that reputation that they had to give them
00:07:08
Speaker
a false reputation, right, that is still, it's actually weird that there's a labor movement that really at its height lasted for about 18 months, right, from 1811 to 1813. About 18 months, this labor movement across Britain, you know, at its height as well, it wasn't just a little group of some
00:07:33
Speaker
some people picking up hammers and smashing machines i mean they they did for sure do that but they were folk heroes of the time there are thousands and thousands of of love self-proclaimed luddites they took oats it was a it was an organization a highly organized and highly militant
00:07:51
Speaker
labor movement, but it is also weird that we still refer to the Luddites today, even if so wrongly, that it's that history has persisted in a way rather than just being lost to the history books of it was just a little bit of a blip at the birth of industrial capitalism because I think as well it shows that capital likes to choose people to hold up as examples. Don't do this.
00:08:15
Speaker
Because if you do, you'll not only be killed, which was the case that this was one of the first instances, the Luddite Rebellion of capital, the early entrepreneurs and factory owners at that time working together with the state to use the military to make machine breaking a treasonous offense, to make oath taking a treasonous offense, so joining an organized movement that was punishable by hanging.
00:08:42
Speaker
And so it really was making an example out of people who would dare to stand up to the machinery, the material power of capital, when in reality what they were doing is they were trying to fight for their right to have jobs, but also to produce quality work, which I think really speaks to all of us, because it wasn't just that the Luddites
00:09:05
Speaker
were against technology. I mean, many of the technologies that they took their hammers to had existed for decades, some of them over 100 years. They were skilled mechanics, skilled technicians. They had a lot of knowledge and expertise in their jobs and the tools of their jobs, but they also had a lot of care about the quality of the job, of the labor and the products that they were producing.
Modern Parallels with AI
00:09:30
Speaker
It was only when
00:09:32
Speaker
factory owners, early industrial capitalists started using technologies that had been around for a long time to start immiserating labor conditions, speeding up the pace of work, rapidly degrading the quality of the products that the workers were producing. It was using technology for capitalist ends. That is what sparked the movement against these technologies
00:09:57
Speaker
by extension against the entrepreneurs, the capitalists, and really what they were striking against as well because this is the birth of the factory system. They were striking against the whole idea of organizing labor within factories rather than organizing labor in ways where people had dignity, where people had autonomy, where people got to enjoy the products and the value of their labor.
00:10:21
Speaker
It was taking the technology as a symbol, really, of the material power and of the future that capital was creating. That, to me, is why I look back to the Luddites in this history of rebellion, understanding their legacy as a labor movement, as a deeply anti-capitalist movement,
00:10:48
Speaker
against the immiseration of the factory system, against the noxious use of these technologies. I mean, that's what they call them, right? They call these obnoxious technologies that were harmful to commonality, right? And really, as well, understanding that legacy, because it has, I think, just increasingly more and more lessons and relevance for us to draw today. I mean, we can think about how
00:11:13
Speaker
Similarly, you know, whether it's generative AI, whether it's platforms like Moodle or whatever, right? Like these things that are used to make our job conditions worse, to make the quality of our labor, the products that we produce worse, right? To make student conditions worse, to make staff conditions worse.
00:11:35
Speaker
all because it makes it easier to squeeze out an extra buck. It makes it easier to discipline labor, to surveil and monitor and manage labor.
00:11:46
Speaker
right, all because it serves someone else's ends. And so for me, that legacy of luddism, that rebellion is really focusing on the material power of capital. It's not an abstract force out there. It exists all around us in really tangible ways. And you have to fight against it in any way possible.
00:12:13
Speaker
you know, whether that means taking a hammer to the MacBook or not, but I think in reality it's the tactic of swinging a hammer is itself also a symbol of seeing that there is a material force and that the values and ends of capital are materialized, they're embodied in the things that have this kind of inhuman power over our day-to-day life.
00:12:37
Speaker
Yeah, I think there are so many lessons to take from that today, especially within the university. We could think of the very mundane technologies of power that exercise over us. I think of the spreadsheet. The spreadsheet is a very mundane exercise of power where so many of us, how are ours assigned to do work?
00:12:58
Speaker
virus spreadsheet. Things like if our budgets are calculated to then say you know even though it took X amount of time to prep for a tutorial last year well we can just like whittle that down this year and the spreadsheet will help us work out how much we will save.
00:13:12
Speaker
Yeah, and I'll just end by saying as well that the way that the reputation of the Luddites has been so besmirched, it's been so kind of forgotten in its true form as well, I think is because capital is truly afraid of workers standing up, organizing and being militant.
00:13:29
Speaker
doing things like, I think as well, a hundred years after the Luddites in 1918, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, who is part of the industrial workers of the world, wrote a brilliant pamphlet just called Sabotage, where the industrial withdrawal of worker efficiency. And so for her, Sabotage is not just, or not only smashing the machine,
00:13:53
Speaker
but also doing things like what we're doing now, withdrawing your labor, withdrawing your efficiency, doing work stoppages, work slowdowns. All of that is sabotage. All of that is as well, I think, in the legacy of the Luddites. And that has been recognized for a very long time, but I think recently that legacy has been forgotten.
00:14:14
Speaker
in large part because I mean one of the most powerful segments of capital now is the technology industry and its integration with every other sector and it is against their interest for people to remember that the Luddites were not just technophobes or primitivists or whatever but truly understood as the historian David Noble put it, they understood technology in the present tense.
00:14:37
Speaker
Not as something that might happen or could happen or a future that if only it were, but as something that exists right here immediately in front of you and is doing stuff to you right now, right here. Brilliant. Thank you so much, Jay.
00:14:56
Speaker
I'm now going to invite our next speaker, Kate Murphy, who's a senior lecturer in contemporary history in the School of Philosophy, Historical and International Studies.
History and Impact of Teach-Ins
00:15:06
Speaker
Kate, how long have you been at the university for? I have been here. I did my PhD. You, you, you, yes. I've been here a long time. I did my PhD here, and I became a permanent staff member in 2011, so it's been a while. But before that, I was
00:15:26
Speaker
on contracts and doing a session of work and really I'm here today not just because of my own work conditions and horrendous workload but because I'm sick of working with astonishingly good teaching associates who are and being kind of complicit or feeling complicit in their exploitation
00:16:00
Speaker
But I want to talk about students today. And today is my first teach-in. But the first teach-in is generally dated to the 1960s, perhaps not surprisingly, and specifically to the University of Michigan in 1965. And that teach-in was, of course, about the war in Vietnam. And Monash's first teach-in, which was Australia's second teach-in, was not long, a few months later,
00:16:29
Speaker
in July 1965 and also focused on Vietnam. It featured talks by Monash academics, by politicians from both sides, from student activists of course, and it was televised as well as attracting 2,000 people to the campus.
00:16:45
Speaker
And the name teach-in is of course a kind of a spin-off from the already existing protest strategy of the sit-in, associated or popularised by the civil rights movement. Teach-ins were often held in lieu of regular classes and in association with staff for industrial action like ours today.
00:17:08
Speaker
and they were jointly organized by students and faculty. So they're really good examples of historically of staff student solidarity, which is a really strong theme here at Monash and in other Australian universities. But part of the point of the teach-in was that it was participatory, okay? So it was students and staff together, audience and speakers engaged in a collective kind of dialectical process
00:17:37
Speaker
which is kind of the way The Towers has set it up today. And this format was reflective of the influence of emerging radical ideas and educational theories that were becoming increasingly influential. So what I really want to talk about today is not how Australians students used the campus as a base for political activity,
00:18:01
Speaker
around external issues like the war in Vietnam, but the ways they increasingly critiqued the university itself. Because most people don't realise the extent to which student protest in the 60s and 70s was about intramural internal university issues with sincere apologies to those of you who were there.
00:18:25
Speaker
and who know all too well. But the Australian popular memory of student protest in the 60s and 70s really emphasises those
00:18:38
Speaker
student responses to the external political world beyond the campus. So students protesting against successive conservative federal governments, against repressive state governments, and particularly their opposition to the war on Vietnam and imperialism in general.
00:18:57
Speaker
So historians have written about the connections that students forged with off-campus groups, with the labor movement, with Indigenous activists, but there's been less attention according to students' relationship with their institutions of higher learning.
00:19:14
Speaker
and the ways that students sought to change them. And I think this is a really important story for us to keep returning to, particularly in view of the way that students have been kind of demonised in recent debates as enemies of academic freedom and, by extension, enemies of academics and our struggle against the neoliberal university.
00:19:38
Speaker
So I want to recenter students as defenders of academic freedom and the conditions that nurture it via a quick revisiting of the history of student activism. In 1968, two prominent student radicals, Rowan Cahill and Terry Irving, observed that all student activism in the 60s was founded on a substratum of frustrations with the university, with the present character of the university.
00:20:06
Speaker
And the first of those frustrations was of course its relationship with capitalism. Post-war higher education policy had required universities to better respond to the needs of industry, to provide training that was required for the workforce,
00:20:22
Speaker
rather than knowledge for knowledge's sake. And this fuelled the idea that the university was a kind of factory churning out useful idiots who were trained to think what society and the government wanted them to think.
00:20:37
Speaker
On top of that, universities had links to the military industrial complex. Research and innovation was critical to arms production, and of course this research took place in universities. So in the 1960s,
00:20:53
Speaker
as universities develop closer links to industry, students became concerned that not only that research was supporting unethical industries, but that their universities were getting too close to industry and governments generally in ways that compromised the independence of the university and academic freedom. Does any of this sound familiar? But by the 1970s,
00:21:21
Speaker
Critics of the university evolved somewhat to focus closer attention on more day-to-day issues affecting students and especially assessment and teaching. Although the relationship of the university to capitalism remained the root of the problem. So students complained that assessment and especially exams were a reflection of the competitive bureaucratic world that they were so dissatisfied with.
00:21:52
Speaker
Some called for the abolishment of all assessment or only diagnostic assessment. The real guts of the sickness, as Brisbane activist Dan O'Neill put it, was in the classroom, in the competitiveness normalised in the current model of learning and assessment and in hierarchical staff-student relationships.
00:22:15
Speaker
So this approach was influenced by radical educational theorists like Paulo Freire, author of Pedagogy of the Oppressed. But on the ground, these student campaigns really boiled it down to slogans like Smash the Exams. Great example from the University of New England in 1973.
00:22:39
Speaker
students sitting the classical Marxism exam pulled their chairs into the centre of the exam hall and began discussing how they might answer the questions collectively. The university administration were at a loss as to what to do, and so they called the police. In the meantime, the students pledged not to leave the exam hall until they were granted what we would now call a take-home exam.
00:23:08
Speaker
to which the dean and vice chancellor eventually agreed and the students left having got what they wanted. At Monash in the early 70s, the revolutionary communists, the rev comms, argued in their newsletter, Hard Lines, that, quote, a fundamental change in the social role and function of education means a corresponding fundamental change in society.
00:23:33
Speaker
a successful anti-assessment struggle could be a step towards the fundamental social changes we need. So their campaign group, Assessment Action, attracted broad-based support in a period where student activism was generally thought to be in decline. Arts students dominated the campaign, but there were a few other groups involved, like the Dissident Physicists. In the second half of 1974,
00:23:57
Speaker
Assessment action led an occupation of the administration building, which we now know is a chancellery. It lasted eight days, which was the longest student occupation to occur at Monash up to that point. The occupation ended when 76 students were forcibly removed by police. And just a small postscript to that story about the revcoms and assessment action. Earlier this year, my historian's heart was touched when a student
00:24:26
Speaker
let me know that at the Deakin staff strike earlier in the year they'd produced a leaflet named after the Revcom's leaflet from the 70s, hard lines. The leaflet also featured Mario Savio's body upon the gears speech which many of you will know running along the border. So thanks to Josh Downey who's here somewhere for telling me for sharing that with me. I've also got a photo and thanks to all those students who are here today in solidarity with us.
00:24:55
Speaker
And those students who continue to nurture a view of the university as a community of inquiry, of quality education and learning rather than a corporate entity. Thank you. Alright, next up I'm going to invite Kathleen Neal to join us. So Kathleen, welcome.
00:25:25
Speaker
Thanks, Tal. Also, can I ask, so where are you based in the university? How long have you worked here and why did you show up today? I am senior lecturer in history. I am a medieval scholar.
00:25:38
Speaker
specialising in 13th century politics, which is where it's at, I'm gonna tell you.
Historical Parallels and Exploitation Lessons
00:25:43
Speaker
I first joined Monash in 2011 as a sessional staff member and then on a sequence of fixed term contracts before becoming a permanent or continuing staff member in 2016. There's a number of reasons why I decided to join today. First and foremost,
00:26:03
Speaker
I work with, as Kate was mentioning earlier, an absolutely outstanding array of sessional staff members this year and over the years, represent ladies. And having also held a former role as tutor coordinator, I've seen across my school the extent of the exploitation, and I've experienced it as a sessional staff member in the past.
00:26:30
Speaker
And the fact that I ask them to work to rule for their own good is a choice that I make which understandably actually does affect what we can offer in the unit. It affects the amount of
00:26:46
Speaker
consultation time we can offer, the depth of feedback we can offer, and that does disadvantage students. But it is better than me following the university line and just expecting people to work to their passion, which is the nature of the unsustainable model of academic work in not just this university, not just this country, but globally.
00:27:14
Speaker
The extent to which the university expects and relies upon academic staff working all hours of the day and night because they love it materially influenced my own health over the years. This level of kind of personal crisis really drove me to the realization that action has to be taken because the university will not love you back as our previous speakers have pointed out.
00:27:43
Speaker
And they work on the assumption that there is always someone else to take up that role if you fall by the wayside, no matter your degree of commitment to your teaching, to your students, to your co-workers, et cetera. And the withdrawal of work in this way is literally the only lever that we can pull to show them how serious we are that enough is enough.
00:28:06
Speaker
And I'm also here because I think we're in a moment where some unique drivers have come together to make the situation even worse than it was when in 2018, 2019 I was suffering my personal kind of road to Damascus moment.
00:28:26
Speaker
And they stem not only, but obviously largely from the COVID pandemic and also from the wider impacts of the climate crisis that we're experiencing, the social, economic and military turbulence that flows from that.
00:28:45
Speaker
And this brings me to the point that I wanted to share with you today from my perspective as a medievalist, because there are some really, really powerful echoes of this moment that we're experiencing in the 14th century.
00:28:58
Speaker
The 14th century is best known to you probably because it is the period of the Black Death. The plague arrived, not just in Europe where it's best known, but in fact globally, spreading out from the Mongolian steppe into Eastern and Northern Africa, across the whole of Asia, into Europe, sparing the Americas only because they hadn't been discovered by Europeans yet.
00:29:22
Speaker
or at least linked into the global networks of trade that the Colombian voyages engendered. This massive pandemic, moreover, came on the back of an already existing climate crisis. Early in the 14th century, something called the Little Ice Age began.
00:29:45
Speaker
in which a sudden reduction in solar flare activity and a massive eruption of a New Zealand volcano coincided to cool global temperatures by an average of two degrees in a single year. So, you know, scientists have been talking about the amazing rise in temperatures globally just in the last month and that was 0.5 of a degree in September.
00:30:12
Speaker
Two degrees of cooling occurred in the 13 teens leading to global famine. And this has been documented archaeologically and in the historical record in the Americas and in Europe and elsewhere.
00:30:27
Speaker
The impact in Britain, which is the area that I know best, was massive just from the famine that resulted from the crop failures that this changing climate produced. There's estimated to have been 10% to 15% mortality of the British population just from food shortages.
00:30:46
Speaker
and it also had a wider implication in the kind of general lack of physiological resistance among people who survived that initial catastrophe. So when the Black Death arrived in 1348, it attacked a population that was already at a low ebb of its
00:31:05
Speaker
physical resilience, its medical resilience. And in Britain, the latest estimates suggest that the population decreased instantaneously. You can watch the precipitous decline of the demographic graphing. Somewhere between 40 and 60% of the population died.
00:31:26
Speaker
So COVID, while it had a massive impact on us, is kind of nowhere in terms of its impact on population scale, thank goodness. And that's probably one of the things that the early, quite extreme responses by governments around the world were fearing and trying to avoid.
00:31:46
Speaker
So this was bad enough for people, but it also engendered massive turbulence, as you might imagine, in labour markets and the economy. So all of a sudden, a fairly static, long-term situation by which labour had been organised, according to something which is sometimes known by the F-word, feudalism.
00:32:11
Speaker
I'm not going to put my historian's hat and give you a lecture about why that's not the word that we use anymore, but it's a good shorthand that you might have heard before. This means essentially a system of structuring labour according to social hierarchy that is intensified and formalised through a system of at least notionally reciprocal benefits to the peasants from their lords and vice versa.
00:32:38
Speaker
However, the massive drop in population meant that this system was no longer tenable because there were so few workers left to till the fields, to the extent that some historical sources record the
00:32:55
Speaker
the lords themselves having to put their backs to the plough. And this was difficult not just because of the economic impact, but also because of the disruption that it threatened in terms of the social status and hierarchy, the kind of symbols of lordship that kept the lords at the top of this social pyramid were undermined by the fact that they had to labour.
00:33:23
Speaker
And this was seen as extremely threatening by those in power and their earliest responses to this were to legislate to try and keep wages low and to force people to pursue the working categories of peasant or whatever that they had been born into. In other words, to try and
00:33:43
Speaker
put legal remedies in place to stop the capacity of this turbulence from generating any kind of social mobility or opportunity for those who had always been on the bottom rungs of society.
00:33:56
Speaker
So there are numerous ordinances and statutes attempting to formalise this system of oppression. And finally, when even that failed to stop people demanding better wages or more mobility, the capacity to leave the land and so on, they began to raise more and more taxes.
00:34:21
Speaker
This was not just because the government was running out of money to do its normal business, but because it was also at the same time responding to the climate and other types of turbulence through mass warfare. And we can see also a number of parallels to today, I think, in this situation.
00:34:41
Speaker
So the English royal government was merely engaged in what's known as the Hundred Years' War, trying to take control of France at the time, which was a very nice nationalist distraction from the kinds of pain and turmoil that average people of the country were faced with.
00:34:58
Speaker
But they also were really struggling to fund this massive military campaign and so they invented a thing called a poll tax. Poll comes from a Middle English word for head and it is still embedded in our word polling booth today, meaning one vote per person, one vote per head.
00:35:16
Speaker
The poll tax was levied across the whole of Britain with some very minor exemptions at a rate which had never influenced so many people before, nor at such a high level of taxation. And it was raised a number of times successively, or at least it was attempted to be raised a number of times successfully. And this is where my real example of revolt comes in.
00:35:42
Speaker
You may have heard of the English Peasants' Revolt, it occurred in 1381, and it was a response to these coalitions of factors, the long impact of pandemic, the demographic change, the economic restrictions that they were trying to, that were being enforced upon them, and in particular the taxation that went on and on and on.
00:36:07
Speaker
in amidst rampant inflation where the cost of things was increasing by 30%. So what did people do? They organised, they gathered together, they communicated with each other, they coordinated incredibly closely and they began to do things like refuse to pay the poll tax,
00:36:30
Speaker
to under report the number of people locally who were at least notionally eligible to pay it. They colluded
00:36:39
Speaker
with and conspired with tax collectors to minimise the number of people that the government knew about in order to claim the tax. And in some counties around Britain, the reported number of taxis, if you like, reduced by something between 50 and 60% over the course of three levies of the poll tax in the 1370s. So there's already this build-up of resistance in advance.
00:37:09
Speaker
But then the authorities attempted to impose the tax collection through violence and this is where the Peasants' Revolt really came to the fore. Instead of capitulating, they banded together across multiple locations nationally and coordinated their march on London or on local
00:37:32
Speaker
centres of power to voice their opposition. They destroyed records wherever they could find it in order to disrupt the capacity of authorities to know who, where and why to tax and who, where and why to direct their reprisals
00:37:53
Speaker
And this was such an effective strategy that it made the authorities really, really quite frightened and tense and actually was in the short term successful in securing capitulation to all of their demands by the Royal Government of the boy King Richard II.
00:38:10
Speaker
In the longer term, or the medium term I should say, as soon as the rebels had disbanded, the Royal Government's reprisals were swift and violent and a number of them were executed. However, in the longer term it was incredibly successful in empowering the political representatives of the people, the Commons,
00:38:31
Speaker
to take action to improve the economic and other situation of the people, to stand up against royal demands for taxation and other kinds of oppressive imposition. And the poll tax was not levied again until the 1990s.
00:38:50
Speaker
So if there's a lesson to be taken from this, it's that this kind of turbulence that we're experiencing now is one which authorities will try to exploit, to reinforce a status quo or even to expand their exploitation of the people who are doing all of the hard work.
00:39:12
Speaker
Secondly, that with collective action and coordination pressure can be applied and short term, medium term and longer term gains can be won. Thank you.
00:39:29
Speaker
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge, but also for sharing your story. I think it wouldn't be unique just to you, the things that you're describing. I mean, how many of us here have thought, I can't afford to be sick?
00:39:47
Speaker
Right? Many, many. Either I can't afford to be sick because my workload will not allow me to be sick. But if I take a break now, I will have to make it up later anyway, so I'll just work through. Or I can't afford to be sick because I literally am not paid at all. I will have no income if I take a sick day. Which is outrageous. Which should not be the case in a university that is so rich, that is capable of giving more, and yet it doesn't.
00:40:20
Speaker
Alright folks, that's it for this episode. Thanks to Kate, Danny, Adam, Bernard, and Pod Daddy Sofio for all the work they've put into this, and we'll catch you next time.