Academic and professional services staff at the University of Essex were on strike in March, as part of a second wave of local industrial action over management proposals to cut 400 jobs and to shut down its Southend Campus. A strike in these circumstances is better than no strike, certainly. One of the few ways the situation facing Essex and many other UK universities – which differ only in being at different stages in the same process of terminal decline – could be even worse than it is, is if there were no resistance at all from students and staff.

But another strike is also another opportunity to observe academics behaving badly, and they rarely disappoint. There is the full-on, full-bodied scabbing, of course. Rates of unionisation are higher than ever, but many paid-up union members think nothing of crossing picket lines (presumably regarding union membership mainly as a cheap source of legal advice). There are the cyber-scabs: those who see a strike as an opportunity to catch up on work emails. And then there are the pay-as-you-go strikers – a large proportion of union members, it seems – who like to keep a foot on either side: strike one day, scab the next. That way, you can keep the docking of pay to a symbolic snip, and still bask in the warm glow of solidarity, knowing that you have done your bit for the collective. This is a bit like feeling virtuous for only cheating on your spouse two days a week – but then academics are not exactly known for their marital fidelity, either.

It doesn’t end there, though. Scabbing is an art like everything else, and as always, academics are determined to excel. Enter the ‘scaboteur’. Why be a common scab, when you can go one better and stop a strike before it starts? The tactics of the academic scaboteur are the same every time. A bold but common opening move is to say (as loudly as possible): “I can’t afford to strike!” This claim would be most plausible if made by precarious, fixed-term academics or graduate students, but as I’ve noted before, they are not the ones most likely to be heard making it. There is a kind of inverted ‘scabs’ triangle’ at work here, whereby the people crying poverty are found disproportionately among the ranks of the permanent and (even after years of pay-erosion) relatively well-remunerated. Sure, most academics may not be among the 1%, but you do have to wonder where their salary is going if striking for a week or two has become an unaffordable luxury.  Do they have undisclosed coke habits? Fabergé egg addictions?

 In any case, as the academics in question are frequently reminded, there is a strike fund (which, unlike funds for students in financial need, operates on the basis of trust). No good, apparently: the strike fund takes WEEKS to come through – by which time these unfortunate colleagues and their children will surely have starved. It’s considered bad form to pry into people’s financial affairs – unless those people are really poor, or young, or both, in which case it’s de rigueur (benefits claimants and applicants for student hardship funds can expect to have their bank statements scrutinised). So the scaboteur’s bluff is unlikely to be called, but it’s hard not to suspect that some of our esteemed colleagues are simply fibbing.

Even supposing for sake of argument that there are some genuine cases, academics who, due to whatever combination of circumstances, have found themselves in too tight a spot to be able to take even a short-term hit without intolerable hardship and who therefore see no alternative but to scab, then the least they could do is to scab quietly. That, however, is the last thing on the scaboteur’s mind. The objective is to leverage hardship, real or imagined, against striking in general. On this argument, striking is not only detrimental but elitist, actually, because some people can’t afford to go without pay. Well, you know what else means not getting paid, for a lot longer than a few days? Being made redundant. But in the meantime, the scaboteur’s logic is that if not everyone can or will strike, nobody should. This logic reaches its inventive acme in the argument that for some to strike – or to strike too hard or too long – is for them to make scabs of others. “I would have to cross a picket line,” as one union member put it ominously, “and I would never want to do that.” We would, as you might say, have scabs on our hands.

If a strike cannot be delayed or prevented altogether, the scaboteur’s tactics move toward mitigation. The argument from economic necessity looms large here too: people may be able to afford to strike for one week, but not two (how the miners managed, we can only imagine). Here, the argument is often supplemented with another, subtler one. “I personally would love to vote for an all-out, indefinite strike,” goes this line, “but we need to take people along with us.” In other words: I am radical; they are not. It’s an argument all too familiar from recent political history at the national level. “I would love to vote for a left-wing party, but the public won’t support it” is – we should all know by now – code for: “I hate it with every ounce of my being and will do everything in my power to make sure that the public do not have the opportunity to support it or anything like it.”

 Still, in the context of the university, it’s an argument with a kernel of truth. The academics who don’t go to union meetings are typically even more spineless than those who do. But as with the argument that “elections are won from the centre” (or lately, that they are won by pandering to the racist right), it rests on a completely unevidenced assumption. In the university case, the assumption is that those who are reluctant to engage in industrial action can be brought on side if only we water it down enough – and that the increase of ‘density’ will be sufficient to make up for the loss of volume (a one-day strike with a really good turnout is worth more than a week-long strike with worse participation). It was on the basis of an argument of this sort that a meeting of Essex UCU in advance of the March strikes voted overwhelmingly in favour of the most moderate of the proposed options: “pulsed waves of targeted action”. It sounds like an electric toothbrush and is about as threatening to management. All signs are that the redundancies will go ahead as planned.