In 2015 and 2016 students at South African universities campaigned under the banner #FeesMustFall for the abolition of tuition fees. Little public attention however has been paid to the alliances of students and workers in parallel #EndOutsourcing campaigns for fair labour practices for all university workers. Heike Becker asks what were the trajectories of the student-worker movements for insourcing of all workers at public institutions of higher learning? And what did they have in common with similar campaigns that arose at the same time at universities in the United Kingdom?
By Heike Becker
In early October 2015, just days before the massive #FeesMustFall student protests hit South African higher education campuses, the Oct6 movement (named after October 6, the day the activist group presented its manifesto) raised concern about the conditions of ‘support staff’ such as cleaners, security staff, and maintenance workers in the public university run on corporate principles in the contemporary era of neoliberalism. Protest action focused on the University of the Witwatersrand (‘Wits’) in Johannesburg. The signatories of the group’s manifesto included student activists, radical academics and labour activists from universities in Cape Town and Johannesburg. Their call to action was against the outsourcing practices that marginalised the most vulnerable university workers. The manifesto argued that, ‘while some progressive gains have been made in the post-apartheid period, South African universities have slid into more conservative practices. One of the most serious instances of this conservatism has been the treatment of university workers. The mass outsourcing of university workers to private companies since 1999 is a blight on the record of post-apartheid universities.’
Next to the issue of tuition fees the labour conditions of the low-paid workers providing auxiliary services have become a key issue of contention at South African universities. The outsourcing of functions to private companies has typically meant that workers, who were previously directly employed by the universities, had to take a cut in their already meagre earnings; they also lost social benefits, including pension funds and tuition fees rebates for their own and family members’ university studies. South Africa’s student protesters carried #EndOutsourcing banners along with their #FeesMustFall demands. Concerned academics entered, sometimes heated, disputes with university managers. Workers went on strike to demand better labour conditions.
These are not just South African concerns. Similar conflicts have been fought over at British universities. In both countries, protests revolved around the exceedingly low salaries – and lack of social security benefits – paid by contracting companies to outsourced workers. There is more at issue though. In London as much as in Johannesburg and Cape Town battle lines have been drawn between workers, contracting companies and university managements. They have been fought by new alliances of workers, students and academics. In some places they have seen the rise to prominence of newly invigorated, independent labour unions. A particularly strong example of this is the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IGWB), a young union, established in 2012 that mostly organises transnational migrants who work in Britain under precarious labour conditions. The IGWB broke away from the established trade union, which the immigrant labour activists felt did not properly represent their constituency. In their campaigns they employ vigorous, colourful and noisy forms of activism instead of the conventional and conservative tactics of the established union representatives.
Students and critical academics have further raised concerns about the practices of corporatized academia and deepening inequalities in the neoliberal Global South and North. In South Africa as in Britain the struggles for insourcing have involved arguments between academics and senior academic management (some of them with leftist credentials) about the core spirit, social and political responsibility of the university. What the Oct6 activists from Johannesburg and Cape Town wrote, captures the hardening battle lines from the Cape to the Thames: ‘The raw inequality of campus life is a sign of a deeply undemocratic system. Universities cannot imagine that they can serve as the cultivators of future democracy in South Africa if their own terms are saturated by such inequality. It provides a tacit education to all who learn at our universities that such inequality is an acceptable feature of our society. If we cannot sustain a practice of equality in our universities, how are we to expect other institutions to work against inequality in the most unequal country on earth?’
In this blogpost I show the different trajectories of movements for insourcing of all workers at public institutions of higher learning through recent examples from South Africa, with a focus on Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg and the University of the Western Cape in Cape Town, as well as the University of London in the United Kingdom. What are the common aims of these struggles, and how successful have they been?
South Africa: student-worker alliances
In South African universities outsourcing of auxiliary services was introduced some years into the post-apartheid era. On the cusp of the 21st century, the country’s universities privatised cleaning, catering, and grounds maintenance, that is gardening and other tasks to keep university campuses in good shape. Interestingly, both of the country’s leading ‘liberal’ universities, Wits and the University of Cape Town (UCT) were led by vice-chancellors of impeccable leftist credentials when they introduced outsourcing. Wits vice-chancellor in 2000 was the historian Colin Bundy who had been instrumental in the production of revisionist South African history from both Marxist and Africanist perspectives, while UCT’s principal in 1999 was Mamphela Ramphele, physician and anthropologist, and a prominent formerly banned activist of the Black Consciousness movement. That South Africa’s leading universities turned to such problematic labour practices while under the watch of former activist-academics leaves no uncertainty about the pervasiveness of the neoliberal turns the country took soon after the end of formal apartheid.
Typically, outsourcing resulted in massive job losses and drop in wages. When Wits handed over cleaning, catering and grounds maintenance to private companies in 2000, more than 600 workers were retrenched and only about 250 were re-employed by private companies.
Outsourcing was accompanied by drastic attacks on wages and conditions: typically, cleaners’ wages dropped by almost 50 per cent, without social security benefits such as medical aid, maternity benefits, or pensions, a report on labour conditions at the university said in 2011.[1]
The 2011 report concludes that outsourcing ‘reproduce[d] the apartheid legacy at Wits and continues to do so to this day.’The contracts that workers have signed with private companies since 2000 allow the university ‘to absolve itself of any responsibility for workers.’
Wits stood out among the South African universities with a continuous history of worker activism around the labour conditions in the corporate university. In 2013, for instance, workers went on an industrial campaign to protect their jobs when new sub-contractors took over the provision of auxiliary services at the university.[2]
While the university executive mostly washed their hands of the conditions under which the lowly-paid support staff worked, the institution’s new vice-chancellor Adam Habib – a political scientist and former anti-apartheid activist – claims that already early in his term, in 2013, he told the university governance structures, such as Senate and Council in no uncertain terms that he regarded outsourcing as a violation of human rights.[3] Habib claims that the battles over insourcing were never between advocates and opponents of outsourcing, and that he personally had stated unequivocally at the time that he did not ‘need to be convinced that outsourcing exploits vulnerable workers and needs to be changed.’[4] However, and that became the major bone of contention of the next few years, at Wits as at other institutions, he also took the line that insourcing would come at a significant financial cost, and that it was crucial that insourcing would not compromise the university finances. Hence, the point was whether ‘institutional stakeholders were prepared to pay the costs associated with advancing the human rights obligation.’[5]
Habib’s stance was indicative of the attitude of university executives. However, as he freely admits, the student and worker protests of 2015 changed the terms of the debate. The dispute was no longer over whether to insource or not, but the only issue now was, how to do it. He comments: ‘In this sense, the student and worker protests were essential for enabling change. They demonstrated the power of social mobilisation in opening up the systemic parameters of what was possible.’[6]
Following student and worker protests in late 2015, at Wits a ‘task team’ of university executive management, workers’ and academics’ representatives as well as student activists developed and implemented a two-step plan. Starting from the introduction of a top-up allowance – to be paid to the sub-contracting companies to ensure a minimum wage (initially R 4,500 from January 2016). In June 2016 the task team made a detailed recommendation on the insourcing of workers in catering, cleaning, grounds, waste and security, and drivers of Wits branded buses. Insourcing was to happen by January 2017, ‘provided that this coincided with concluding contracts with service providers – or that these contracts could be terminated early without cost to the university.’[7] Negotiations with the companies that provided the auxiliary services were tricky. However, by mid-2017, about one and a half thousand Wits catering, cleaning, grounds, waste and security staff were insourced at a minimum salary R 7,800, and officially welcomed back into the university community with ‘a bit of fanfare’, as Habib writes.[8]
Wits presents a success story when it comes to the implementation of reasonably fair labour practices. However, Habib’s account as he tells it in his personal reflection on the #FeesMustFall battles, is also ripe with dismissive, even aggressive retorts at student and worker activists, who were the most active proponents of the campaign to bring all university workers back in house. His most venomous invectives he reserves for the academics who pushed hard for insourcing. He dubs those Wits academics who supported the students’ and workers’ struggles as the ‘far-left’, or with even more rancour, the ‘Pol Pot brigade’.[9]
One of the academics who seems to have earned the Wits principal’s wrath was the anthropologist and senior humanities professor Eric Worby, who consistently spoke out about the importance of a university such as Wits meeting its human rights obligations by ridding itself of outsourcing. Habib expresses his clear contempt that ‘very few of the activists ever wanted to confront the choices and trade-offs we had to make.’[10] He, like other senior university executives also kept an authoritarian stance. Typically, riot police and, increasingly, private security companies were brought on to the campuses, and student and worker protesters were warned that no ‘disruption’ would be tolerated and that anyone involved would be suspended and banned from the campus.[11]
Nonetheless, the recent insourcing trajectories at South Africa’s comparatively wealthy formerly ‘White’ universities such as Wits and UCT appear to have been rather smooth. Similar to the developments at Wits, at UCT an agreement that committed the university to insourcing was signed between the vice-chancellor and the National Education, Health and Allied Workers’ Union (NEHAWU) on 28 October 2015, and by mid-2017 most UCT workers were back on the institution’s payroll.
Universities such as Wits and UCT had comparatively smooth routes to getting workers back on the institutions’ payroll, other universities however were more disinclined. The University of the Western Cape (UWC), where I teach, is one institution where until today the auxiliary services are outsourced to several sub-contracting companies. This is in spite of the fact that at UWC as on other campuses insourcing was a demand of the student protests from October 2015, and outsourced workers have recurrently come out on protests about their labour conditions and reiterated the strident demands to be brought back into direct employment by the university. In February 2016 this took a particularly militant form when about 100 workers, mostly cleaners, tipped over bins and threw litter over the campus.
UWC’s executive management initially responded with a R 2,000 monthly salary top-up from December 2015 and offered that those working on the campus in the employment of sub-contractors would receive the same study benefits for themselves and their children as those directly employed by the university, that is, tuition-free undergraduate enrolment and a 75% rebate for postgraduate studies. However, during meetings with the protesting workers and in public pronouncements the UWC executive management repeatedly claimed that this was the best they could do, and that insourcing of the outsourced workers was impossible since this would compromise the financial sustainability of the university. In early 2017 the UWC spokesperson said that the university could not bring 600 outsourced workers onto the staff ‘without facing retrenchments and possible bankruptcy.’[12]
There is some truth in this. Insourcing, despite different cost estimates presented by South African institutions, would be costly, especially in the transition. Unlike the leading historically white universities, UWC, founded by the apartheid government in 1960 as a university for ‘coloured’ (mixed-race) students, cannot rely on private endowments bequeathed by wealthy alumni or corporate investments to subsidise the costs of insourcing. While UWC is today among South Africa’s leading research universities, the institution remains financially vulnerable.
Yet, a number of outsourced workers at UWC faced a particular hardship when 143 workers employed by one of the six companies that provide the auxiliary services, were dismissed in January 2017. When due to the student protests the campus was shut down in October 2016 they had stayed home until the university re-opened a month later. The company, SECURITAS, which provides security services to the university, claimed that they had been absent from work without permission. In March 2017 the case was heard at the CCMA (Commission for Conciliation, Mediation and Arbitration) but no resolution was found. The case of the 143 dismissed workers has been raised through repeated labour action, and most recently an online petition in November 2018 that demanded their re-instatement and an end to outsourcing. The petition appealed to the university’s responsibility for its workers.
The petition used strong language, accusing sub-contracting companies of paying ‘slave wages’; it claimed that not even a quarter of what the university pays the company is spent in salaries for its employees. Outsourcing was described as an ‘evil system’ and ‘modern-day slavery.’ The petition concluded that, ‘the fight to end outsourcing is the fight to end slavery and promote human dignity.’[13]
The cries for human dignity provide a significant moment that links the struggles in Johannesburg, Cape Town and London.
London: struggles of precarious workers
Struggles to end outsourcing at universities are not confined to South Africa. Between September 2017 and May 2019 there have been 17 days of strike action at the University of London (UoL), where cleaners and security staff, most of them of a migrant background, began a campaign to end outsourcing in September 2017.[14]
As in South Africa, the wages of outsourced workers at British universities – employed by subcontracting service providers – are generally much lower than those of their colleagues who are directly employed by the university. They are also discriminated against in terms of social security benefits.
The strikes have been coordinated by the Independent Workers’ Union of Great Britain (IGWB), which has called on the university to end outsourcing, implement pay rises, and stop the bullying on racist, sexist and homophobic grounds of migrant workers and especially women who work for outsourcing companies. The IWGB is a new union, founded in August 2012, which represents mainly low paid migrant workers. The union represents sections of the workforce which have traditionally been non-unionised and under-represented, such as the UoL’s outsourced cleaners and security guards, as well as workers in the so-called ‘gig economy’, such as bicycle couriers and Uber drivers.
Labour action for insourcing at UoL has included vibrant, creative and noisy picket lines, protest marches, and interventions during university functions. The university authorities however did not back down; instead almost half a million pounds were spent on additional security over two months in 2018 to police the industrial action and student protests that took place in solidarity with them. In the strike on 30 October 2018, the University even used bailiffs with handcuffs and extendable batons in an attempt to intimidate workers, students and academic protesters.
Following on these events, in December 2018 the IWGB called for a boycott of Senate House, the administrative centre of the university. The union asked academics, public figures and organisations to pledge ‘to not attend or organise any events at the University of London central administration (… ) until all outsourced workers (including cleaners, receptionists, security officers, catering staff, porters, audio-visual workers, gardeners and maintenance workers) are made direct employees of the University of London on equal terms and conditions with other directly employed staff.’ IWGB organiser at the UoL, Jordi López, said that this campaign was particularly significant, the IWGB and campaign organisers believed, since it would help to achieve victory at the epicentre of London’s academic hub, which would ‘sound the death knell for outsourcing in the sector.’[16]
By August 2019 the pledge had been signed by more than 400 academics, politicians (including the shadow chancellor John McDonnell and five other MPs), public figures (including veteran film maker Ken Loach) and 23 branches of the University and College Union (UCU), the leading British union of academics and academic-related staff. In May 2019 the national congress of the UCU officially voted to support the campaign. With arguments echoing the South African OCT6 manifesto, Christiane Paine who moved the motion at the UCU congress, said: ‘I believe that inequality is legitimised by precarious work… Universities should aspire [to be] institutisons where every worker has the same terms and conditions.’[17]
As a result of the boycott, over 180 Senate House events were relocated. However, the campaign has not been without controversy. In one rather bizarre spat in February 2019, for instance, leading academics stood accused of undermining a protest about workers’ rights when the boycott was broken in order to give a talk about a historian famous for his support of workers’ rights.
Richard Evans, emeritus professor of history at Cambridge University launched his new biography of the late Marxist historian Eric Hobsbawm at the UoL Senate House, thus breaking the boycott advocating better employment conditions for outsourced staff.[18]
Evans expressed his support for the cause of the protesters in a letter to The Guardian newspaper and wrote that he had taken a bundle of leaflets distributed by the boycott campaign into the meeting for the audience to read. He argued that, ‘this was a far better way of publicising their cause than cancelling the meeting and sending 150 people home disappointed.’[19]
Yet, he argued against the boycott in even more strident terms, accusing it of ‘sectarianism.’ He even called on the late Marxist historian for support (‘I don’t think Eric Hobsbawm would have approved of the boycott’) and expressed his disapproval of the IWGB, whose credentials he doubted since it is not affiliated with the Trades Union Congress (TUC), the national federation of trade unions in England and Wales. He claimed that, the fact that the IWGB union split from the established unions representing workers at the university to operate independently would have struck the Marxist historian as undermining the trade union movement.
The UoL branch chairwoman of the IWGB union, Maritza Castillo Calle, doubted this and in turn claimed ‘that we are sure [Hobsbawm] would be on our side in this struggle.’[20]
A member of the London Socialist Historians Group responded to this skirmish over the late historian’s possible standpoint with a rather laconic comment: ‘What would Eric Hobsbawm have done? As a Marxist I am a materialist so can only note that he is no longer available to tell us.’ However he argued that he maintained that it was ‘a basic act of solidarity’ not to hold events during the boycott campaign since it was not for the academics to prescribe to the workers how to wage their struggles; rather they should accept that it was up to the outsourced workers and the union they choose to represent them to determine strategy.[21]
Opponents to the boycott repeatedly pointed to the fact that the insourcing process was already under way. In response to the UCU Congress resolution in May 2019, a university spokesperson, for instance, emphasised that the remainder of the process had been agreed with the recognised unions – including UCU and the public service union Unison, thus excluding IGWB, which the university does not consider a ‘recognised union’. Reminiscent of the South African responses, the UoL spokesperson further raised an authoritative, if not authoritarian, voice claiming that, ‘Staff at Senate House have been subject to intimidation and abuse online in relation to the boycott which is completely unacceptable.’[22]
The IWGB has not entirely questioned that progress has been made but pointed out that the process was very slow and that maintenance workers, cleaners and catering staff would remain outsourced at least until the current contract with service providers are up for tender again, some only in 2021. The union maintains that thus the university’s handling of their policy around insourcing has been twofaced.
While campaigns for insourcing have been particularly effervescent during the past two years, they go back even longer. The beginnings of the struggles in London have been told, with some creative license, by the activist, academic and novelist Leo Zeilig in his novel, An Ounce of Practice. Published in 2017, this is, in part, an account of a strike and campaign for justice of a group of mostly Zimbabwean workers on a campus in London. It also shows their disappointment with the officially recognized trade union and their resolve to carry on despite the discouraging stance of union officials. While the real-live workers and activists are mostly immigrants from Latin America and the Caribbean rather than from southern Africa, the author who witnessed the earlier battles when he worked as a researcher at the University of London has been engaged ever since with the struggles of workers of migrant background who are ‘so often invisible, patronised, abused.’
In a scene in An Ounce, an unofficial strike is in its second day, and a union official named Terry turns up to tell the workers they must return to their posts. He is shouted down by Tendai, one of the main organisers of the strike. It is worthwhile to read this longer excerpt from the novel:
Terry blustered again. ‘Management have told me if we don’t clear the car park and move away from the main entrance they will be forced to call the police, who may make arrests. I don’t know your individual circumstances, but they will check papers. As you are on an illegal strike, your union can’t support you.’
A woman screamed from the back: ‘Bastard. Go back to Mummy or we’ll spank you!’
Terry turned to Tendai, his eyes wide, his lips puckered and tensed. Tendai raised his arms in a slow, dramatic shrug. There was a cheer. Tendai’s locks flowed over his shoulders; his coat was too small, the sleeves above his wrists; a silver chain was visible on his open neck; his taut body, stripped of fat, stood tall. When the cheering subsided the same woman jeered affectionately and called out, ‘It’s Jesus. It’s the black messiah!’
Tendai’s insolent, drawn face was serious. He shook his head and spoke in English: ‘This man says we must return to our jobs, to the insults. He says if we don’t, the police will come and arrest us and send some of us home. The union won’t fight for us.’ Tendai paused, then spoke more loudly. ‘I say that we are the union, and if we fight then the union is with us!’ There was another cheer. Tendai’s voice carried over the heads of the strikers to the offices and departments above the car park. ‘There are no foreigners here except the bosses.’
That was the end of it. Terry was jostled from his place and the crowd rejoiced as though they had already won. They embraced each other, linked arms, kissed. Then they marched around the university singing in Spanish, Polish and Shona – exclaiming, encumbering the streets, the road filled with their bodies. [23]
The novel follows the strike and the lives of the workers over several weeks. Then the action shifts to Zimbabwe…
Outsourcing, struggle, and the corporate university
When the insourcing battles in London resurged in 2017, Zeilig commented that in his novel he had ‘attempted to create a cast of Zimbabwean migrants at the centre of labour protest in London, who were once active in the movement against Mugabe’s dictatorship. An Ounce of Practice is a story about the connections of the Global North and South, the link between how we live, love and struggle.’
The struggles of university workers connect Cape Town, Johannesburg and London in a number of ways. In both the Global South and North institutions of higher education have become ‘Thatcher-ite’ corporate businesses, even though the University of London, Wits, and UWC are all public institutions. The universities’ decisions to outsource auxiliary services were rationalised with the argument that this would allow them to focus on their ‘core functions’ of teaching and research. In reality, it meant that universities added to inequality and social injustice by chucking out their most vulnerable workers into working under conditions of super-exploitation without the social security benefits they grant those directly employed, such as pension funds, health insurance etc.
The worker protests also demonstrate the importance of new forms of labour struggles and organisation. In South Africa, it was the student and worker struggles that forcefully put insourcing on the agenda in 2015-16. The established trade union NEHAWU did not play a significant role on most campuses. At Wits, the insourcing process was agitated and negotiated by a student-worker alliance under the #EndOutsourcing and #FeesMustFall banners, with substantial support from radical academics. After they were employed directly by the university, the vast majority of the workers joined the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa (NUMSA) that had broken away from the ANC-aligned Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).[24] At UWC, too, strident demands for insourcing were raised during the student and worker protests in late 2015. For several reasons, though, at UWC they did not succeed. Unlike at Wits (or the historically white, comparatively wealthy UCT twenty kilometres down the road), UWC’s executive management was adamantly opposed to an agreement to bring workers onto the university’s payroll. This was, partly, due to the historically black institution’s lack of financial resources. Also, the UWC struggles received less public support and media attention than those at the formerly white universities, and there was comparatively little support by UWC academics, except for a rather marginal informal network of some ‘concerned academics.’
In London, the ongoing struggle has been led by a new kind of union, IWGB, which has taken up the organisation of formerly non-unionised sections of the workforce, especially immigrants employed in the most vulnerable, unprotected and low-paid jobs. The young union has thus introduced new politics of workers’ struggles; it has also made its mark with new aesthetics of struggles, known for the vibrancy of salsa and the noisy blowing of vuvuzelas (the plastic horns that achieved global prominence during the 2010 football world cup in South Africa) on their picket lines. It has also garnered substantial support among academics and public figures.
To sum up: the struggles for insourcing of all workers at universities in South Africa and Britain points to global connections of neoliberal university governance. It equally indicates however new forms of workers’ struggles emerging from below, and hopefully connecting those fighting for social justice and progressive academic practices in the Global South and North.
It is interesting indeed that similar battles for fair labour practices on university campuses have been fought at academic institutions in both the Global South and the North. The bottom-line is the precarious situation that the workers find themselves in. Irrespective of whether they work for a university in London, Cape Town or Johannesburg, cleaners, security personnel and other auxiliary labourers receive poor pay and, importantly, are deprived of the employment benefits such as pensions and other social security payments because their labour has been ‘casualized’.
The battles for insourcing have been successful to varying degrees, as the discussion of the two South African cases exemplifies. After a long and hard struggle the IGWB won in October last year an important concession for university workers in London although the boycott campaign has not yet been called off.[25] It appears, sadly, that it is the least affluent and well-resourced academic institutions attended mostly by students from black working-class families, such as UWC, that are particularly prone to perpetuate the conservative labour practices of the neoliberal age.
Heike Becker teaches social and cultural anthropology at UWC in South Africa. Her work explores themes at the interface between culture and politics and focuses particularly on the politics of memory, popular culture, digital media and social movements of resistance in southern Africa (South Africa and Namibia). Heike is a regular contributor to roape.net.
Featured Photograph: Students and workers unite at UCT to end outsourcing in 2015.
A version of this article was published by the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Southern Africa.
Notes
[1] Nkosi, Bongani; ‘”Abused” workers at their Wits’ end’; Mail & Guardian, 28 October 2011.
[2] Nkosi, Bongani; ‘Wits workers prepare for more strikes’; Mail & Guardian, 31 May 2013.
[3] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77
[4] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77
[5] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77
[6] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 77
[7] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 82.
[8] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 83
[9] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 24.
[10] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 49.
[11] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 67.
[12] Furlong, Ashleigh, ‘Insourcing at universities: uneven progress; GroundUp, 14 March 2017.
[13] vernac.news.com 22 November 2018.
[14] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019
[16] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.
[17] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.
[18] Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019.
[19] Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm would not have backed University of London boycott, The Guardian, 11 February 2019.
[20] Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019.
[21] Flett, Keith. Richard Evans should have cancelled his book launch at Senate House, The Guardian, 13 February 2019.
[22] Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.
[23] Zeilig, Leo. 2017. An Ounce of Practice. London: hoperoad; pp. 188-189.
[24] Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 89.
[25] ‘Major concession won – boycott continues until full victory’; email sent by Jordi Lopez to Boycott Senate House mailing list, 18 October 2019.
