Other people five
I realise this is not a good look to say this a week before the publication of my book that defends relationships between humans but Surviving Work started in 2011 when I was put in a compulsory redundancy pool and my life got hijacked by the liquid fear that my survival was at the mercy of other people.
The professional witching hour is upon us and I’ve spent the last three weeks on strike, with the promise of a smorgasbord of local and national disputes across Higher Education taking place over the next year. All of which will test my finely crafted principles and practices around relationality, to the point that my first shameful thought when I drowned my phone in coffee and lost all my phone numbers the day before strike action started was that this had saved me a lot of time.
There’s nothing like your own impending redundancy to remind you of the searing fact that you can defend other people’s dignity at work your whole professional life and still be poleaxed at the prospect of defending your own.
After a lot of therapy, I can now say without punching and spitting - that you can never predict what people's reactions to your vulnerability will be. Having worked for many years for trade unions I have for a long time held to the spectre-at-the-feast school of workplace dynamics that nobody wants to hear that you never know who will stand up to defend you during workplace conflict.
One of the hazards of going on strike is that it underlines with existential neon that the world of work can absolutely turn out to be 180 degrees away from its stated aim, and the landscape of collegiate relationships can undergo seismic shifts. There are surprises, like in the 2011 strike action where the people at work who actually helped me were a motley crew made up of a Turkish teacher, a Scottish communist economist and someone I shared an office with who I always thought hated me.
Uncomfortable eh.
Last week on the picket line I received a postcard from God. Being relatively new at my university I don’t know many people on the picket line, which is the number one reason to not rot away making bad chutney at home to go make some friends. People are nice, lots of dogs and cars toot their support.
Suddenly a really tall man comes bounding up to me and says ‘It’s you!!’ and I realise that this is P, who I have not seen since we were at primary school together. A few weeks before, out of the blue, he’d contacted me to say hello and that he was also a sociologist and working at the same university. I hadn’t had the heart to ask him if he was going to be on the picket line, it being a potentially hostile move, but turns out he’s the real deal. I say this without sarcasm but he is exactly the same as when we were kids in our little CofE primary school in a village with forty kids under ten bored out of our rural minds. My twin sister and I responsible for bringing about the introduction of a school uniform because we refused to stop wearing dressing up to school, something he’s apparently now got over. It is in this random way that the universe is returned to its benign and hopeful axis, a reminder that you never know who you will meet on a picket line and how much that will mean.
This is not a piece about bad unions. Almost without exception globally, if you have a union in your workplace you should join it but a huge generalisation now follows. For all of us, we can’t delegate building our relationships with other people or with ourselves, including the parts of ourselves that believe that other people are a waste of time.
Like many of the people I engage with in psychoanalytic, trade union and mental health networks we are tied together by knowing too much. It’s our survival of staring into the abyss that means you want us on your side when the growing minority becomes the majority staring blink-blink at what’s on the horizon. But in a context where there is often no obvious distinction between the good and the bad guys, our experiences of existential threat can mean we carry our trauma too closely such that our usually-useful vigilance disorientates. It is the survivalist in us who can throw us back into a position where other people appear to be a waste of time.
Solidarity is less an ideological construct and more an everyday practice, something that those of us with an intellectual persuasion often fail to understand. It is through our relationships that the real work is done and one of the advantages of actually practicing solidarity is that our relationships just get better. As a result of being forced through the redundancy mill I have some powerful, loving and genuine relationships with people I work with and deeper relationships with my family and friends. I feel more secure and cared for than before which is ironic given my actual vulnerability in the workplace. Taking action is harder than it looks, but it is also a beautiful thing.
Next week my book UberTherapy will be published by Bristol University Press and Surviving Work will focus on the debates about digital therapy.
You can send messages of support and affection to @leicesterUCU and support our Fighting Fund here. For those of you who have already contributed, you are the best.
Surviving Work has moved socially to @survivingwork.bsky.social @survivingwk
@UberTherapy.bsky.social @ubertherapies
UberTherapy: The Business of Mental Health October 2025 Bristol University Press. Pre-order here.