Do Students Need a ‘Union’?
Henry Hill studies Journalism in Manchester and is a Contributor at TSJ. He is the 8th ranked Conservative blogger in the UK.
Pretty much every university student must be at least passingly familiar with their student union. Although the quality of such establishments – and it is as establishments that they are most widely known on campus – varies enormously from place to place, let nobody think that I want to get rid of the student union in its familiar, homely on-campus sense.
But do students really need the other aspects of a union? I mean, they’re called trades unions for a reason, and the student-college relationship is fundamentally different to the employee-employer one.
The relationship between a business and its employees is that the business buys labour with wages. In this relationship the business is the consumer, not the worker – hence the term ‘labour market’. As I explained in my Young Writer on Liberty submission, trade unions parallel business cartels by seeking to restrict supply of a good (labour) in order to inflate prices (wages).
The student-college relationship differs from this in that it is the student, not the college, that is the consumer. We purchase a university education, including access to teachers, libraries and online material, from a university via our tuition fees. This would suggest that what students need is not a ‘union’ but a ‘Which?’-style consumer champion.
Is this distinction important? Or am I simply playing around with semantics?
During my time at the University of Manchester I got quite well-acquainted with the workings of the fairly large executive council of the student union. I found that these positions could be divided between the useful - those that focused on students’ relationship with the university, each other, oversaw events and societies or governed welfare – and the big-budget playthings of political poseurs.
On the one hand, it is certainly true that the work of the former – the welfare, student societies and academic-related offices – could be carried out as effectively under the auspices of a ‘union’ as anything else.
On the other, in my view many of the problems in the ‘student movement’ – another awful term – stem from the casting of student interests in the trades union mould. Student leaders fundamentally misinterpret the nature of student problems – and the solutions to those problems – by viewing the issue through the prism of labour relations rather than consumer relations.
For example, student political leaders often support lecturer strikes and other measures out of ‘solidarity’ when they are not in the interests of current students as consumers of education. A lecturer strike in defence of their pension could knock out a lot of a student’s teaching time on a particular module and cause them to fail an exam, severely harming their long-term prospects.
The relationship between students and professors puts them on different sides of the producer/consumer divide, and they have divergent interests. The fact that university professors have an employee/employer relationship with the university is totally irrelevant because students do not have a similar relationship with either. It is only the framing of student issues through an inappropriate parody of trades union activism that allows illusory parallels between the two to be drawn and acted upon.
As I argued in the Manchester student paper, the idea of a student ‘strike’ having any discernible impact on a university is absurd because students pay universities once a year and aren’t willing to get kicked out for non-payment. What then is the student equivalent of a withdrawal of labour?
A total waste of money, that’s what. A student on ‘strike’ is simply not using an educational product for which they’ve already paid.
If tuition fees have been as hard on students as claimed by their ‘representatives’, such wastage should surely be recognised as totally anathema to student interests. Yet it isn’t, because so hard-nosed a cost/benefit analysis doesn’t fit the image of students as oppressed workers. Which we’re not, no matter how many placards we wave to the contrary.