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FROM JOHANNESBURG TO LONDON: STUDENT-WORKER STRUGGLES FOR FAIR LABOUR PRACTICES ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES

ANALYSIS 08 / 11 / 2019

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In 2015 and 2016 students at South African universities campaigned

under the banner #FeesMustFall for the abolition of tuition fees.

It was widely reported that students were pushing for far-reaching

change: Twenty-five years after the end of apartheid rule they were

calling for the decolonisation of the country’s education system. 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. What were the trajectories of the

student-worker movements for insourcing of all workers at public

institutions of higher learning? What did they have in common with

similar campaigns that arose at the same time also at universities in

the United Kingdom? What are the common aims of these struggles,

and how successful have they been?

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. They called to action 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

HEIKE BECKER

06 / 12 / 2019

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established trade union federation, 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 rather dreary

picket lines 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 paper 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 for 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

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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, also is 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 strew

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 the

about 600 outsourced workers onto the staff “without facing

retrenchments and possible bankruptcy”.12

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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/ alumnae 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 144 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 144 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

Like 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 and solidarity student and academic protesters.”15

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, audiovisual workers, gardeners

and maintenance workers) are made direct employees of the

University of London on equal terms and conditions with other

directly employed staff.”16 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”.17

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

and professional association of academics and academic-related

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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.”18

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.19

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.”20

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”.21

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 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.22

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.”23

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 art 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”.24

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

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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.”25

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.”26

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).27 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, owed 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

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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 benefits 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 has just

won an important concession for university workers in London

although the boycott campaign has not yet been called off.28 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). She has just, with her third year students, completed

research on the September 2019 Global Climate Strike in Cape

Town.

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1Nkosi, Bongani; ‘”Abused” workers at their Wits’ end’; Mail & Guardian, 28 October 2011.2Nkosi, Bongani; ‘Wits workers prepare for more strikes’; Mail & Guardian, 31 May 2013.3Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 774Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 775Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 776Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 777Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 82.8Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 839Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 24.10Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 49.11Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 67.12Furlong, Ashleigh, ‘Insourcing at universities: uneven progress; GroundUp, 14 March 2017.13vernac.news.com 22 November 2018.14Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 201915https://iwgb.org.uk/page/hidden/why-support-the-boycott16https://iwgb.org.uk/en/boycottsenatehouse17Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.18Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.19Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019. 20Evans, Richard J. Eric Hobsbawm would not have backed University of London boycott, The Guardian, 11 February 2019.21Rawlinson, Kevin. Talk about Marxist historian under fire for breaching workers’ rights boycott, The Guardian, 7 February 2019.

22Flett, Keith. Richard Evans should have cancelled his book launch at Senate House, The Guardian, 13 February 2019.23Busby, Mattha. 2019. University of London faces boycott over treatment of staff; The Guardian, 26 May 2019.24Zeilig, Leo.‘”There are no foreigners here except the bosses”: Precarious workers strike back’, RS21, 26 May 2017, (https://rs21.org.uk/2017/05/26/there-are-no-foreigners-here-except-the- bosses/)25Zeilig, Leo. 2017. An Ounce of Practice. London: hoperoad; pp. 188-189.26Becker, Heike. From London to Harare: an activist yearning for an ounce of practice. The Conversation, 23 March 2017. (https://theconversation.com/from-london-to-harare-an-activist-yearning-for-an-ounce-of-practice-74857)27Habib, Adam. 2019. Rebels and Rage. Reflecting on #FeesMustFall. Johannesburg and Cape Town: Jonathan Ball Publishers; p. 89.28‘Major concession won – boycott continues until full victory’; email sent by Jordi Lopez to Boycott Senate House mailing list, 18 October 2019.

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