Isla Campbell on picket lines, pay disputes, and the genuine cosmic irony of striking on the one day everyone actually wants to look at the sky
Staff at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich have voted to take strike action over pay and working conditions on the exact day of this month’s eclipse, and I have to say, as someone who has never once organised anything more ambitious than a group chat poll about dinner, I felt a very specific and unexpected swell of solidarity reading this.
Why The Timing Of This Particular Strike Felt Genuinely Poetic
Choosing the single day of the year when the entire city is desperately craning its neck skyward to withdraw your labour feels like exactly the kind of quietly devastating scheduling decision that only genuinely fed-up workers could pull off with a straight face.
What This Dispute Actually Reveals About Working Conditions At One Of London’s Most Beloved Institutions
That being a nationally treasured tourist landmark apparently does not automatically translate into being a nationally treasured employer, a gap between public affection and actual working conditions that feels depressingly familiar across half the institutions I love visiting in this city.
How I Actually Spent Eclipse Day Given The Circumstances
Watching from a nearby hill rather than crossing anything resembling a picket line, partly out of genuine solidarity and partly because I’ve developed an allergy to feeling like a tourist crossing someone else’s actual workplace dispute for a nice photo.
Whether I Think This Strike Will Actually Change Anything Long-Term For Observatory Staff
Genuinely hopeful, though cautiously so, given how these disputes tend to drag on considerably longer than a single, symbolically perfect strike day.
What This Whole Situation Reveals About How Easily We Forget That Beloved London Institutions Are Also Just Workplaces With Their Own Genuine Grievances
Mostly that it’s worth remembering the people actually running the place you’re queuing up to photograph, even on the one day of the year everyone’s looking somewhere else entirely. More London goings-on continue at bohiney.com.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com
