ON APRIL 9th Gemma Owen appeared in Swansea Crown Court accused of murdering a pensioner, John Williams, at his home in Pentrechwyth. A straightforward hearing—except that it had to be adjourned because the legal firm assigned to Ms Owen had been unable to find a barrister to defend her. It was one of the first cases to be affected by a criminal barristers’ strike that started on April 1st.

It is not only the barristers. University and college lecturers only recently suspended their own strike action, accepting a joint committee of experts to arbitrate with the government in a dispute over cuts to their pensions. In 2016 junior doctors went on strike for the first time in 40 years, and their grievances simmer on.

They have all been protesting against cuts to their compensation or conditions, and the more general deterioration of the services they work in as the government reins in spending. After slicing through public services and handouts for the poorest, austerity is now biting hard at the professional middle classes.

Take the criminal barristers, of whom there are about 4,000 in England and Wales. They are striking against a change to the fee structure used when they take on cases in which the client qualifies for legal aid. The government wants to pay barristers according to the complexity of a case, rather than the volume of material that they have to read. The Ministry of Justice (MOJ) argues that the change is cost-neutral. But Angela Rafferty, head of the Criminal Bar Association, argues that barristers doing work-intensive cases will lose out.

More to the point, though, the barristers are protesting against deep cuts to the justice system since the government’s austerity drive started in 2010. In 2016 the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee described a system “close to breaking-point”. Central government spending on criminal justice fell by 26% between 2010 and 2016. The MOJ has suffered more than most Whitehall departments, losing 34% of its budget during the same period, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. It has to find a further £600m ($835m) in savings by 2020. “This is not a fiery uprising,” says Ms Rafferty. “More an unprecedented feeling of we’ve had enough, of humiliation and shame in the system.”

In the case of the lecturers, the axe has fallen on their generous pensions, part of what academics argue is an “unofficial covenant” to compensate for their relatively modest pay. In 2011 their final-salary pension scheme was closed to new entrants. Since then, members have been asked repeatedly to pay in more. The last straw was a proposal to move everyone over to a defined-contribution scheme. According to the lecturers’ union, this could wipe £10,000 a year off the average academic’s pension.

John Ralfe, a pensions expert, argues that lecturers cannot feel too aggrieved at the proposed closure of their defined-benefit scheme, as these “have closed almost entirely in the private sector.” However, as with the barristers, the proposal comes on top of what lecturers see as a steady deterioration in their working conditions. There is particular anger at the “casualisation” of the profession, a trend common to other parts of the economy. Increasingly, academics find they can get only short-term contracts; lecturers have held protests against zero-hours contracts, to which workers in unskilled jobs have been subjected for years.

For now, the lecturers seem to have won. On April 13th university authorities agreed to talks, promising to maintain current levels of pension provision. The government also had to make a few concessions to the doctors to end their dispute. Tangling with the mobilised middle classes is a risky business.