Further Education Manifesto 2024

In this manifesto we want to address the immediate and long-term challenges we face in the further education sector and how we will approach them.

If elected, our General Secretary candidate will:

Make securing binding national sectoral bargaining in every nation, the key priority.
Fight for a sector that makes and implements decent pay awards and national workload agreements in every college. No ifs, no buts.
Campaign for pay parity with school teachers.
Fight for an alternative vision for further, adult and prison education that enriches the whole person, rather than only aims for ’employability’.
Fight to restore ESOL Outreach and Adult Education.
Campaign to abolish Ofsted and punitive, stressful monitoring practices.
Defend victimised trade union reps to the hilt.
Give branches the support they need when they take action.
Ensure democratic decisions are implemented.
Ensure further, adult and prison education is given parity to higher education within our union.

This document was co-written by Saira Weiner (GS candidate) with Peter Evans (VP candidate) as well as Richard McEwan, Regine Piling and Safia Fillisi, who are standing for election for NEC.

Introduction

For many people, colleges are places where mainly working-class adults and young people come for a second chance at education and to transform themselves and their lives. 1.6 million students go to college in England every year. Further Education (FE) is a source of education, transformation, empowerment and community – as well as employment. Despite the vital role we play, we receive less funding per head than other sectors. Moreover, for staff in FE the daily challenges of providing education to teenagers, and adults returning to education, have intensified since the pandemic.

The market that has evolved since incorporation is a failed project. We need a new approach that values education as an intrinsic good and unleashes our creativity and that of our students. For many of us, the reclassification of FE as part of the public sector marks an opportunity to have a big discussion about where our sector is going.

For instance, the ideas contained in the National Education Service, proposed under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Labour Party, was greatly informed by UCU policy. In particular the FE Manifesto (2006) with the preface written by Paul Mackney, former NATFE General Secretary who became Joint General Secretary with Sally Hunt when NATFE merged with AUT to form UCU. Also Reconstructing further and adult education in a post-coronavirus world by Sean Vernell (UCU Left member, long standing NEC member) a developed analysis and proposals for how UCU should approach its campaigns and industrial strategy in FE and ACE. These documents outline this vision of lifelong education, from Cradle to Grave. UCU has been developing this vision since UCU was formed — resisting marketisation and fighting for this vision goes back to the founding of UCU, not something that has just emerged in the last few years, as some would like to claim in UCU.

But for UCU to translate those ideas, we will have to make a strategic change to our further education industrial strategy and fight for it. The fight for decent pay and conditions is intrinsic to that wider and far reaching change.

Here, we want to set out how we can collectively work to fundamentally change the sector. A cornerstone of the strategy is to restore our ability to campaign nationally and to secure national binding sectoral bargaining. One based on levelling up the pay and conditions for all who work in the sector and giving us a voice to be heard and seen.

A failed market

Since incorporation in 1993, FE has been the test-bed for marketisation and introducing competition into education. Incorporation severed Colleges from local authority control. This preceded Academisation in the school system, with similarly disastrous consequences for staff terms and conditions, democratic accountability and the quality of education.

FE receives less funding per head than other parts of the education system. It was the hardest-hit education sector during the post-bankers induced crisis and Austerity measures. This is perhaps unsurprising given that Tory Ministers do not send their children to study at their local college! Millions of adult education places have been lost in that period, because investing in people’s social development is not understood by those who have enjoyed a first-class education.

This is a direct consequence of the market philosophy that was structurally designed into incorporation. Colleges competing with one another for students, no controls over staff pay or that of senior managers, and successive government cuts. It was, and is, a race to the bottom. Colleges became undemocratic chiefdoms whose role has been reduced to skilling working class students on the cheap and, the unemployed for manual and low-paid white collar work. That is why successful ESOL Outreach programmes that taught migrants and refugees to speak English and join in the full life of their communities were replaced with ‘employability’ courses that focused on taking those that could speak some English to get ready for jobs that often didn’t exist!

It wasn’t always this way. People wanted to work in FE, rather than count down the days to the next half-term break. Prior to incorporation, colleges had living mission statements extolling their role to educate and empower the communities they served. Focusing on pedagogy rather than spreadsheets was the norm. We are losing something we need to reclaim — before it is lost for good.

The soul of FE

After more than ten years of austerity, staff pay has been cut by 35%. Workload has increased, with added attendance-chasing and monitoring, wasting the majority of our administration and preparation time. The needs of students have grown since the pandemic, educationally and in terms of mental health. It is a much harder job now.

There is a historic and acute crisis of recruitment and retention within the FE workforce, which has a median age of mid-to-late years of life. So this is as sharp a crisis in colleges as it is in schools, if not worse. FE staff, particularly younger staff, are leaving to work in schools because of a £9k average pay gap. We lost well in excess of 25,000 jobs during Austerity. The real figure is likely much higher.

Part of Saira’s candidacy as General Secretary is a campaign to restore FE. That means professional pay and conditions with decent training and career development. It means freedom from endless micromanagement and monitoring. An education that meets the needs of our communities and liberates us to deliver the education our communities want and need in the way that works for them. We need to reclaim the soul of FE. That would make FE an attractive place to work again.

A sector that celebrates equalities

Saira has written about her pledges on equalities, but here is further expansion in relation to FE.

Although there have been calls to decolonise the curriculum in FE, particularly from our students who are increasingly from black and minority ethnic backgrounds, employers have done very little. This needs to change. Moreover, staff who are black face more bullying and harassment within our colleges — this needs to be challenged.

Across the post-16 education sectors women face increasing burdens — thanks to poor parental leave policies, increasing workloads and astronomical childcare fees. In our colleges, women members increasingly say they cannot keep up with the ever increasing workloads and looking after their children — they feel forced into reducing their hours which then creates a real financial burden. We have single mothers on permanent contracts forced to claim Universal Credit to make ends meet. UCU needs a dynamic campaign that links the issues of workload and pay to these equalities issues.

The Department of Education sent threatening ‘guidance’ to schools and colleges that only mentioned Israel and none of the violence in Palestine. Employers have pushed this through by restricting support for Palestine on campuses and threatening staff with disciplinaries where they do. We need to support and defend every member who shows support for the Palestinians. Many students have also faced hostility from management, with the fear that they will be reported through PREVENT, as encouraged in the DofE guidance. UCU must campaign to ensure PREVENT is abolished.

The UK Government has issued draft guidance for schools and colleges on trans and non-binary young people in schools and FE colleges developing its ‘anti-woke’ narrative and deepening its culture war against the LGBT+ communities and ultimately showing a lack of respect for young people. Additionally, the government has refused to confirm legislation making conversion therapy illegal. UCU Left have consistently worked with the equality committees of UCU including the LGBT+ MSC to campaign against this trans and homophobic environment. We have moved resolutions at congress which the UCU parliamentary team can use when lobbying MP’s and other pressure groups. We must continue and deepen this work to support our LGBT+ staff and students.

UCU’s current FE industrial strategy is not coherent

UCU’s recruitment and organising agenda needs an explicit focus — securing national binding bargaining and building national strike action to win it. We can’t just ‘build capacity’ abstractly, and knock the reality of what is actually possible right now into the long grass.

When you clearly fight, and fight for something it is much easier to recruit members and reps. Otherwise what are people going to join a union for, why would they dedicate time to be reps?

Our industrial strategy is not working and we need to change our approach. This is in the context of the biggest upturn of strikes for decades where other unions, as well as our colleagues in Higher Education have shown it is possible to engage the majority of our members in national and impactful action. We can do that in FE too, and learn the lessons from those campaigns.

The incumbent General Secretary proposes we continue with the current approach of local campaigns, some may turn into local disputes and eventually we may build up to a bigger critical mass. But fundamentally those disputes are about securing local deals in a context where issues like pay and pensions are UK wide and national issues.

Only 60 out of some 250 College employers have made some form of pay award this year. Remember that this year, Colleges were told in the summer that somewhere in the region of £500m more funding would come down the line: this year, £185 million and next year, approximately £275 million.

The so-called ‘twin track’ approach, is a poor compromise between effective national action and a take it or leave it approach of local action.

This year 8 colleges took strike action, last year 30 and the year before 15. Out of 250 colleges in England. These are often the same core colleges. When they win deals, in quite isolated circumstances, they are not generalised to everyone else. We are not levelling up. Branches and members are being left behind.

And increasingly those branches that have struck will find it harder to do the same thing every year. We are creating islands that are fighting for pay, only to see that tested against a wider market pulling wages downward. The campaigns have not achieved the critical mass required to fundamentally address funding in the sector or secure new money to go to staff pay.

There is a limit to how much you can fight national issues locally. A local strike would most often be to address what is simply a local issue. Pay primarily comes from government funding and is a UK-wide issue at source. The employers have acted to facilitate pay restraint overall and at times have held back from releasing what they can genuinely afford.

Local coordinated strikes over pay were a necessity in the face of difficult trade union environment and rapidly declining pay in the sector. Something had to be done to get action back on the agenda and prevent a rot setting in. But we should not institutionalise that as desirable, or even the most effective strategy. We need to make FE a national force.

How we approach national bargaining

The current process for national bargaining in FE in England is that UCU puts in a claim once a year, usually on pay and workload. We may meet the employers federation, the Association of Colleges (AoC), once or twice a year. In recent years they have recommended to their subscribers to pay a below inflation cost of living pay award or no award. Then, in a ‘good year’, about a third of colleges pay it, a third some of it and a third nothing.

Those fights and wins are worth it and we are not suggesting to throw the baby out with the bath water — as some on the Further Education Committee have sometimes suggested. But we are not matching up to what is required or possible.

There is no binding requirement for any college to pay the award. Some colleges are not part of the AoC and may or may not make some award.

This is a ridiculous state of affairs. Other parts of the education system such as schools, sixth forms and universities have binding bargaining arrangements. Where every employer has to honour national agreements in every institution.

This year we added an explicit demand for the employers to work with us to break this cycle and to implement a binding arrangement so that every college would be compelled to honour the recommendation.

The employers responded by saying they would work with UCU to explore the implications of doing so. This is a small step, but it is not insignificant and marks a step change from when our calls for a binding sectoral bargaining were brushed aside.

We have not seized on this opportunity. That is despite a spring e-ballot showing 87% of members on a 51% turnout supported a national ballot. This showed that there was a real desire amongst the FE membership to fight for this.

However, faced with pressure from staff on pay and a recruitment crisis in the sector, the employers are looking for a way to to stop undercutting each other and fix pay rates. They hope this will stop workers shifting to better paid neighbours. It is a live conversation in the sector among HR managers — what to do about the pressure of cost of living when competition is not working.

Does UCU shape this pressure for a new approach in our image for our members, or will a new bargaining arrangement be imposed on the employers’ terms?

If we secured binding national bargaining this would mark a real shift and a basis to secure decent pay awards and workload agreements for all. That would positively impact our ability to project wider educational and reforming demands on the sector.

Conclusion

Therefore, when the incumbent General Secretary says we are doing well and this is the biggest FE campaign ever, we disagree.

The majority of our members’ pay is still declining. There are thousands of pounds difference in pay between colleges within the same city. Workload hardly featured in the campaign nor did the case for a binding national bargaining. We did not advance those issues in any serious way.

The strategy set out by the GS is to simply do more of the same to ‘build capacity’ and hope to accumulate more branches year on year. We have to acknowledge this approach is not delivering.

Had the NEU adopted this approach it is unlikely they would have made an impact, got a deal for all members, or secured the 6.5% that all their members were paid which most of ours were not. They won 6.5% because they took several days of national strike action.

We are proposing a different strategy and will work night and day to back you to make it a success.

It won’t be a walk in the park to win an aggregated ballot or real binding national bargaining. We believe it can be done. To truly change, FE will require all of us to participate. But we think that is worth fighting for. If you agree, vote for us and get involved in your union.

Authors

Saira Weiner, standing for General Secretary

Peter Evans, standing for Vice President

Peter is a member of the NEC, representing LGBT+ members, and serves as LGBT+ Committee Chair. He works at West London College as a lecturer in business where he is also Vice Chair of his UCU branch. He is active with the Labour left. If elected he will be UCU’s first gay/queer activist president.

Richard McEwan, standing for NEC, London & East FE seat

Richard teaches maths at New City College, where he is branch secretary of UCU NCC Poplar. He is a serving NEC member and Vice Chair of FEC. He is a regular at the London Regional Committee.

Regine Pilling, standing for NEC Women (FE) and NEC, London & East FE seat

Regi teaches Politics and Criminology at Westminster Kingsway College. She is Branch Secretary of WKC and London Regional Chair. She is currently on the NEC representing Women in FE, attends Women’s Standing Committee and is a member of UCU’s Climate and Ecological Emergency Committee.

Safia Flissi, standing for NEC Women (FE)

Safia is an ESOL Lecturer at South and City College Birmingham. She is currently Vice-Chair of her UCU branch and previously was Branch Secretary for 6 years. She is West Midlands Region Membership Secretary and has been the Regions’ FE chair.

20 January 202420 January 2024

UCU Elections: time to transform UCU

large demonstration outside King's Cross railway station with UCU banners

Saira Weiner is standing for UCU General Secretary - click to view her campaign website — Our candidate for General Secretary: **Saira Weiner**

Peter Evans is standing for Vice President (from FE) - click to view his campaign website — Our candidate for Vice President: **Peter Evans**

Post-16 education is in crisis. Successive Conservative governments have slashed funding and ramped up a process of marketisation and privatisation across the sectors. That’s why UCU members have been at the forefront of resistance and on the picket lines across Higher and Further Education.

Even with a likely Labour victory at the next general election, we believe that Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won’t reverse this trend and rebuild education without massive pressure. This means we urgently need to develop a political and industrial strategy that can defend post-16 education and make real gains for all our members.

As an education union, we must deal with industrial matters but also we are the champions of education. We must deal with the wider political issues that face our members, students and wider society. We have just seen tens of thousands of HE members go through a bruising dispute for the ‘Four Fights’ (pay, workload, equalities and casualisation) including extensive strike action and a Marking & Assessment Boycott.

But despite the bravery and commitment of our members in the face of intransigent employers and punitive pay deductions, the stop-start strategy and outright opposition to democratically made decisions by our present General Secretary meant we failed to breakthrough.

The fantastic victory achieved on USS pensions was achieved off the back of extensive strike action, in the face of the General Secretary’s argument that it wasn’t the right time to fight.

In FE despite historic votes for action the chance to build a serious fight over both pay and national bargaining was squandered yet again by the GS’s supporters who remain convinced that national action is impossible and at best local deals can be achieved.

We’ve seen a wave of redundancies in the wake of the HE dispute. At Brighton University, UCU members engaged in the longest ever strike in UK HE history (129 days) in defence of jobs. This was a dispute of national significance but the branch received inadequate support from the national union machinery. This can’t continue – UCU must implement a serious national strategy to win UK-wide disputes and must support every branch.

But at present UCU’s national initiatives lack a clear strategy or clear leadership. This is why we believe it is important to stand candidates who offer a real alternative, not just more of the same.

UCU Left supporters are standing in the National Executive (NEC), Vice President – FE (VP) and General Secretary elections to ensure there is a root and branch change to how UCU operates. Our candidates are dedicated members with proven track records in their branches. Many have played a leading role in building national resistance and have led local disputes in defence of jobs and conditions.

We need a union where rank and file members have a voice and lead their own disputes through democratically elected strike committees, Branch Delegate Meetings (BDM’s) and the decisions of Congress.

We have been through a transformative experience over the last year – we need to transform UCU.

Saira says

“I’m a member of a post 92 University and standing for General Secretary. The victory over USS Pensions shows that a serious industrial strategy can win for all sectors, including post 92 Universities, FE, Prisons and Adult Education. Our members have repeatedly called for UK wide action to defend and extend our terms & conditions, and to fight for the future of education. We need to be bold. We need to transform UCU so that grassroots member’s control our union and disputes – our democracy must be strengthened. I will ensure this happens. ”

Peter says

“I’m currently the NEC rep for LGBT+ members (FE) and Chair of the LGBT+ national standing committee. I’m a lecturer in Business at West London College where I am UCU Vice Chair. I’m in the Labour Party, and an activist within the Labour left. If elected I plan to bring UCU back to local membership with rank-and-file organising, building elected strike committees and implementing Congress decisions. We need more democracy in order to address the challenges we face. ”

Vote #1 Saira Weiner for UCU General Secretary

I am an experienced activist at branch, regional and national levels. UCU needs to be transformed by democracy and solidarity in action, so I will focus on delivering:

Democracy for a real member led union

We urgently need a democratic transformation in UCU, where members taking collective action are in control of their disputes. To ensure this, strike committees should be used to ensure members’ views are heard, and actions are coordinated. Union democracy requires well-organised branches meeting regularly, debating questions and motions before voting on them. Collective debates are essential because we need collective solutions. Moreover, when decisions are made through our democratic structures, it is the role of union officials to carry them out.

A strategy to build solidarity

Our union’s strength hinges on our ability to defend members. Therefore, we need a strategy based on militancy to build membership solidarity and action. While negotiations play a vital role, we must be prepared to take action when necessary. We won’t win unless we fight, and we need to mobilise members fully with the backing of the whole union to win.

In HE, post-92s are under attack due to hikes in TPS employer contributions. We need to restart our national dispute and put pressure on the government to Pay Up For Post-92. In FE unmanageable workloads and the lack of national binding bargaining is breaking the sector and leaving branches to fight alone – we need a national strategy to win back national collective bargaining. In ACE we need a serious campaign that reverses the government’s funding cuts and ensures a national lifelong learning strategy. And in Prisons we must ensure Health & Safety is taken seriously and ensure smaller class sizes. Across all our sectors we need to fight against casualisation that erodes members’ conditions.

Liberation for all

I will campaign to ensure every member is able to play their part and flourish in our union and in our workplaces.

We face an incredibly right wing government that systematically scapegoats vulnerable groups for their own failures. Their racist policies towards migrants and refugees have targeted our students and staff. I will defend the rights of our colleagues and their family members to stay in the UK by opposing racist immigration controls and demanding practical financial support for visa fees.

We are witnessing a horrendous war in Palestine. Our members are facing harassment for speaking out against the atrocities – we have to stand up for free speech and oppose any witch hunting of our staff and students. We must stand firm against all forms of racism, including antisemitism, and show support and solidarity with the most downtrodden in society – racism within the wider working class is a recipe for ruin.

UCU must continue its work to oppose homophobia and transphobia. We must protect the concepts of freedom of speech from those who seek to distort it.

Our workforce is structurally segregated – women; members racialised as black and our disabled members are concentrated in precarious roles or in positions with little opportunity for advancement.

We need to turbo charge the Gender, Race and Disability Pay Gaps ‘Four Fights’ campaign and we need an anti-casualisation campaign in FE and ACE that campaigns to ‘level up’ and liberate everyone treated as second-class citizens in our institutions.

Climate injustice and inaction threatens our lives, livelihoods and our working conditions. In UCU we joined the student climate strikes, XR protests and campaigns against new oil and gas. We need more of this and should support and build a climate movement that mobilises the huge demonstrations we need alongside the direct action to prevent new carbon intensive projects.

Solidarity as a central tenet of our union

No one changes the world by themselves, but when tens of thousands of us join together we can begin to make a difference. As UCU members, we show solidarity with students and other workers – we are not just fighting for ourselves but the future of education and research.

We gain confidence from each other. FE members were inspired by HE members, and lifted by the teachers’ strikes. I will encourage a culture of solidarity throughout our union. When members face redundancies in one department or college, we need to rally around to ensure they win.

I will fight back against the anti-strike laws that are under the guise of so-called “Minimum Service Levels”. We should back our members if they break these unjust laws. As GS I will work with other unions to campaign against these attacks on trade union rights and to deliver hard-hitting coordinated strikes to push back the Government’s offensive.

Getting results for our members

We are an incredibly strong group of workers, and we need to inject some confidence into our union organising.

Our love of education and determination to help individuals, keeps our students in our courses. We need to channel the same passion in our industrial and equalities strategies to ensure we gain results.

We need to strengthen branches, officers, committees and reps, and develop regions to help coordinate between them, share ideas and take initiatives.

We need the National Executive of our union to play its part in acting as a tribune of branches, holding the General Secretary to account and ensuring policy is enacted.

If elected, I commit to take home the average UCU members wage – not the £110k+ that is offered.

Read Saira’s full manifesto

Testimonials for Saira Weiner

“My vote for General Secretary will go to Saira Weiner. Saira is not only a fierce defender of a true member-lead union, but also a leader able to achieve synthesis, successfully manage challenging circumstances, balance different views and work effectively with lay reps and staff, as she has demonstrated as the Chair of ROCC, Chair/Vice Chair of North West Region and previously Chair of the Women’s Standing Committee.

With extensive branch leadership experience, Saira knows first hand the challenges activists and members face. Working at a post- 92 institution, she has experienced the results of the marketisation of education and barriers they create for academic and academic related post-16 education staff. She has been working closely with members across the HE, FE, ACE and Prison education, both through regional work as well as through NEC, to support strategies and tactics which will allow for pay and conditions to improve. Saira will conduct her role with fairness and inclusivity, and will be committed to accountability, democracy and militancy.

It is an honour to call Saira a friend, and to be able to vote for her in these elections.

Do use your vote, do support UCU Left candidates! ”

Maria Chondrogianni
UCU Vice President (University of Westminster, HE)

“I support Saira Weiner for UCU General Secretary as she is someone who stands up for what she believes in and wants to improve education for all.

In FE, we need a GS who will think about a strategy that can win for all of our members rather than an atomised campaign with branches left fighting to improve conditions by themselves. This approach sows the idea that it’s not possible to fight back nationally – it is, and Saira is clear that the national union can provide support and confidence for all members. ”

Carly Grundle
UCU Branch Treasurer, Westminster Kingsway College (FE)

“I’m backing Saira Weiner for UCU GS. We need a GS who understands that the scale of the crisis facing HE means that unless our union mounts a strong united fight, we will not only continuously suffer pay erosion, but we’ll see the fracturing of national bargaining and the destruction of our terms and conditions.

We need a GS who respects the decisions of the unions democratic bodies and implements them swiftly and fully, rather than imposing her own ideas instead. We need a GS who understands that a strong ballot result is just the first step and that winning a dispute requires empowering members to take the level of industrial action necessary to shift intransigent management.

Saira Weiner will do this. She believes that a union is its members and that a GS must be answerable to them. ”

Mark Abel
UCU Branch Chair, University of Brighton

Read more endorsements for Saira on her campaign website

What happened to the ‘national’ FE dispute?

Last week saw UCU members in FE on strike over pay, workload and national binding bargaining (i.e. a pay rise that is paid to every branch). The strikes were well supported with large, vibrant pickets – many members were out for the first time. Billed as a national ‘Respect FE’ campaign members were initially excited to be on the offensive, but the campaign failed to provide this national fightback. What happened?

In March, an aggregated consultative ballot led to a historic result – a 51% turnout with a resounding 87% YES vote for national action. Members were angry. Pay, in real terms, has declined 35% since 2009, staff are increasingly ground down by unmanageable workloads and micro-management. A quarter of teachers leave within their first year, and two thirds of current staff would leave the sector if they could. FE is in crisis and a fightback is more urgent than ever.

For the first time since incorporation in 1993, when colleges severed their links from local government and became individual entities, the threat of national action brought the possibility of regaining national binding bargaining. In the national pay talks in June, the Association of Colleges (the body that represents the FE employers) agreed to ‘exploratory’ talks.

However, this opportunity was squandered. In March nearly 150 branches were balloted, by the statutory ballot in late August only 88 branches were. This ballot was held at a time when FE staff are incredibly busy with the start of term and enrolling students. 13 branches were pulled out during the ballot as they reached below inflation pay deals. By the end of the ballot period, only 32 branches beat the anti-trade union 50% threshold. The national leverage UCU had, was gone.

So how did this ‘national’ campaign start to fall apart?

According to the General Secretary Jo Grady and her team it was for three main reasons. First, the AoC recommendation of 6.5% in September was timed to undermine the vote. Second, that pay was the most important issue for members and that national binding bargaining wasn’t resonating with them. Third, that branches were not ready for strike action. We do not agree with that assessment and instead argue it was due to a lack of leadership and a flawed understanding of how to build a successful national campaign.

At the Respect FE Rally held on the first day of strike action (where no striking worker was on the platform of 7 speakers) the GS argued we needed to win 100% of our members to the arguments and that’s where we now needed to focus our attention. However, rarely is a strike supported by 100% – it only requires a majority of members. Action taken by some can then provide confidence to others.

Moreover, despite publicly supporting the national campaign, almost half of the Further Education Committee didn’t even participate in the ballot. In some of these branches, they had beat the 50% threshold, but still they settled for local deals well below inflation without firing a shot. This sent a clear message that the priority was local branch deals rather than fighting to level up the whole sector and make sure no branch was left behind.

Before the consultative ballot and throughout this campaign, there has been a call by some within the national FE leadership and within some branches to maintain and respect local branch autonomy. They argue that the national union can’t “tell branches what to do.” Of course, the national union can never tell members that they have to strike – but they can provide leadership and solidarity that can give branches the confidence to take action and fight for better deals. We would question, what do they want autonomy from? Do they want autonomy from the national union? If so, it begs the question – why are they in a national union at all? A basic principle of trade unionism is our collective national strength. We are much weaker when we fight on a branch by branch basis. The majority of colleges will not even implement the AoC recommendation leaving the majority of our members with a cost of living pay rise. As a union our power lies with our ability to take national action.

It is not surprising that the AoC outmanoeuvred UCU with their pay offer. The national office made little reference to workloads, an issue that is leading many to leave the sector. And they did even less to raise and popularise the idea of a national binding bargaining. Many members still ask what this is despite the 9-month campaign.

The GS openly stated it had been difficult to popularise national binding bargaining as it wasn’t “sexy”. Well, most things in FE trade unionism aren’t “sexy”! But what are members calling for? Not to be left behind school teachers pay deals, which are based on national binding bargaining. Not to be struggling to pay their bills and struggle to have a good standard of living. Not to be working 12+ hours for free due to gruelling workloads.

We need a radical change in UCU’s national industrial strategy within FE. Otherwise, the sector will continue to be left behind and divided with members left alone fighting their individual employers.

Regi Pilling (FE Women’s Rep NEC & UCU Branch Secretary at Westminster Kingsway College)
Alyson James (UCU Branch Chair at Westminster Kingsway College)
Outcheuma Ezekiel (UCU Branch Rep at City and Islington College)

6 November 20236 November 2023

What went wrong with the UCU Rising Campaign?

lobby of UCU HQ in 2018, with 'no capitulation' placards

How the UCU reballot over pay and conditions missed the threshold

The turnout in the reballot, at 42.59%, will be a huge disappointment for every union member who wanted to see a fight over pay and conditions. But a 68.32% vote for strike action, and a 75.57% vote for action short of a strike, shows that tens of thousands of members still wanted to fight.

This is not the end of the campaign. But our union has some hard questions to ask itself.

Did the UCU campaign run out of steam, or did the UCU leadership undermine it? Was there a fundamental problem with UCU’s industrial strategy, or was the strategy that was agreed undermined by inaction and compromising in HQ?

Every success has a thousand parents. But every failure is an orphan.

Let us get one thing straight. Members are not to blame, nor are branch reps. Some may be ‘tired’, but very many are angry and extremely fed up – mainly at the lack of adequate support and the inconsistent leadership from the top of the union.

Many of the members who fought the employers over the USS pension scheme and won are the same members who saw their fight over pay, casualisation, workload and pay gaps frittered away by our union leadership.

We know that the employers can pay staff more – but they don’t want to. On average, universities underspend by about 4% of the pay bill each year. Since 2009, the employers have taken a strategic decision to spend less on staff pay in order to build up surpluses and invest in buildings in their competition to recruit ever more students in the Government’s Tuition Fee Market.

On top of this, from December every pre-92 employer is going to receive a windfall amounting to around 5% of the total pay bill thanks to the fall in USS contributions (won by our members taking weeks of strike action). It’s Christmas all year round for pre-92 Vice Chancellors.

We must not let the post-92 institutions and their leaders off the hook either. Despite additional pressures on recruitment that some post-92s have seen, and the ideological attack on Arts and Humanities from the Conservative Government, many of our post-1992 universities are in good financial shape. There is no justification for the squeeze on pay across the sector. Where the tiny minority of universities plead poverty, why don’t they cut pay and spending on Senior Managers, not on ordinary staff? Why aren’t they vigorously challenging ideological attacks on our subject areas and questioning the broken HE funding model?

Had we won the ballot we could have demanded our share as a national union. Now it looks like we are going to have to put demands on our employers locally. But that risks undermining national pay bargaining. We also have to rebuild the campaign for a new ballot. We have to understand what went wrong to come back stronger for the next round.

The problem is that the resolve that got the fight over the line over USS has not been applied by our union leadership over pay and the other three fights.

The USS campaign won in spite of a wobbling UCU leadership for three connected reasons. First, the 2018 strike which broke the employers’ plan to drive through DC won because it overturned General Secretary Sally Hunt’s plan to fudge a deal. Second, members kept up the fight, with the joint strike action earlier this year keeping the pressure on. This was particularly crucial after the disaster of April 2022, when the leadership organised token strikes (including Reading Week strikes) before the crunch point, and then abruptly called no further action. Third, the political campaign over the valuation (#NoDetriment) coupled with the changes in the financial position of the USS valuation projections due to rising interest rates made it possible to box in the employers and gain an historic victory.

So the problem is not ‘the strategy’, whatever armchair generals might say. The strategy debated at (Special) HE Sector Conferences and the Higher Education Committee has been undermined multiple times. We are facing a bunch of employers highly incentivised to wait out short bursts of action, so if an agreed strategy is not implemented by the leadership, they gain confidence and decline to negotiate. We need to make good on the promises made by the GS in 2022 – to shut down university campuses until we are satisfied we have won, instead of tinkering around the edges with time-bounded action.

Throughout the entire Four Fights campaign this year, members’ determination and organisation was unfortunately not matched by the same resolve at the top. Instead, the General Secretary repeatedly waved the white flag, from ‘the pause’ to foot-dragging over putting strikes back on, repeated e-polls and ballots. The result for ordinary members was confusing. It felt like we were being turned on and off like a tap, with last-minute announcements and late-notice “briefings” – including briefings labelled as Branch Delegate Meetings after reps arrived at them.

The pause was bad enough. The ACAS negotiations went nowhere slowly (yielding a no-strike Terms of Reference for prolonged negotiations, and an offer on the three fights worse than 2019-20), but allowed the employers to harden their position around their ‘final offer’ on pay, while undermining membership control of the strikes. It took members and branches to challenge the repeated consultations and e-polls just to keep the action on. A clearer signal to the employers that the union was divided could not really be imagined.

The silence of the leadership during the summer Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) was deafening. Remember that it was the General Secretary’s strategy to delay the MAB until the summer – or at least this is what we were told when indefinite strikes from February were opposed! But there was no planning from the centre, no adequate support and no strategy from the top on how to use the MAB to win a deal.

Questions from branches were batted back to local officers and reps with minimal answers from HQ, and branches had to fight to persuade the union they should and could take strike action to defend members against punitive MAB deductions. Branches had to lobby for an increase in strike pay, instead of there being an open appeal to build up a war chest across the union for MABbing members in advance.

Ordinary members were absolute heroes. Many bravely took the difficult decision to take part in the Marking and Assessment Boycott, face down threats of massive pay deductions, have difficult discussions with colleagues and managers, and organise locally to keep going. Others felt massively conflicted but did not take part themselves, some giving hundreds of pounds in donations to support colleagues. All of this participation and solidarity was organised in staff rooms and Zoom and Teams meetings, in departments and between colleges. Unofficial ‘rank and file’ organisation, branches, regions and the Solidarity Movement sustained the MAB while there was near silence from the official union structures.

Thus it was that there was no official Branch Delegate Meeting from the start of the MAB in May until the HEC in August when the General Secretary and the HEC majority planned to call it off. The General Secretary’s supporters on the HEC pushed for a fruitless negotiation with UCEA over reducing the pay deductions, but not over the claim (to her credit, the GS attempted to put pay back on the table). And the summer reballot never happened, leaving members out on a limb.

When the August Branch Delegate Meeting voted for winding down the MAB in the absence of a reballot, and called for strikes at the start of the Autumn Term, it was clear that the ability to apply direct industrial leverage was diminishing. Not surprisingly, given the opportunity, some branches voted to call off the strikes when given the opportunity.

UCU members, reps and activists have been busy building the reballot over the last month. We have had numerous conversations and debates with members. Many members tell us that they are fed up. Some said they won’t vote because of their anger at the leadership. Again and again, the message is the same: we trust our local branch reps, but we don’t trust ‘the leadership’.

Not all branches did miss the threshold, with some reaching 60% by their own count. However, it is clear that there is a great deal of frustration even in those branches at being let down by forces external to the branch. There is a feeling of having policy foisted on them and, worse, that those policies were inconsistent.

Some of that righteous anger is directed at the Left – why did we allow the GS and the union’s HEC majority to undermine the action? The fact is that we tried to stop them! But a small shift in the composition of the HEC following Congress towards the GS-supporting ‘Commons’ and ‘IBL’ factions allowed crucial HEC votes to go the way the GS wanted, including over the negotiation approach and the failure to implement the summer reballot.

This is an unnecessary defeat for our union. In the context of a win over USS, it risks dividing us. We should all beware the argument that ‘members don’t care about pay, equality, workloads or casualisation’. That is clearly wrong – members in pre- and post-92 institutions have just taken part in a massive MAB to try to move the employers over precisely these demands!

Indeed, one of the lessons of this action has been that the employers are prepared to wait out hard-hitting industrial action by the union, particularly if the union appears divided at the top, wherever they think an end-date is in sight, be that the end of a bout of strikes, or the end of a mandate for action. But we also know that some VCs were ready to settle, but UCU’s management of the MAB at the top failed to capitalise on the splits.

Their wait-and see approach was not cost-free for the university employers. The action exposed Vice Chancellors’ priorities starkly. Academic standards could go in the bin. Student complaints might be addressed by warm words, fake degree awards and an occasional bribe – but no reimbursement of tuition fees. The administrative chaos in some institutions at the implementation of the disproportionate and unfair MAB deductions exposed the inability of VCs to prepare. A better-prepared UCU could get universities and professional bodies to commit to academic standards from the start. The inconsistency of deductions across the sector show that employers are not as united as UCEA would have us believe.

The 2022-2023 academic year will go down as the most disrupted in history, with students missing weeks of lectures and many not receiving their results until September or October. If you think like a Vice Chancellor, and view Higher Education as a commodity, this has been a terrible year. It should be no surprise that overseas student recruitment has been negatively affected, alongside a drop in home students who now face 40-year loans thanks to the Conservative Government imposing them on the new intake.

UCU members inflicted a major blow on our Vice Chancellors, and given them a year they will not forget in a hurry. They know that they cannot afford for this to happen again.

The question is, what UCU leadership can deliver the victory that members so dearly deserve? How can we learn the right lessons, understand the weaknesses on the employers’ side and ensure we come back stronger and more effective than ever in the near future?

UCU needs a different kind of leadership. We need to ensure every level of our elected officers and representatives believe our members have the power to change the future of Higher Education for the better — and other sectors too.

We need a GS, Presidential team, and NEC that are committed to democracy through our sovereign structures, to implemented policy efficiently, and to deliver the win our members sorely need on pay and conditions. This is what our UCU Left candidates will do.

— Saira Weiner, LJMU

25 September 202325 September 2023

Keep up the strikes!

Our Union, our Disputes, our Sector in Danger

Solidarity is the way to rebuild
Build the reballot
We need to debate the action we need to win

Our Higher Education strikes this week are essential for the future of our union. Every single striker, every day of strike, every protest and every demonstration matters. We need to do our best to ensure that our actions are coordinated and open to everyone.

Activists want to fight. In non-striking branches many members voted to keep up the action. We need to link together (or ‘twin’) non-striking and striking branches. We can build solidarity by fundraising, by delegations visiting picket lines, and by inviting speakers into branch and section meetings.

Solidarity is essential. You would not know this from UCU’s website, but members in some branches, notably Brighton, Queen Mary, Manchester and Liverpool Universities, are suffering from huge deductions from pay. The whole union must rally around those branches. We need to flood the hardest-hit branches with donations (see links above).

Turn our anger into action

The employers are rejoicing at the self-inflicted and unnecessary retreat in the JNCHES dispute led by the General Secretary and her acolytes in the union’s Higher Education Committee (HEC).

What kind of union calls action and then asks branches whether they would like to opt out on the eve of the strike, indeed, when many Scottish universities were already out the door? Whether you were in favour of the strike last week or not, the retreat has done more damage to the union than had we attempted to hold the line and seen members fail to observe it. Unions are nothing without collective action.

UCEA could not believe their luck when the officials incorrectly withdrew strike action notices from Newcastle and London South Bank Universities despite their branches deciding not to opt out. This error flows from the thwarting of member democracy by the leadership of our union, of which #OptOutGate is just the latest example.

But the stakes are too high to allow justified anger at our union leadership to undermine our action. We have to build the action, to show that ordinary members will continue the fight however much our union leaders falter and fail. We need to use the strike wave to build solidarity for members in branches hardest hit by deductions. And we need to carry that fighting spirit into the reballot campaign.

Right now, visibility matters. We need to organise the largest pickets on campus we can, and call on branches that are not on strike to offer both political and practical solidarity. Regional demonstrations and protests, such as Thursday’s protest outside UCEA’s HQ in Central London, are crucial in bolstering members’ confidence.

Inflation has not miraculously evaporated. We have had 11.7% of the value of our pay wiped out in the last two years (August 2021 to 2023, against RPI). Over this period we have lost pay at a rate nearly three times faster than the previous twelve years (August 2009 to 2021), when pay fell by 25%.

Casualisation continues to divide our members by hierarchies of precarity. Had we won this summer, new lecturers and teaching assistants could be starting the term with proper contracts right now. We could be looking at a negotiated settlement with workload and pay gaps treated as a serious sector-wide issue.

We can’t afford to wait. Our members are struggling to pay the bills right now, and we need to fight back.

Meanwhile employers in pre-92 universities are looking greedily at the USS pension scheme to see how they might profit from a union on the back foot.

We have to win the reballot, because the alternative is to invite defeat. In the process we must debate the kind of strategy needed to win.

The employers’ annus horribilis

We need to wipe the fake smiles from VCs’ faces.

The employers have had a terrible year. Our UK-wide strikes took out weeks of teaching. Our UK-wide marking boycott prevented thousands of students graduating and progressing. Meanwhile, tuition fees are frozen while inflation rages. And there was nothing the employers could do.

That is why VC Senior Management Teams have been so brutal in their approach to pay deductions. Some have climbed down, either entirely, to a lower cap or to various methods of self-declaring hours. But others, including Queen Mary and Manchester, are clearly out to make an example of staff.

Nonetheless in all of the chaos right now, we must take stock of what we have actually achieved. We have driven a coach and horses through the Government and VC’s HE market system. To work around the MAB, Vice Chancellors were forced to bypass long-established academic standards and quality control.

Not only was this decision contrary to the statutory Office for Students’ requirements for universities’ Degree Awarding Powers, it is incredibly damaging for UK HE Plc. Vice Chancellors have publicly trashed “the brand” of UK Higher Education in a way not seen since Gerald Ratner memorably described his stores’ products as “crap”.

They are dependent on MABbing staff for our expertise to reinstate this quality control as we mark. And VCs cannot afford for us to do this again.

We know our sacrifices last year did not break the employers. The unfortunate truth is that the militancy and heroism shown by ordinary members was not reflected by a similar resolve in our union leadership. The employers successfully gambled on the hesitations and mistakes of our General Secretary and her supporters on the HEC.

What went wrong?

Every member now cites the failure of the union’s HEC to implement a summer reballot. But that failure was not inevitable: it was the consequence of a sequence of decisions of the HEC, advised by officials reporting to the General Secretary. Since Congress, a small majority of the HEC is held by members of the ‘IBL’ and ‘Commons’ factions.

Branch reps voted at the May Sector Conference for a summer reballot, commencing as soon as possible. This could have been done promptly had the will been there. There was no such delay or controversy for the spring reballot. Why the dithering about the summer one, when members would inevitably be carrying the MAB and the employers would be weighing up the risks of waiting us out?

In fact, procedurally, the process was straightforward. The formal decision lies in the hands of HE officers, and HEC is obliged to implement Sector Conference policy. The one decision that might have been passed to HEC (the precise framing of the ballot) was not a matter of principle requiring a debate at a meeting a month later. In short, had the General Secretary and her supporters not blocked it, the summer reballot could have been set in train soon after Congress at the end of May. Even with as much as six weeks’ preparation and process delay, ballot papers could have been arriving in members’ homes and pigeon holes by mid July.

Even if a decision were delayed until the HEC meeting on 30 June, there was no ground for not treating the implementation of the Sector Conference motion as a formality. Instead the General Secretary insisted that HEC also consider her proposal for a November ballot as if it could be treated as an alternative to implementing the Sector Conference decision. (Deliberately not implementing a Sector Conference decision is against Rule 18.1 of the union’s rulebook.) And then her supporters carried a motion about national negotiations over deductions, filibustered, and the meeting ran out of time.

What last week revealed about what might have been

Last week’s HEC meeting showed two things.

First, HEC meetings can be called very quickly – in 24 hours if required.

Second, there seems to be no legal barrier to stop strike action being called and then stood down branch by branch.

Yet it was unspecific ‘legal advice’ that was used to block the implementation of motion HE5 at April’s Special Sector Conference which called for strike action against pay deductions being called and potentially stood down according to each employer’s response. Friday’s mistakes aside, ‘legal objections’ were not the real impediment to implementing a more militant united and protective approach to the MAB. We could have boxed in the employers from the start, and forced them to concede much more quickly or escalate our action.

We could have brought the dispute to a head and forced negotiations on the national claim.

The point of this review is not to recriminate about the errors of the General Secretary and her supporters. It is to remind ourselves that there was an alternative strategy, one that was agreed by the Sector Conference of our union. This was a strategy which would have united members and could have won the dispute.

Democracy, indefinite action and the alternative strategy

So-called ‘indefinite’ action sounds frightening. But we have just had two years in which very many members took a particular form of UK-wide indefinite action – a marking boycott with no end date.

If we compare what happened in the summers of 2022 and 2023, one fact jumps out.

In 2022-23, branches ran their own MAB campaigns. They were compelled to negotiate locally, but that gave them control over their own dispute. The outcome was overwhelmingly positive, with a series of local wins, branches strengthened, and only Queen Mary management imposing deductions for MAB participation.
But in 2023-24, branches were left to soldier on with no real say in the dispute. The Special Sector Conference had voted for fortnightly BDMs or (ideally, a national strike committee) to run the MAB. But this was not implemented. The General Secretary and her supporters on the HEC did not want to give up control.

Branches could not negotiate their way out of the MAB individually, but at the same time they had no say over the national dispute. When national negotiators were directed to go and negotiate return of deductions rather than press forward on the national claim there was uproar.

Democratic rank and file control is not an optional extra! That is why regular Branch Delegate Meetings empowered to direct the dispute were a crucial component of the strategy (see motion HE5 above).

Whether we are discussing indefinite strikes like in Brighton, or an indefinite marking boycott, ‘indefinite’ simply means that the members stay out until they win. For this type of action to work, members have to be in control.

Members have to decide what a ‘win’ looks like – not the HEC or the General Secretary.

Where next?

It is unsurprising that right now very many members feel angry about the way the dispute has been conducted. The main part of that anger is the growing realisation that the so-called leadership, the GS and the majority of the HEC, simply failed to lead.

The MAB applied huge leverage and pressure to the employers, but the failure to trigger the reballot meant the employers could decide to wait us out.

But there was an alternative strategy, based first and foremost on member-led, branch democracy being put in control of the key decisions of the dispute.

Strong branches know they can take action and often beat their employer. But that is because the branch is in control of the dispute. Our union structures don’t allow us to apply that logic of branch control to national disputes. As the scale of our action has increased, and as we take indefinite forms of action, the question of democracy becomes inescapable.

The dispute last year was dominated by top-down interference in both the action and the negotiation process. Instead of these interventions demonstrating the General Secretary’s superior competence, they exposed her failings, and presented the union as unnecessarily divided in front of the employers.

We need to win the reballot. But at the same time we cannot continue like this.

We need democratic renewal, starting in branches.

It is our union. It is time to take it back.

6 September 20236 September 2023

The MAB is ending, but the fight goes on

Lobby of UCEA employers during 30 November national demonstration.

The results of the e-ballot over the continuation of the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) will be a surprise to many. Although overall 60% of members voted to end the MAB early (on a 27% turnout), HEC members were told that 62.7% of members who said they were participating in the MAB voted to keep it on!

These results raise big questions of leadership, democracy and the kind of union we need.

Members are frustrated, but they are not waving the white flag. We all know the stakes are high. Whether it is over pay or pensions, the employers are highly motivated to hold out against industrial action. Vice Chancellors plead poverty for staff while boasting about how they deserve more. The proportion of income allocated to ‘staff costs’ (pay and pensions) is falling to its lowest ever level. And pre-92 VCs are already salivating over what they might do with the unexpected windfall from the USS surplus, and pushing for the lowest contribution rates.

This result shows the resilience and determination of ordinary members who are still standing up to threats of massive pay deductions.

As a result of the survey, the MAB will be called off. But it didn’t have to turn out this way.

The MAB has demonstrated the power of members. UCU members have courageously implemented the MAB and have made it hurt the employers at many institutions. Students have been heroically supportive. They know that our fight is their fight. The government was rattled enough to publicly intervene in the dispute.

But sadly Jo Grady, the General Secretary, and the HEC majority who follow her, have failed to match the commitment of our members.

Branches have been left to fight alone to deal with punitive deductions of up to 100% over long periods. The complete separation of strike action and the MAB has meant the power of the MAB was reduced, with strike action against deductions localised and turned into an ‘opt-in’ process. Eventually the cap on claims on the national Fighting Fund was relaxed, but only gradually.

But probably the biggest problem has been the deliberate refusal to re-ballot members over the summer. Both employers and union members knew that the ability to continue the MAB into the autumn, and threaten employers making punitive deductions with prolonged strikes into the new term, was lost. This encouraged the employers to wait out the MAB.

The Special HE Sector Conference voted for fortnightly BDMs to run the dispute, or, perhaps better still, a national strike committee composed of delegates from branches taking the action. This was simply not implemented. It has been left to unofficial branch and regional events and the UCU Solidarity Movement to try to fill the gap.

When an official BDM was eventually called on 11 August (more than two months into the action) it was a serious and substantive meeting that was widely supported by branches.

Relaunch the fightback

The twin crises we face – the Cost of Living Crisis and the accumulating crisis in Higher Education – are not going away. Our pay has been cut by more than 11% against RPI over the last two years, on top of the 25% pay cut from August 2009 to 2021. Attacks on our members through casualisation and job cuts are continuing. There is no respite in the financial crisis for staff.

The e-ballot shows that members are more angry and more resolved than union activists sometimes think. The strikes in September can be the platform to relaunch the Four Fights campaign and the re-ballot.

But there are some key questions to be discussed.

Some members will quite reasonably feel demoralised that the MAB did not break through. We need to discuss this properly with members – what were the strengths and weaknesses of the MAB, and what could UCU have done differently? Should UCU have been better prepared to stop the employers ripping up academic standards? Would a more aggressive strike action policy have dissuaded the employers from punitive deductions? How do we combine a variety of forms of industrial action to make them effective?

Other members may ask what is the point of a five-day strike, whether in induction week or at another time. True, it is not an indefinite strike. But we cannot launch an indefinite strike from a standing start! There are several reasons why this is important. First of all, we need to send a clear signal to the employers that we are not defeated, that we intend to win the re-ballot and take further action. We tell students that faced with such university management we are compelled to disrupt their education and the dispute is not ‘over’. And we show our members that their participation can make the difference.

We also have to organise to win the vote in the re-ballot, despite the fact that the ballot is taking place too late to allow us to take action at the start of term.

It is important that branches hold regular meetings, including site and departmental meetings, to build up support for winning the re-ballot. We must have a strong union presence on campuses. We must resist collectively any management pressures to work extra hours to make up work lost during industrial action. We must start building up strike funds again.

Finally, we must ensure that in a new dispute we don’t have more of the same sabotage from our union leaders. The only way to drag these employers (with the Conservative Government behind them) out of their luxury bunkers is indefinite action – the kind of action we should have taken before the MAB ever started.

Our dispute is not an ordinary industrial confrontation. It is about the future of Higher Education. It is about the future of HE jobs, the kind of education students will be taught and the colleges we want. Our colleagues in Further Education are starting their ballot on 5 September. They shouldn’t go through the same kind of frustrations we’ve experienced. We need indefinite action to beat the employers and we need to build democracy and control at the grassroots.

Democracy in Disputes

Time and time again democratic votes, whether it is over the implementation of the MAB, calling and pausing strikes or the timetable for re-ballots, have been ignored. When delegates were asked at the BDM, an unprecedented 98% of the membership wanted an immediate summer re-ballot. What we got instead was the Grady plan of a November ballot.

We could have won our dispute months ago if the HEC decision to move towards indefinite strike action earlier this year had been implemented rather than sabotaged. Jo Grady claims that such action is not possible until we have a greater density of membership. But you only build a union in struggle, not off the back of a stop-start strategy that leaves us open to attacks by employers and can wear down our activists and the wider membership.

The use of ‘e-polls’ and surveys in this dispute has shown that they are less democratic and less accountable than consulting with branches. The MAB vote shows that members taking the action were more willing to keep it up than members who were not taking the action.

These debates are not confined to the UCU. In many unions there is growing frustration amongst activists that new, more militant tactics must be implemented to break through intransigent employers. Where that mood to escalate and oppose bad deals has coalesced into organisations like ‘NHS says No’, ‘Educators say No’ and others, some unions have seen members vote to reject their leadership’s strategy. Often they had to be balloted twice or three times for rotten deals to be pushed through.

Activists are faced with some very big questions. Time and time again we have voted to fight, have joined picket lines and protests and put our pay packets on the line on strike days and throughout the MAB. But no matter how many times we vote to fight, the General Secretary imposes her strategy over our heads.

Firstly, we are going to have to challenge the General Secretary, if and when she stands in the upcoming election. But it is becoming increasingly clear that just changing one General Secretary for another doesn’t fix all our problems. We need a different approach to disputes, where the trade union officials and the right on the HEC cannot turn off the tap.

We need to build a serious rank-and-file approach to industrial action, where decisions are made in the branches taking the action, and branches coordinate horizontally. Congress voted for National Strike Committees to run disputes. This wasn’t implemented, but there is a growing groundswell of support for the basic idea. Our union has strong branches and other ‘lay’ structures such as Regions and Nations, but they are not allowed to lead. We need to build links between branches through informal networks of solidarity like the Solidarity Movement.

We are not the first to make this argument and we will not be the last. In 2021 the Columbia Student Workers in the USA won an indefinite strike after overturning their conservative leaders and building a grassroots leadership to carry it out. We have to think about how we apply the lessons of their victory to our union.

Together we can break the democratic deficit that exists and break out of the vicious circle of stop-start action and the undermining of our activists. The dispute is winnable with the correct strategy and the implementation of democratic decisions.

17 August 202317 August 2023

HEC report 14 August 23 – Two steps forward, one step back

HEC agrees to call strike action before the end of the ballot period and launch reballot as soon as possible.

But HEC was also told that this reballot would take five weeks to prepare, which was a shock to those in attendance. If this is true – and it has not been confirmed formally – then this will open up a large gap in our mandates.

Indeed if this were true, then union officials should have told HE officers and begun preparations months ago! Sector Conference had put the union on notice that a long summer ballot was required. Delaying HEC meetings, failing to implement HE19 and now stating that time delays would be required before the ballot commenced – all of these delays appear deliberate.

Moreover, had UCU members at Friday’s BDM been told such a delay was inevitable there would have been uproar. Were this information circulated earlier still, it would have affected how branches voted.

On Monday a motion calling for branches to take strike action in one of the last two weeks of September (allowing for flexibility) was passed. At the same time, another motion calling for an e-ballot to consult members over potentially winding down the MAB was agreed.

USS was taken out of the reballot motion after a closely-contested debate. It is clear that some members of HEC are influenced by the idea that reballoting on USS would be seen as an act of ‘bad faith’ in the negotiations – despite this being the same brutal negotiating space which saw UUK impose draconian cuts on members’ benefits for two years, cuts UUK admitted at the time were unnecessary.

With the employers openly seeking to exploit the turnaround in USS fortunes for themselves and cut contributions, we think it is a mistake to take any negotiations over the pension scheme merely on trust. We will need to revisit this question urgently!

What next?

Branches should call meetings of members as soon as possible and invite HEC members and negotiators.

Many branches are still facing major deductions for MAB participation. We need to signal to employers that the more they try to intimidate members the more they undermine goodwill from the very staff they need to mark student work and address complaints.

We should all be preparing for strikes in September to show the employers we are not defeated. Branches should ask for a discussion with HE officers about alternative strike dates if term does not begin until October (the HEC motion passed mentions flexibility).

We should also begin a debate about the kind of action we need to see next year to win. Many members are drawing the conclusion we need indefinite strike action that the employers cannot wait out.

Branch reps should prepare for another GTVO effort, and use it to recruit more members.

In USS branches we will also need to campaign to demand employers accept UCU’s priorities for benefit restoration over their desire for a ‘pension holiday’ and cutting contributions. It was a mistake for HEC to postpone a ballot on USS, but that does not stop branches campaigning.

17 July 202317 July 2023

What is going on in the HE national negotiations?

Summary

These talks concern ending the Marking and Assessment Boycott
Pay, casualisation, workload and pay gaps are not on this table: at best, these talks may lead to restarting negotiations
Employers are not making an improved pay offer, but have offered a ‘review of sector finances’
We need to launch the summer reballot, not just for leverage now, but to keep up pressure in the autumn
Democracy is essential: any offer must be put to a Branch Delegate Meeting before going to HEC and an e-ballot

On Friday, members received an email from the General Secretary about the talks with UCEA. A rather cryptic ‘joint statement’ between UCU and UCEA has been published on UCEA’s website.

Members are engaged in a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) in order to persuade employers to increase their offer on pay and engage in meaningful negotiations over casualisation, workload and pay gaps.

We all know that the MAB has been difficult to carry out. On top of the professional and personal sacrifice, it is extremely stressful for staff. Members are facing up to threats of 100% pay deductions and often prolonged deductions. These threats have already been carried out in many cases, and some members have even received zero pay!

But we are doing this in order to move the employers on the demands of the dispute. The scale of this action and its impact is due to the cumulative anger in the sector of staff who have seen employers hold down pay and continue abusive practices of casualisation and overwork. The MAB is less like a strike and more like an underground organised movement that has included staff who did not take part in strike action in the past.

The joint statement says

Today’s exploratory talks between UCEA, UCU and the other joint unions’ side secretary were constructive, although there is still significant ground to be covered. We have explored obstacles to resuming negotiations and bringing an end to the Marking and Assessment Boycott, with both sides recognising the complexity of the issues. Both sides welcomed the positive tone of the discussion and have identified dates for further urgent talks. Further discussion will also take place with the Joint HE Trade Unions to consider the scope and remit of a review of sector finances.

This statement after the first day of negotiations follows a letter from UCU General Secretary Jo Grady to UCEA two weeks ago. In this letter she set out terms of reference for an ‘interim agreement’ and the following approach to negotiations:

Any suspension will require UCEA to recommend an immediate end to punitive pay deductions and a return of deductions to members.
Any suspension will require a commitment from employers to recognise staff’s entitlement to leave and to a reasonable workload on their return to normal working.
Any interim agreement will be subject to consultation with UCU members.
University staff have already rejected the 5% pay award UCEA began imposing in February (2023), and continue to demand that UCEA improve pay to deal with the cost-of-living crisis.

The employers have refused to talk to the unions about pay since they declared the pay offer for August 2023 as ‘final’ in February. They placed preconditions on negotiations on casualisation, workload, pay gaps and ‘the review of the pay spine’ (considering whether to delete and adjust salary points at the lower end of the national pay scale) that ruled out any industrial action by any trade union for the duration of those negotiations.

So why are they talking now, and what does this ‘positive tone’ refer to?

Decoding the statement

In order to decode the statement we have to read the bullet points in Jo Grady’s letter. This sets out UCU negotiators’ brief as to negotiate an end to the MAB.

On the one hand, an agreement to stop and return any deductions made would obviously be welcome. But if the employers wish student work to be marked by staff who set assessments and taught the students in the first place, it will be essential anyway!

With the exception of Queen Mary, which faced significant strike action, and Goldsmiths, which was in a parallel local dispute over redundancies, no deductions were made for MAB participation last year. Although this negotiation is more complicated with 145 institutions at the national table rather than at 30 local ones, the realpolitik is essentially the same.

But what about actual positive movement on the issues of the dispute? What is the substance of the statement?

The final bullet point is unclear. It seems only to ask the employers to note that the unions continue to demand an increased pay offer, but not to commit to it.

The UCEA statement says ‘[f]urther discussion will also take place with the Joint HE Trade Unions to consider the scope and remit of a review of sector finances.’ But ‘a review of sector finances’ means ‘open the books’ at best. It does not put new money on the table. Given the financial speculation and capital overspend that many universities have engaged in over the last decade, this review could easily turn into a platform for the employers to plead poverty. It is likely that many will.

UCU is currently negotiating the end of the MAB without demanding a concrete commitment from the employers to move on the Four Fights – the entire point of the dispute. By contrast, branches in the MAB last year were able to extract concrete commitments from their employers, and in some cases additional payments, as a condition of ending the MAB.

What can we do at this critical point in our dispute?

We have to stop our union giving away our leverage. It is not enough to say ‘hold the line’ if these negotiations will be the end of the line!

The first step is to call a summer reballot and demand that other Sector Conference decisions are respected and implemented, as members have a right to expect. It is possible, within UCU rules, for the relevant officers to trigger the ballot. Of course this should have happened at the last HEC meeting, however, the agenda item which would have triggered the ballot was ‘timed out’ by other business.

The reballot must begin immediately. If the employers are kicking negotiations over pay into next term, we need those talks to begin in the context of a credible threat of industrial action. Other trade unions, including UNISON, are lining up to take strike action next term.

Launching the reballot will also send a strong signal to the employers in the current negotiations that members expect a better deal right now.

The second step is to demand that any offer from the employers is put to an official Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) before an HEC meeting is convened to discuss it. This is the very least we should expect, and has been how UCU has consulted over negotiations since 2018. Yet it seems that sections of the UCU leadership are averse to doing this. Could it be that they worry that branch reps won’t stand for a sell-out?

Calling a BDM is a basic requirement. Local branches negotiating the end to the MAB last year put offers to branch meetings and debated whether the offer was good enough. But there was no official BDM called ahead of the last HEC meeting which voted (by a majority of one) to approach the employers with these conditions.

Democracy is not an added extra. It is essential to our union’s health and strength. Whether one thinks that an ultimate offer is a good or bad one, we must not let our union slide further into undemocratic practices. Nor must we permit the undermining of reps and activists who have led the MAB in the branches, and every single member who is holding the line for their union right now in the face of management intimidation.

Passing motions

An example model motion is the following (passed at KCL on 12 July)

MAB for the win!

This branch believes that

the MAB is currently exerting huge pressure on the employers
now is not the time to offer concessions
the offer of an ‘interim agreement’ sends a dangerous signal that we have no stomach for the fight.

This branch calls for

an urgent BDM to discuss the MAB
the decisions of Sector Conference to be respected and implemented, including the summer reballot, which should begin immediately.

This branch resolves to contact our geographical and UK-wide representatives on HEC to explain the way they voted on the key motions at last Friday’s meeting and under what circumstances they would vote to overturn decisions made by HE Sector Conference.

15 March 202315 March 2023

No more ‘pauses’ – no suspension of action! Strike to win!

Tuesday’s #UCURising reps briefing has caused a huge amount of confusion ahead of our six days of strike action.

No new information about progress in the talks materialised.

All we learned was that there ‘may’ be some progress on USS, and that ‘some agreement’ is close on how the issues of casualisation, pay gaps and workloads might be addressed in the future.

Pay: The only pay-related item currently on the table is compression of the pay spine (the result of higher increases on lower spine points reducing pay differentials between them). Correcting this is unlikely to put money in UCU members’ pockets, and may make only a small difference to the lowest paid. There has been no further offer from the employers over headline pay. Members still face a two-year 15% pay cut against inflation.
USS: On USS there has been an interim statement with employers agreeing to prioritise benefit restoration ‘if it can be done in a sustainable manner.’ However, there has been no firm commitment to benefit restoration, and a lot could still go wrong.

In other words, there is no offer that represents tangible progress in the disputes, and there is not likely to be one this week.

In spite of this, it seems that branches will be asked to elect delegates in preparation for an ‘emergency’ BDM which may take place as early as this Thursday, and be followed by an ‘emergency’ HEC to take decisions on the action.

Why? The only reason can be that the General Secretary and the President-elect want to call off our strikes. The silence from HQ about these six days of action has been deafening.

Jo Grady has learned, however, that calling off strikes unilaterally produces a negative response from members. Instead, it looks like an emergency BDM will be used as a mechanism to try and bounce the HEC into calling off the action.

Democracy takes time

We are in favour of holding BDMs to update members in the course of disputes and to involve them in decisions about action.

But as of March 15, no-one apart from a select few even knows what is on the table!

A BDM called at no notice to discuss an ‘offer’ which does not yet exist — and which delegates will barely get sight of in advance — is even less democratic than some of the recent BDMs have been.

To be effective and democratic, BDMs need to be preceded by branch meetings at which the issues are discussed, votes are taken and delegates are elected and mandated. This ensures that members can consider the arguments for and against, delegates vote according to branch positions and decisions, and don’t just represent themselves.

This kind of democratic process will be impossible ahead of a BDM on Thursday. Members are mobilised for the strike. Many are attending Budget Day demonstrations on Wednesday and will have no time to meet.

Indeed, the only reason for the rush to do this on Thursday seems to be because the NEC meets on Friday all day!

We have to go forward

What is at stake is not just a few days of strike action but the future of the entire dispute.

We need to insist that no more of our planned strikes are called off. The GS’s ‘pause’ set back our campaign by destroying our momentum and causing confusion among members. We lifted the pressure from the employers at the crucial time, with the inevitable result that the employers imposed a pay award comprising two years’ worth of pay cuts instead of just one.

We have already wasted too much of this six-month mandate to call off more strikes. Every time we do, the employers are emboldened.

Strike. Vote. Win.

Strikes now at the end of term have substantial leverage with the employers because they prevent remedial ‘catch up’ teaching ahead of exams next term (in some universities this is the last week of teaching). Were we to stand down action next week, it would lead to immediate demands on members to catch up with teaching and undermine our own strikes. Of course we are not just a union of lecturers. But teaching is time-constrained, and it is a mistake to think otherwise.

But ultimately the main message will be obvious. Cancelling strikes tells members and employers that the union is not confident of winning. The pressure on employers is immediately lifted. And it will make it harder to win the reballot we need to mount a marking and assessment boycott next term — and harder to carry it out, for fear of a repeat of more start-stop sabotage.

No Capitulation. Unity is Strength.

Build the Pickets. Keep up the Action.

12 January 202312 January 2023

HEC votes to call escalating action

The UCU Higher Education Committee (HEC) met on Thursday 12 January to review the union’s industrial action strategy in both disputes.

What is at stake

First, the Committee Secretary and elected UCU negotiators reported on the progress of pay negotiations.

The initial offer from the University and College Employers’ Association (UCEA), received the day before, is the following.

1. No improvement in 2022-23 (this was 3%, with a taper for the very lowest paid). Note that RPI in August 2022 was 12.3% (CPI was 9.9%).
2. A banded offer for 2023-24
  - Grade pts 3 to 14 – 7% (2.8% to be paid from February)
  - Grade pts 15 to 25 – 6% (2.4%)
  - Grade pts 26 to 42 – 5% (2%)
  - Grade pts 43 to 51 – 4% (1.6%)
3. No inclusion of pay-related elements
  - UCEA proposes commencing negotiations over these elements (in the case of UCU: casualisation, workload and equal pay gaps) later in the Spring.

Negotiators calculated that if inflation does not fall from current levels, the UCEA offer would represent a pay cut over just the two years from 2022 to 2024 of approximately 15%. Obviously, inflation in August 2023 is not known. The pay cut is slightly greater for the highest paid, and less for lower paid.

Another way of thinking about this is that were we to accept this offer, we could easily lose as much as the equivalent of two months’ pay for each year of our future working lives!

This is on top of the 25% (i.e. three months) real-terms cut in pay we have received between 2009 and 2022.

Although on paper it is a slightly better offer for the very lowest paid staff, it is still devastating. Staff in the lowest UCEA band (those on points below 15) would lose an average of more than 10% of pay over the two year period. But this will have a terrible impact. The cost of living crisis is hitting the poorest hardest, for a range of reasons. Even before the crisis, low paid staff had little or no disposable income or were in debt, food and fuel have been increasing more quickly than luxury goods, and now many are being forced onto fuel prepayment meters if they find themselves in arrears.

The stakes could not be clearer.

We should also remember that in pre-92 universities, these wage cuts are on top of a pension cut of between 30 and 40% that could mean that younger members will never be able to afford to retire. A pay cut of 15% is also another pension cut of 15%.

The Committee Secretary’s report had proposed that this offer would be circulated to members with an electronic poll. This was opposed by HEC on the basis that this was an interim offer, and we had no mandate for accepting such a huge cut in pay! Negotiators were also concerned that the offer needed to be explained to members carefully, as it is a two-year offer with implications for 2023-24.

Industrial action

HEC then turned to the question of industrial action. It took into consideration the responses reported to the Branch Delegates Meeting (BDM) and motions from branches.

It also recognised the democratic flaws of the way the ‘binary choice’ had been posed by the union, and that a number of branches reported that they had not considered permutations of indefinite action. On the other hand, three quarters of branches that submitted motions to the HEC called for various forms of indefinite action.

lf the proposal for indefinite discontinuous action had been put to the BDM it may well have won.

This is a debate that the union has begun. It is by no means over.

It was very clear that whereas more than a third* of votes of BDM delegates supported various forms of indefinite action, the majority of members were not yet at that point.

Equally, branches voting for the General Secretary’s plan said that they wanted genuinely escalating action.

HEC appreciated it was difficult to reconcile these two positions, especially as members who called for indefinite action were concerned that the General Secretary’s ‘escalating’ action might not genuinely be escalating.

After a lengthy debate on different courses of action, HEC agreed to an escalating plan of action with 19 days of strike action, with a Branch Delegate Meeting and HEC in the middle. This means that as the action builds up, there will be an option for branches to make a case for further escalation, including potentially to move to indefinite action, depending on how the employers respond.

The action is neither all-out indefinite action nor the General Secretary’s original plan.

Due to reporting restrictions we cannot divulge details of this plan this evening (12 January), but we expect UCU to tell members very soon.

HEC also respected the outcome of the BDM on the Marking and Assessment Boycott. The decision was made to move the January boycott to April – with dates designed to be inclusive of different timescales applying in universities in Northern Ireland and Scotland.

Note

*The BDM weighted votes had 31% for indefinite action. In addition, delegates from some very large branches that voted for the indefinite 4-day plan, including UCL, Oxford and LJMU, were recorded as abstaining.