Sean Wallis

5 November 20195 November 2019

The fight is on

Build the HE strikes: organise to win

UCU has called eight days of strike action over Higher Education pay and USS pensions before Christmas, one full week: 25-29 November, culminating with the next school student climate strike day #29November, and three days: 2-4 December, ending on UCU’s Disability Day of Action.

Once again, UCU Left members on the HEC were instrumental in ensuring that the union stayed on track. Our strategy of balloting on pay and pensions together has paid off, with the biggest ever vote in HE for action over pay, casualisation, workload and equality. Now the strategy is to bring members out, united, on the same days over both disputes. A work to contract begins at the same time.

Across UCU, in branch after branch, members voted overwhelmingly YES for action. The reason that some branches will not be on strike is only that their turnout was below 50% of their membership (the anti-union threshold). For example, De Montfort University got a 74% yes vote but a 49% turnout. King’s College London got 81% yes on a 48.7% turnout, and so on. Before the Tory Anti Union Law, these votes would be considered outstanding!

Despite this, this strike call means that 80% of members in USS institutions are being asked to come out on strike. On the Four Fights dispute (pay, equality, casusalisation and workload), more than 60% of members across the sector pre- and post-92 are being called out.

At the same time, UCU agreed to reballot members in branches whose turnout was 40% or over, with other branches choosing to opt in. Ballots can begin after re-notification to employers, so can coincide with the start of this round of strike action. A second wave of strike action can begin next year.

The fifth of the nominated strike days coincides with the date of the next mass Friday climate strike called by school students. Striking UCU members will now be able to respond en masse to the call by young people for trade unionists to support the movement for urgent action on the climate emergency.

We may also be joined by postal workers in the CWU, who have already voted for strikes before Christmas in defence of jobs and against plans to dismember the postal service.

Our strikes will also take place in the run-up to the most important general election for decades. The outcome of the December 12 poll will determine the future of post-16 education for years to come. The issues we are fighting over – pay, pensions, equality, casualisation and workloads – have all been brought to crisis point by the marketisation of the HE sector driven by the Tories’ neoliberal agenda. Our strikes can bring the issues of the student debt burden and the corrosiveness of competition between institutions to the forefront of the election campaign.

Branches and Regions need to begin preparation for the strike now.

We need the big lively picket lines which characterised last year’s USS dispute. We need imaginative teach-out events which can involve students and UCU members in joint discussion and activity.

And we need striking branches to help with the reballoting effort in neighbouring institutions that didn’t make the threshold the first time around.

The last USS strike saw the union grow by 50% in the branches that took strike action. Members joined to take part in the strike in large numbers, some joining on the picket line. This strike will be a fantastic opportunity to recruit more members to the union and further strengthen branches.

Strike committees & democracy

UCU’s last protracted strike, over USS, was sustained by strike committees in many branches. Strike committees were the backbone of the strike: they organised pickets from day to day, gave members a place to express their concerns and debate the way forward with fellow-pickets, and took initiatives like lobbying UUK and talks – and even protesting outside the union HQ during the #NoCapitulation moment.

Some branches have organised strike committees before, but for others the idea is new. Strike committees are simply open democratic fora, open to all strikers, to conduct the business of the strike. Ideally they should be run daily during the strike – that way strikers know when and where they need to go to debate the lessons and decide on next steps.

NB. Ahead of the strike, branch reps will need to book warm, sizeable rooms for strikers to come to!

There will be a Higher Education Sector Conference on USS in Manchester on Friday 6 December – two days after the strike, to which branches can send delegates. Note that to book delegate space, branches must submit delegate names (may be provisional and swapped later) to UCU by Friday, 22 November.

UCU’s Democracy Congress will take place the next day. (NOTE. The deadline for booking delegates is this Thursday, 7 November.) Many of the issues of how such strikes should be run will be raised at that conference as well.

Teach-outs & themed strike days

The last USS strike showed tremendous enthusiasm for protests and initiatives. Teach-outs with students and staff were extremely popular. These can also generate material for distributing on themed strike days.

In this strike we can also bring back themed strike days – something that UCU did very effectively in the HE pay dispute in 2016.

To be clear, a themed strike day is not a day when we only strike over one issue. (We will strike over pay and pensions each day in USS branches.)

A themed strike day is simply a day when branches or regions adopt an issue and promote it actively on that day – in banners, leaflets, press material etc.

In addition to strike days over pensions, for example, we must have a strike day themed on the Environment on 29 November, linking up with the climate movement!

We can also take actions highlighting pension poverty, poverty pay and long hours, casualisation in its many forms, the gender pay and pension gap, race inequality and migrant rights, and disability inequality and access – the last day of strike action is UCU’s Disability Day.

Running through the core of the disputes, we will spell out our alternative: What the University is For. We all know the market madness lies behind most of the evils we are striking against.

We can invite MPs and prospective MPs to participate in teach-outs. The election is a chance to put a spotlight on the crisis in post-16 education.

Strike funds

Members will be concerned about their personal finances. So we will need an effective communications strategy from Head Office outlining the financial support available and how to apply for it.

UCU has already announced national fund criteria:

£75/day for every union member earning under £30,000 a year from Day 2.
£50/day for union members earning £30,000 or more from Day 3.

Branches should also set up local strike funds (guidance from Head Office will be available shortly), and should reach out to sister unions and supportive organisations to add to these local funds. Many pre-92 HE branches already have local funds, but the same is not true for many post-92 branches. Either way, local funds should prioritise the casualised and lowest paid.

In the run up to the General Election there are likely to be lots of political meetings. Organise strikers to do delegation work. Try to attend and speak at some of these and ask for donations. Ask for a speaker slot at your local Trades Council meeting and at local constituency Labour Party meetings. Contact active pensioner and anti-austerity groups.

Most meetings will be happy to hold a bucket collection for our cause, and every penny will help towards ensuring our members don’t struggle financially while fighting these disputes.

Solidarity & reballots

Both disputes are national disputes with the employers, over pay, casualisation, workload and equality with UCEA; and over USS, with Universities UK. Both employer organisations are supposed to represent the interest of the employers collectively in negotiating with the union. All branches are in dispute, even if they are not on strike.

Branches taking strike action will need solidarity from the wider UCU. They will be striking as a first wave, with the expectation that their colleagues in other institutions will be joining them in a second wave. But for this to work we will need a renewed effort to win the turnouts needed in universities and colleges.

Strikers can visit and enthuse branch meetings, department meetings and even floor-walk with reps to Get the Vote Out – and collect for strike funds.

NB. Venues for strike committee meetings and teach-outs can in principle also be booked in these colleges.

We are one union – and we are united to win these two disputes.

31 October 20196 November 2019

We won the vote – Now let’s start the action

The ballot results are in. UCU members throughout Higher Education are ready to fight to defend their pay and pensions, and to stand up against inequality, unmanageable workloads and casualisation.

On pay, 73% of members voted yes to strike action, on a 49% total turnout. 55 university branches declared with a turnout greater than 50%. On USS, 44 out of 64 USS institutions hit the threshold. Herriot-Watt topped the poll at 71.59% turnout.

Branches in Northern Ireland do not have to beat the 50% threshold, so Queens University Belfast, Ulster University, Stranmillis University College and St Mary’s University College Belfast are also able to strike.

62.33% of balloted UCU members are in branches eligible to take strike action over pay. In the USS pre-92 universities, the equivalent figure is 80.62%.

These are the highest votes ever in a UCU national pay campaign, outstripping those in last year’s pay ballot.

The votes were overwhelmingly for action. But thanks to the Tory Anti-Union Laws, turnout is the key. 55 branches exceeded the 50% threshold required. Given the obstacle that this represents for trade unions, our results are very positive. The union decided to conduct disaggregated ballots precisely so that some branches would be able to fight even if we didn’t reach the threshold overall.

What must happen now

It is time to name the date for action.

The 55+ branches with legal mandates must begin escalating action in mid-November (see list below). The other branches need to continue the campaign to reballot – see below.

The pension action will begin to put pressure on the employers in UCEA and UUK and on the pension bosses at USS. We know they won’t shift their positions without it.

The pay action (including equality, workload and casualisation) unifies members young and old, and unites us with our colleagues in other unions in each university or college. Pay also unifies the sector, pre- and post-92.

Successful pay ballots allow other workers who are not in UCU to participate in strikes. (It is unlawful for employers to discriminate by union membership and branches can extract statements from HR to that effect.) It also means that post-92 institutions will be able to take strike action alongside pre-92, offering mutual solidarity and presenting a united front in defence of HE and the staff who work in HE.

It is time to lift the lid on local issues of casualisation and gender and race pay inequality – and show they are endemic to our sector.

We can take action alongside postal workers defending their jobs and school students fighting climate change.

General Election

The general election gives us the perfect opportunity to put a spotlight on the future of Higher Education.

If we want to insist that government has a responsibility to ensure that universities pay their staff properly, address the scandals of rising casualisation and unequal pay, and protect the USS pension scheme for future generations with a government guarantee, we could not ask for a better moment to take action!

Reballots and organising solidarity

Meanwhile, branches who reached 40% or more should be reballoted with the aim of joining a second wave of action in January. Many branches are only a few dozen votes short of the threshold and have a very good chance of breaking through on a reballot. Bringing out more branches would be an excellent way for our action to escalate in the new year. See the graphs above. Branches which fell below 40% should have the right to opt in to the reballot.

All those not in a position to strike yet can support striking members by contributing to a strike fund levy.

UCU in Transformation – One Year On
#UCUTransformed2019
London, Sat 2 Nov 11-5
Called by London Region UCU

In the meantime we face a major organising task. Regions have a crucial role to link up branches striking with those balloting, organising regional demonstrations and encouraging demonstrative action.

The first step to linking up activists and reps will be the #UCUTransformed2019 one-day conference called by London Region UCU on Saturday 2 November.

This will be the first chance to debate the next steps in the struggle with other reps and activists. Reps in branches that missed the threshold will want to discuss the Herriot Watt GTVO strategy. Other regions should call activist meetings as soon as possible to do the same.

Branches with live ballot mandates

The institutions in which members can now take action are:

Aston University
Bangor University
Bishop Grosseteste University
Bournemouth University
Cardiff University
Courtauld Institute of Art
Durham University
Edge Hill University
Glasgow Caledonian University
Glasgow School of Art
Heriot-Watt University
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA)
Loughborough University
Newcastle University
Open University
Queen Margaret University
Queen’s University, Belfast
Roehampton University
Sheffield Hallam University
St Mary’s University College Belfast
Stranmillis University College
The Institute of Development Studies
The University of Aberdeen
The University of Bath
The University of Dundee
The University of Kent
The University of Leeds
The University of Manchester
The University of Nottingham
The University of Sheffield
The University of Stirling
Ulster University
University College London
University of Birmingham
University of Bradford
University of Brighton
University of Bristol
University of Cambridge
University of Edinburgh
University of Essex
University of Exeter
University of Glasgow
University of Lancaster
University of Leicester
University of Liverpool
University of London, City
University of London, Goldsmiths
University of London, Queen Mary
University of London, Royal Holloway
University of Oxford
University of Reading
University of Southampton
University of St Andrews
University of Strathclyde
University of Sussex
University of Wales
University of Warwick
University of York

5 September 20195 September 2019

Get organised to defend USS and pay

Take the fight to Boris – Defend Higher Education!

What is at stake

This is what is happening to our USS Defined Benefit pension. If we were to accept UUK’s offer, USS will pay us a pension worth less, pound-for-pound, than three quarters of the value (72.22%) of the 2011 CARE scheme.

And that scheme was a huge cut from the Final Salary scheme that had existed for years.

This is a deliberate policy by the employers, working in concert with those in USS and the City who would like to see the back of Defined Benefit. In 2018 UUK used their majority on the Board (and the casting vote of the Chair) to impose Defined Contribution.

The entire case for increasing contributions is predicated on a ‘deficit’ that has been widely debunked. The simple fact is that if the pension scheme were not ‘de-risked’ there would be no projected deficit. ‘De-risking’ (selling off investment assets and buying gilts) began after the employers demanded it in 2014.

This attack is not a one-off. It won’t be stopped by negotiations — however clever the negotiators. Sally Hunt knew that. That’s why in 2017, she used her influence on the HEC to build the strike. She silenced the right wing of the HEC, openly campaigned for strikes and allied with the Left to make sure they took place.

Members took up the call and responded brilliantly. 14 days of strikes stopped USS and UUK wrecking the Defined Benefit scheme altogether.

We could have fought and won to commit UUK to No Detriment. Had we done that, we would not have to fight now.

But two years on, USS and UUK are turning their backs on the Joint Expert Panel, the result of the 2018 dispute, ignoring UCU, and demanding 20% more from members — all for the same pension benefits.

With the employers imposing 1.8% on pay, USS members will have an effective 0.2% pay increase (CPI, meanwhile, is at 2% and RPI 2.8%). This is a huge pay cut.

Worse, increased employer contributions will inevitably provoke the university employers. Trinity College Cambridge has left the scheme. As costs on them rise, universities will demand 100% DC. And every cut in DB pension value means less for members to defend.

We cannot leave it to the Joint Expert Panel to rescue us. USS is being undermined by market greed.

Record profits, winners and losers — staff and students lose

Our pension is the victim of Higher Education marketisation.

It is no accident that 2011 marks the beginning of the decline for USS, a scheme that survived stock market crashes and paid 1/80th Final Salary for decades. Before 2011 members paid 6.35% employer contributions. After UCU lost that round, contributions were forced up to 7.5%, and Final Salary was closed to new members.

Before 2011 the employers’ surpluses (profits) were small. Universities were not expected to turn a profit. For example, in 2003, HESA reported a sector surplus (both pre- and post- 92) of £65 million.

But by 2016 the sector surplus was £1.5 billion (on stricter reporting standards)!

The mad competitive scramble to recruit undergraduate students and bank £9,000+ tuition fees has set university against university, college against college. It has encouraged them to borrow over £10 billion in capital projects, and it has created winners and losers.

Graph: Winners and losers. Surpluses as a percentage of total income by institution (2016-17), HEFCE. Total surpluses in 2017 were reported to be £1.1 billion.

The premise of USS’s stability is mutuality — that the sector works together to provide pensions and the employers together contribute stability to the investment strategy by underwriting the portfolio. This is known as the ‘employer’s covenant’.

But Higher Education competition is destroying mutuality and trust. Why would UCL loan to USS to underwrite the risk of King’s, its competitor down the road? Why would King’s underwrite UCL?

Anyone who thinks that accepting this offer will ‘tide over’ USS has not been paying attention.

Members struck for 14 days in 2018 because they knew that our fight to defend USS was also a fight to defend the future of Higher Education. We had to resist the war of all against all that the sector had become locked into.

Made in Westminster

In 2016, HE Minister Jo Johnson drove through the Higher Education and Research Act. This allowed universities to declare bankruptcy, as Greenwich School of Management (aka ‘GSM London’) did in July.

No wonder employers are concerned about carrying each other’s risk!

The Tory Government is divided over Brexit. A snap General Election is likely. We have a tremendous opportunity to put Higher Education on the map and put the responsibility for this crisis back where it belongs — in Government. The demand for a Government Guarantee to underwrite USS makes total sense. But we need one now, not when USS is frittered away to nothing.

Since our strikes in HE, Further Education members struck over pay and marched on Parliament against cuts in funding. Our members’ action put FE on the political map and extracted £400 million from a right-wing government led by public school boys!

Taking action in own defence gives members confidence to stand shoulder to shoulder with our EU colleagues and students over Brexit, and stand up to any attempt to divide us in a snap election.

Get organised for Round 2

We have to fight to defend our pensions and pay, and we have to organise the fightback now.

As well as pay cuts, the other symptoms of HE marketisation are rising inequality, casualisation and workload.

We have a fantastic opportunity to bring all of these fights together in the two ballots, uniting both sectors.

Balloting begins next week.

The only way to defend our pensions is through strike action beginning in the Autumn Term. We need to approach Get the Vote Out with military seriousness in branch after branch.

We won the first battle, but if we don’t fight now, we will lose the war. We need to mobilise everyone who stood on the picket line in 2018 to organise meetings in department after department — it is time to unite to win the ballot to defend USS, defend pay and defend Higher Education for future generations.

1 June 20194 June 2019

The Fight Of Our Lives – Round 2

The Augar report

The disastrous HE tuition fee market experiment of 2011 is unravelling.

The much-trailed Tory-commissioned review into HE funding, the Augar Report, is proposing cuts in tuition fees to £7,500 but a much harder ‘hit’ on students: faster repayment schedules with a lower repayment threshold, a lower interest rate but students will carry a debt for 40 years instead of 30.

In UCU Left, we have always argued for cutting tuition fees to zero, bringing back grants, and demanding that “all who may benefit can come” to university (the so-called Robbins Principle). For us, Higher Education is the gift each generation bestows on the next – access to knowledge at the highest level. Make the super-rich pay their taxes, and this is entirely feasible.

But that is not what this cut is about.

Indeed, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reckon that the wealthiest students would benefit the most from the changes.

But this change – the unilateral imposing of new rates for degrees – is also a colossal market intervention on a supposed independent market!

The shockwaves will be massive.

So far the government has said it will not bail out colleges. Yet many universities have taken on large long-term debts for building projects. The Times reported in January that universities had taken on £10bn in loans.

Second, the market changes are intended to reduce student intake in certain subjects – Arts and Humanities disciplines in particular – that have seen the greatest expansion. Colleges which are dependent on these courses are likely to suffer the greatest.

If the changes are implemented, this new round of state intervention will likely drive some universities into the wall and propel students out on the street, indebted and degree-less. This happened in the USA with the collapse of the Corinthian Colleges, and if Augar is implemented, it is bound to happen here. The HE Bill (now ‘Higher Education & Research Act’) changed the constitution of university funding to explicitly allow universities to go bankrupt without being required to teach students to completion.

The Tory ex-HE minister, Jo Johnson, criticised the report, saying, correctly, that it will destabilise university finances. You’re not kidding.

Even before Augar, press leaks were of universities teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Sir Michael Barber, Chair of the ‘Office for Students’, was reported in response saying that “no university is too big to fail”.

Now that boom-time is coming to an end, the employers are trying to make us pay the price. Just as they siphoned up the profits of HE expansion, faced with boom turning to bust, the university employers are trying to make us take the pain. They have held down pay increases below inflation yet again, driving down the proportion of budgets going to staff costs (pay and pensions) across HE, driving up surpluses and capital investments. Across our sector, from Westminster to the Open University, we have seen wholesale redundancies amidst shiny new buildings.

In the Pre-92 sector, the market is undermining the pension scheme. And the same approach is now being applied to TPS. Treating Post-92 colleges as independent universities justifies the Tory response to the Teachers Pension Scheme crunch – no more money – triggering cuts and redundancies, and potentially break-away pension plans.

We need a concerted national plan to defend the Post-92 Contract, redundancies and escalating workload in these universities. Most of all we have to fight like a national union and defend the sector.

So once a fightback in Pre-92 begins, we should use this to inspire resistance in Post-92. We are now committed to a pay fight uniting both parts of the sector. See below.

The USS crisis

In UCU Left, we have long argued that the USS crisis derives directly from HE market competition. In 2017, we saw Cambridge and Oxford colleges threaten to go it alone. This May, Sir David Eastwood, USS JNC chair, wrote to Bill Galvin, USS CEO, to say that USS needed to account and pay for the risk of HE institutions breaking away from USS.

Market madness is undermining USS.

Is USS in trouble?

USS is paying out less in benefits than it is taking in. In 2018, USS received £2.2bn in contributions and paid out only £2.0bn – a 10% surplus.
Neither the scheme’s assets, nor returns on those assets, are currently being drawn upon to pay benefits. The scheme is ‘immature’, growing and healthy.
Yet, at the insistence of the employers, USS management is ‘de-risking the portfolio’ by moving investments from equity (stocks and shares) to debt (gilts), causing a loss of 4.8%pa+ to the scheme. This is because government bonds and gilts have a low level of return, below CPI. Long-term this means inflation ‘eats the pension pot’, creating a real deficit.
This is heaping risk upon the scheme and eroding its long-term viability. The models used by USS Ltd to estimate its future viability are seriously mathematically flawed in other ways.
The only reason to ‘de-risk’ is if you think the universities won’t be around to act as guarantors to the pension fund. And the reason you might think that is because of the current market madness engulfing the sector.

The current huge USS contribution hikes are in essence covering the cost of the ‘employer covenant’ – the guarantee that employers collectively make to guarantee the future of USS. This works on the presumption that universities will be around in the future, to support USS in the future. But market competition makes university survival less certain, pushing the scheme into a winding-up (‘de-risking’) valuation methodology. Hence ‘de-risking’, the misnamed process of devaluing the assets by dumping them in low-interest bearing government bonds and gilts.

The root of the problem is simply this. In a winner-takes-all, devil-takes-hindmost cuthroat competition, universities see each other as unknown risk bearers at best, enemies at worst. Thus in May, Trinity College Cambridge announced it was leaving USS because it did not wish to carry the pension risk of other colleges’ pensioners.

It is bad enough that costs on us are sky-rocketing. Worse, paying these additional contributions is to reward and encourage failure!

We cannot address this crisis by negotiating and hoping. We need leverage.

Look what happened after we stopped striking. We went backwards.

The USS Board shredded the First JEP Report – and any move to avoid ‘de-risking’ – because they believed UCU had demobilised.
One of our USS trustees, Jane Hutton, was forced out for criticising USS’s approach to the valuations.
The Pension Regulator is saying that even ‘Option 3’ is unlikely to be viable.

We are heading for disaster unless we fight.

We have to fight back

When we fight we can rebalance the equation.

Before we struck in 2018, everything seemed lost. USS was heading for the abyss of 100% Defined Contribution. Within two weeks into 14 days of strikes, and UUK were beginning to backtrack.

But we stopped our strikes too early. Not because the JEP was not well-intentioned – but because the Achilles heel of the JEP was that USS Board could ignore its recommendations.

Every Pre-92 branch of UCU faces a stern test. How will we rebuild the fight to defend USS?

We need to get organised.

Starting now, how do we organise a Get the Vote Out Campaign that instils confidence in our members to strike in the Autumn?

We will face two arguments.

“We fought before but here we are, so what’s the point?”
- Our strike was successful but it was only one battle in a war to defend our pension. If we had continued to victory, we might have won outright.
“Pension cuts are inevitable.”
- They were not inevitable for the entire life of USS until 2011. What changed is the market competition in the sector, and USS adapting to it by ‘de-risking’ USS.

This is Round 2 in the fight of our lives. A serious fight to defend USS has every change of winning, and in the process building a bigger defence for the future of Higher Education in the UK, uniting with students and everyone who cares about the future of society and the role of universities in it.

We should re-raise the demand that as part of the Augar review, the Government should guarantee USS (and underwrite TPS costs). After all, they are directly intervening in the market they created and undermining the UK university sector as a result.

What next?

UCU’s HE Conference decided on the following key actions:

Declare a dispute with the employers immediately over the imposed extra contributions.
Ballot members in September and October for serious strike action in the autumn term.
Build a big political campaign calling members into action, including a Day of Action.
Call a Higher Education Sector Conference in the late autumn term to review next steps.
Organise a pay campaign alongside pensions and unite the whole union across HE.

Branches need to call General Meetings before the end of the Summer Term, to report back on Congress and HE Conference. Invite our new General Secretary Jo Grady, a USS negotiator or an HEC member to speak.

It is time to wake up the ‘strike committees’, ‘action committees’ and other campaign networks that branches built up before and during the last USS strike. Every single member who took strike action has a stake in this fight.

We need to plan the biggest possible Get the Vote Out campaign for September and October.

We need to explain that we won the battle, but we have not yet won the war.

We can put this right in Round 2.

But we need to get organised.

Obvious Question: How can we fight a climate crisis with a bankrupt university sector?

28 January 201925 January 2024

UCU Elections 2019: Vote Jo for Vice President

Are you looking for the 2024 elections? Click here!

Voting in the Vice President & National Executive Committee elections starts on 1 February and closes on 1 March.

Jo McNeill is the UCU Left candidate for Vice President. Many universities and colleges have already organised hustings, if there isn’t one where you are, please contact Jo to invite her.

To get in touch with Jo and to find out more about her campaign, please see her website.

Our candidates

UCU Left recommends the following candidates for a member-led, democratic and fighting union.

More pictures and election leaflets coming soon!

Please click on the candidates’ names to download their election flyers.

North West HE

Saira Weiner
Anthony O’Hanlon

North West FE

Carol Cody

Honorary Secretary & President UCU Scotland

Marion Hersh
Carlo Morelli

North East HE

Bruce Baker

UK-elected members HE

Maria Chondrogianni
Marion Hersh
Carlo Morelli
Jo Grady

UK-elected members FE

Richard McEwan
Saleem Rashid

Disabled Members HE

Ciara Doyle

Black Members

Naina Kent
Dave Muritu

STV voting system

Please note that all members can vote in the elections for Equality, Casually Employed members’ and Trustees seats

To maximise votes for progressive candidates we ask you to do the following:

Please use your votes to first endorse all UCU Left candidates and only after that use lower preferences for other progressive candidates in each relevant list
Give your highest preferences in the UK-elected list to UCU Left candidate(s) from your region

9 November 201811 November 2018

Report on UCU HE pay sector conference, 7 November

HE votes to re-ballot and campaign on pay, equality, casulisation and workload – prepare to organise and fight

Following a serious debate about strategy, delegates at Wednesday’s HE Sector Conference voted to relaunch a hard-hitting national pay campaign, focusing on pay, equality, casualisation and workload.

Delegates came to the pay conference in the wake of industrial action ballot results which delivered an overall vote of 69% for strikes and 80% for action short of strike on a 42% turnout, the highest figures ever for an HE national pay ballot. However, as we know, only eight out of 147 branches of the union exceeded the 50% turnout threshold required under the Tory anti-trade union legislation.

The debate

Given the solid support for action there was no desire to wind up the pay campaign.

But there were tactical and strategic differences about how to go forward.

A number of motions (composite motion 1, and motions 2 and 3) argued for a selective re-ballot of members in branches which had come close to reaching the threshold. Motion 1 used the 35% turnout as a benchmark, allowing others to opt in. This would be a ‘disaggregated’ ballot, counted branch-by-branch, just like the most recent ballot and the USS ballot.
Against this position was a motion (Motion 5) which argued for an aggregated national ballot in the Spring Term and for fighting over next year’s pay claim. This means that all members get to vote, and all votes are counted centrally. The delay would offer branches some additional time to prepare.

The conference heard how branches such as Herriot Watt had sailed over the threshold (achieving a 65% turnout) by implementing a meticulous GTVO campaign. If this experience were generalised across the union, combined with speaking tours by HEC members and other measures, many more branches could reach the threshold in time to take action alongside those which already have a valid ballot.

The merits of aggregated and disaggregated ballots was debated. An aggregated ballot would mean that if the 50% threshold was crossed, all members could strike and take ASOS together. It would be a national strike as well as a national claim. But the disadvantage is that if the 50% threshold was not crossed, the dispute would be over. It is one roll of the dice.

The recent turnout at 42% is a lot higher than the ~35% turnout in 2016, but there is still some way to go to reach 50%. We would all be in it together, but there is an increased risk of not getting over the threshold. The fact that branch results would be hidden in the total also tends to soften the responsibility of individual branch activists to fight to reach 50% in their own institution. This is why UCU Left believe that in light of the Tory union thresholds, we have nothing to lose by disaggregating a national ballot. A national pay campaign, if necessary, could be led by a significant number who reached the thresholds.

For this tactical reason, UCU Left members argued to mount a disaggregated ballot and to build on the current ballot result. As one speaker put it, “our task is to march every branch over the 50% threshold” in pursuit of the national claim, an act that would strengthen their ability to fight independently in front of their own employer. Continue reading “Report on UCU HE pay sector conference, 7 November”

2 November 20182 November 2018

UCU Left report: HEC pay & equality ballot debate, 1 November

HEC members were presented with a report from a national official that accepted that we had received the best ballot result in a pay dispute – in turnout or strike/ASOS vote – but then argued that national pay bargaining had not delivered pay increases for members and therefore ‘alternatives should be explored’.

This report floats the idea that UCU should explore the scope for local bargaining over pay. UCU’s national policy, confirmed at a Sector Conference as recently as 2017, is that we defend National Pay Bargaining in principle.

It is true that the machinery for national pay bargaining at New JNCHES has reached an impasse.

But this is not an argument for local bargaining. Continue reading “UCU Left report: HEC pay & equality ballot debate, 1 November”

13 September 201813 September 2018

JEP reports… What Next?

After more than ten meetings and careful consideration of the state of the USS pension scheme’s finances, the USS Joint Expert Panel (JEP) has concluded that the way the scheme has been valued to-date could be much improved.

In diplomatic language, the JEP confirms what a wide range of independent critics of USS valuations, including UCU and their actuaries First Actuarial, last year argued.

The JEP comments that the much-challenged ‘Test 1’ had “assumed too much weight in determining the valuation” and call for a re-evaluation of the sponsor covenant. The report’s authors say that “greater weight should be given to the unique features and strengths of the higher education sector” — echoing what many of us have been saying throughout. Continue reading “JEP reports… What Next?”

23 June 2018

Brief report from the UCU Higher Education Sector Conference on USS, Manchester 21 June

This sector conference was called after at least 28 branches passed motions requisitioning a special meeting (20 branches’ motions were officially accepted). This is nearly half the branches involved in the USS dispute.

The original aim of the conference call was to pin down the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) and ensure that it was, in a real sense, transparent and accountable to members.

However due to the delay in accepting that the 20-branch threshold had been passed at UCU head office, the meeting eventually took place on 21 June, three weeks after UCU’s “ordinary” sector conference at Congress. Nonetheless the meeting was packed out by delegates from across the country. The same spirit that took the union through 14 days of strike action was evident in the room.

Disturbingly, a set of motions on JEP transparency (and in particular demanding UCU panel members do not sign non-disclosure agreements, or “NDAs”) were ruled out of order because “the decision had been made by members in the ballot”. Yet confidentiality was not even mentioned in Sally Hunt’s lengthy UCU ballot letters asking members to vote Yes. Sector Conference voted to overturn CBC and hear those motions, most of which were passed.

In addition to demanding JEP transparency, the conference also demanded answers from the JEP. The conference passed motions to demand that the JEP model alternative valuations relaxing the various constraints that USS had imposed (the infamous ‘Test 1’ and ‘de-risking’ among them) to publish the results, and to publish any additional assumptions. Similarly a motion from Warwick listed questions that the JEP needed to answer.

Sector Conference voted against any consideration of ‘Collective Defined Contribution’ schemes either by negotiators or by the JEP. These are Defined Contribution schemes available in other countries but where the investment risk is shared by all scheme members. Like individual DC schemes they still involve the transfer of risk to pensioners. Currently in the UK there is no legal framework for these schemes. For both these reasons UCU should not pursue them.

Other motions passed included planning bi-annual delegate meetings to review JEP progress at sector conferences during the dispute (with a consultative ballot of members to relaunch a dispute triggered if progress was deemed inadequate or problematic), and further refining the terms of reference of the USS Dispute Committee (essentially, the same principle).

Notably, UCU agreed a carefully-worded motion from Brighton that allowed branches in post-92 universities with USS members to have a say and involvement in campaigning over USS. The current voting policy (‘convention’) of pre-92 university delegates voting in a USS dispute with Universities UK is maintained, but the motion encouraged ways for UCU to consult with members through other means. Following intervention from the floor, and in an important moment of unity, both pre- and post-92 delegates were allowed to vote on this motion.

There was some considerable discontent that only 2.5 hours had been allocated for the event, to which 27 motions had been submitted. Inevitably, five motions fell off the agenda due to time constraints. These were all remitted to the HEC.*

This meeting built on the successful Sector Conference at Congress and further strengthened union members’ ability to hold the JEP and our negotiators to account while they make crucial decisions which will determine the future of our pensions. The stakes could not be higher and delegates recognised the seriousness of the task ahead.

The situation could not be clearer. If the JEP is unable to present a solution to the USS JNC that reduces the projected deficit, and thereby eliminates the cuts in benefits or increases in contributions planned, UCU now has all necessary mechanisms to restart the dispute.

*Motions 1-12, 14 and 15 were passed, and motions 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 were remitted to the Higher Education Committee. The delegates from Strathclyde representing motion 19 sought its withdrawal but was prevented from doing so, and this will need to be addressed at HEC. Motions A, C, D, and E were voted back onto the agenda and passed with some amendment.

Full list of motions

5 June 2018

Vote for action over pay and equality in the HE e-ballot #1

Times Up on Discrimination, Casualisation and Inequality in HE:

The USS Joint Expert Panel and HE Pay

Carlo Morelli and Sean Wallis

The consensus among everyone who took part in it is that the USS dispute was a fight over the future of Higher Education, not simply over the pension scheme. The reason is simple. The undermining of Higher Education by its supposed leaders has reached a critical point. The 2017 Higher Education and Research Act (HERA) accelerated the drive towards the fragmentation of the system and full privatisation. Mass redundancies announced at OU, Liverpool, Westminster and London South Bank are one sign of this process. Another was the threat by Cambridge and Oxford to go it alone. As one commentator put it, the USS crisis was Made in Westminster and driven by HE marketisation.

Our USS dispute galvanised this opposition to the attack on Higher Education. The Big Picture politics united professors and post graduates, irrespective of whether they personally had a pension or were close to retirement.

The formation of the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) to review the current valuation of the USS pension scheme, and the wider methodology for future valuations, has the potential to be an important step in limiting competition between employers, provided that the deficit is reduced and especially if the Government is forced to step in and guarantee the sector and the pension scheme long-term. If this happens then the employers will have an incentive not to leave USS.

In the short term, increasing costs on employers will restrict their ability to engage in expensive capital projects in the race for student numbers. But it may also cause them to quit USS, or like Coventry, expand by hiring staff in subsidiaries without access to the pension scheme.

The employers’ marketisation agenda is based on the assumption that students will continue to take on unsustainable levels of personal debt (and the Treasury will continue to write a blank cheque) in their desire for a decent education. Competition will intensify post-Brexit if EU student numbers fall.

If the JEP delivers a resounding rejection of the USS valuation, this can be the start of a wider defence of HE. However, the JEP will not do this unless the power that brought the employers and the USS Board to heel continues to be felt.

It was our 14 days of strike action that stopped the imposition of 100% Defined Contributions, and it is only the threat of future strike action that can ensure the JEP delivers for UCU members.

This is one of two key reasons why we now have to immediately mobilise for strike action in the autumn – not just to prevent backtracking over USS, but also over pay.

Pay

Graph: Real-terms HE Pay/Salary Cost to August 2017. August 2008 = 100%, estimated against RPI (solid line) and CPI (dotted line). The red line is the Salary Cost to USS employers after March 2016 when the paid an additional 2% into USS. Data from Office for National Statistics.

The employer’s UCEA proposal for a 2% rise in pay is derisory. It could amount to the biggest real-terms cut in pay in one year since 2008. Pay is currently around 13% less in value than in 2008. RPI in March was 3.3%, equating to a further 1.3% pay cut for 2018.

On top of this, there is the risk that if the JEP does not deliver, USS members in pre-92 will have to pay additional contributions of 3.7% of salary. A “2% pay increase” is increasingly looking like a 5% pay cut.

Our pay campaign must embrace the demand for No Detriment in pensions as well as pay. We should not be paying for the failures of USS and the employers or their marketisation agenda.

Equality, precarity and workload

The USS strikes focused attention on the inequalities in HE. Vice Chancellors have been granting themselves eye-watering pay increases. The Minister for Higher Education, Sam Gymiah MP, was forced to legislate that Vice Chancellors and Principals can no longer sit on remuneration committees that determine their pay. You really have to take corruption to new heights to have to have a Tory Government Minister to say that your greed has to end!

But it is not simply Vice Chancellors’ and Principals’ pay that is a disgrace. A host of other ‘perks’ demonstrate they have lost touch with the reality of life for staff in the institutions they run. When the new Principal at Edinburgh University, Peter Mathieson, moved from Hong Kong University, he was awarded an £85K increase in the salary of his predecessor (to bring his basic salary to £342K). He received approximately £42K in lieu of pension contributions, £26K in relocation costs and – just to make him comfortable – he was given a ‘grace-and-favour’ five-bedroom home in central Edinburgh to live in.

The second reason why we now need a serious militant fight over pay is that our USS dispute was driven by the experience of staff facing the intensification of workload and managerialism, and the twin evils of discrimination and casualisation. Our pensions dispute was never going to resolve the scandal of casualization, nor the scourge of gender, and other, pay gaps – but the pay campaign can take the fight to the employers. As Christina Paine and Sue Abbott, separately in this volume [Another Education is Possible], make clear, casualization and pay discrimination over gender and other protected characteristics are structurally embedded in HE.

Mobilising the enthusiasm evident over the USS pensions dispute across both pre- and post-92 universities on pay can mean we utilise the power we have in our membership to demand real action on casualization and pay discrimination. The pay campaign can resolve the unfinished business in our USS dispute.

We can also unite with colleagues in Further Education beginning a national fight over pay.

We are not alone

Indeed, we are not alone in the working class movement in seeking to mobilise a wider campaign over pay. Already Mark Serwotka, General Secretary of the PCS union, is calling for a national strike over pay. Together with PCS and other unions such as NEU and EIS, we could co-ordinate strike action for an end to the pay squeeze and an end to inequalities in the public sector.

Our USS dispute has given confidence to workers well beyond our ranks. It demonstrates that British unions are far from finished, they can overcome barriers placed in their way by anti-union laws, and they can renew their membership and win real improvements for their members. But that will only take place by leading a serious fight to stop our pay being cut, and end casualization, discrimination and inequality.

First published in Another Education is Possible, UCU Left, Spring 2018.