Liz Lawrence – Yorkshire and Humberside Regional Secretary
This year UCU members and staff prepared for Congress in the context of a long-running dispute between UCU as an employer and the UCU staff union, UNITE. At Congress 2024 the employment sector conferences didn’t happen due to industrial action by UNITE. We recognise and support the right of UCU staff to take strike action. The cancellation of FESC and HESC meant discussion on industrial strategy didn’t happen, which has affected UCU’s work and should have focused the minds of UCU SMT to resolve the dispute.
Trade union staff do not take industrial action lightly. We appreciate that for highly committed workers it is hard to vote for and take industrial action. So why have our UCU staff felt the need for action? The issues in the dispute include race discrimination, stress and workloads, union recognition and hybrid working. These are all matters which UCU as an employer should have resolved at the negotiating table a long time ago.
What sort of employer should a trade union be? Most members would agree a union should be a model employer. While we recognise that some aspects of a union official’s job – dealing with difficult and hostile employers and members who may be understandably distressed by bullying, discrimination and unfair working conditions – are unavoidably stressful, a union should be as supportive as it can be to its staff.
Unions should set examples as good employers, both because it is the right thing to do in terms of trade union values and because failure to do so will damage the union’s reputation — something which will undoubtedly be exploited by the employers with whom UCU negotiates for workers in post-16 education.
The majority of UCU staff are not experiencing UCU as a good employer. On the contrary they describe their workplace as ‘toxic and dysfunctional’. They say:
I feel more and more disheartened, depressed and stressed by working for UCU. I keep asking myself ‘why?’ Why am I no longer trusted to do my job? Why am I no longer allowed to collaborate with colleagues? Why do I suddenly need to be micromanaged?
Some of this no doubt sounds familiar to UCU members working in post-16 education.
This dispute is damaging UCU, both in terms of how demoralised many UCU staff feel and in terms of UCU’s reputation within the wider trade union movement. It is time for a negotiated settlement.
Solidarity with UNITE UCU!
More information and donations to their strike fund can be found here.
Richard McEwan (New City College) and Regi Pilling (Westminster Kingsway College), both NEC and national FE pay negotiators
The Starmer government has signalled its intent to continue austerity, cutting adult education budgets and slashing welfare and disability payments relied on by many students and staff. The DofE is recommending a 2.8% pay award, but it’s unfunded meaning more realterms pay cuts. As we are all too keenly aware, colleges were left out of the last pay award entirely. The promised £300m will not go far after years of cuts, rising student numbers and rising costs like national insurance, which the government is no longer covering. The situation is unlikely to improve with the Comprehensive Spending Review later this year – further education funding will still be woeful and unable to meet the ambitions of the New Deal claim. In this context, the decisions of this year’s FE sector conference will really matter.
Events have moved significantly since the special sector conference last spring. Employers, through the National Joint Forum (NJF), have committed to exploring how binding national bargaining can be implemented in England FE. Two special meetings have scoped this out, tied to a desire for pay parity with schools. England FE remains the only part of UK education without proper national bargaining, making it the poorest sector and unable to put coherent demands to government.
Although it is still early days, there is a convergence of interests as employers seek to address the recruitment crisis. It is clear that a new bargaining system is coming, but whether it favours us or the employers will depend on our industrial strength. Achieving a binding framework will require additional government funding and cannot be won through local strikes alone. Therefore, UCU needs to launch an England-wide campaign of protests, demonstrations, and strikes. Securing a national framework could transform pay and conditions — we must seize this opportunity with a decisive strategy.
Moreover, the FEC and the secretariat now agree that the time is right to escalate the New Deal claim to national action – this is also reflected in the motions to conference. However, whether this turns into action remains to be seen, especially with the IBL / CUD (the right in UCU) holding a majority on the FEC. They have historically opposed action, including recently opposing a motion for UCU to hold an indicative ballot to find out if members would strike to gain the equivalent 5.5% school teachers’ pay award. Therefore, the critical question is how and when we escalate our current campaign.
We could be in a much stronger position. In March 2023, a majority of England FE members voted for national action — an achievement that took the NEU years to reach – however little action was taken by UCU. This academic year, action by 30 sixth form colleges on FE pay over the 5.5% award caught the attention of employers and government- most 6th form colleges have now gained that pay award.
Yet UCU took two years to issue a briefing explaining our campaign for national bargaining, and no local FE strikes occurred this year — a first. Last year, despite strong indicative ballots, over 75 branches opted out of action. This demobilisation and lack of national leadership led to low settlements and made life harder for those branches that fought. The local action strategy has run its course. If we are to win, we cannot repeat these mistakes.
At this year’s FESC all the motions call for nationally coordinated action. However, timing is key. In FE, the best time to act is near the start of the academic year, when local and national negotiations occur and before the October census date, which is critical for student funding. Management are very worried about strikes at this point as students still have the ability to move to other institutions. Striking after enrolment but before the census date gives us maximum leverage.
We also need mass, coordinated action. Members understand that local strikes alone cannot address sector-wide issues. A campaign mobilising colleges together will be far more powerful and will raise confidence amongst members.
We support all motions. FE2 should be amended to encourage strong branch participation. What we are trying to do as a union requires branches to act in the overall interest of the union’s claim. FE3 and FE9 call for a national ballot, which we also support. Whether aggregated or disaggregated, the important thing is a united, England-wide ballot. It has been clarified to FEC that all previous national ballots were technically disaggregated. This should be explained clearly to the conference. If passed, the FEC can implement the motions as we have for previous national ballots.
We hope you have a good conference and that we come out with a clear plan to fight for our claim and win it. If we get this right in addition to fighting for our own pay and conditions, we will have a strong voice to stop more attacks on our communities’ access to education.
After 15 years of seemingly limitless market-led expansion of Higher Education, the UK university sector is facing the biggest crisis in its history. It is worth briefly remembering how we got here. Any solution to the crisis has to talk about how we get onto a stable financial footing, and what that will look like.
The 2010/2011 Willets Plan for English Universities had the following elements: • Up to £9,000 tuition fees for home students (equating to a profit of some £2,000 per student) • Abolition or partial reduction of the block grant subsidy (which was calculated on a quota basis per subject area) • (2014) Abolishing student recruitment caps (apart for regulated courses like Medicine) • (2017) Changing the regulatory regime from a quality assurance model to a deregulated ‘consumer complaints’ one.
These home undergraduate tuition fees were backed up by student loans costing some ~£20bn a year to the Treasury. Alongside increases in home student fees, unregulated overseas student fees were allowed to soar.
This system initially appeared to work, although not how politicians had imagined. First, nearly all universities found that charging less than £9,000 per student did not help them recruit, so the Tory idea of a ‘genuine’ marketplace with different prices turned out to be a pipe dream. Second, faced with a lifetime of debt, students tended to pick subjects they were confident about. Humanities, rather than maths and science courses, found themselves the main beneficiaries. This meant that students tended to repay their loans at a lower level than Willets and co had planned: over the then 30-year loan period, the Treasury reckoned only half the loan would be paid.
Nonetheless, after caps on recruitment went in 2014, many universities gambled on long-term expansion, taking out 20 or 30-year loans to build new campuses. But that was OK, interest rates were at an all-time low and property prices were surging. What could possibly go wrong?
Then in 2017, Jeremy Corbyn nearly found himself Prime Minister as a leftwing Labour Party programme saw his party surge to nearly beating Teresa May (with 40% against the Tories’ 42.4% of the popular vote) – an increase explained in part by the youth vote and a popular call to abolish university tuition fees. In response, the Conservatives announced a review of HE funding, to which the financier Philip Augar was eventually appointed in 2018.
Augar’s review was delayed by first Brexit and then Covid. Augar’s solution, eventually implemented by Michele Donelan in 2023, was to tinker with the market formula, changing the loans system to a 40-year repayment scheme with an RPI rate of interest, and lower earnings thresholds for repayment. The Institute for Fiscal Studies calculated that working class students would pay back more, wealthy students would likely pay less. Whereas the earlier scheme was closer to a hefty 9% graduate tax, the new scheme was more like a Treasury-backed loan, which students would be made to pay. These changes added at least £30,000 to the cost of education over the student’s lifetime – some estimates put figures closer to £60,000.
What would a sustainable alternative look like?
By 2019 the market system was getting close to failure, for anyone who cared to look. In 2020, a rapidly-convened Convention for Higher Education statement was launched in Parliament during the Covid lockdown. The proposals it put forward did not abolish the market system, but were designed to rein it in and address the social inequalities created by the market. They included:
• Restoration of maintenance grants. • Resources to tackle inequalities of access (prioritising social groups in disadvantaged circumstances, whether on the basis of locality, socio-economic class, ethnicity or disability; and to unemployed adult returners). • Immediate reduction in tuition fees by 30%, with the balance made up by the government. • Restoration of student recruitment caps, backed up by direct public funding to support struggling institutions through a temporary dip in recruitment. • Senior salaries should be restricted to a 6:1 ratio, and casualised staff given secure contracts. • Abolition of racist and discriminatory policies towards international staff and students. • Democratisation of internal university governance.
The Convention Statement was supported by the Labour Shadow Minister for Higher Education, Emma Hardy. Her statement at the launch is worth reading, especially in the light of shallow promises from Bridget Phillipson and Jacqui Smith. The Convention’s broad-based efforts in getting the ear of the Government, Lords and Labour in opposition contrasts with UCU’s so-far feeble lobbying campaign.
The fight we need
We cannot fight redundancies of 10,000 a year on a university-by-university basis. We need to take the fight to Government. When that has been done – as in Dundee – the union has been able to spearhead a defence of Higher Education and marshal the overwhelming majority of public opinion in our favour.
University of Dundee planned to cut 632 jobs – the UCU branch took 3 weeks of strike action in February and March. UNISON and UNITE also balloted successfully. Together they built an excellent campaign with large pickets, general meetings and public rallies involving other trade unionists and politicians from the Scottish National Party, Labour and Green Party. But critically they pressured the Scottish government to act. Consequently MSPs questioned University of Dundee management and the Scottish government stepped in providing additional funding. The fight is not over for Dundee – but it shows what can be done when the fight is taken to government.
But most of the time our national union is not pushing out to make the big arguments. Instead union branches have been advised to negotiate locally. Branch reps are being asked merely to hand-hold members as they are escorted through notionally ‘Voluntary’ and inevitably Compulsory Redundancy Consultations. Even when branches are allowed to strike, it is often too little and too late.
Making the big arguments means we have to fight for the future – for the defence of subject areas and departments, as well as for universities and access. That’s why we need to spell out short-term demands as well as long-term goals.
We need to mobilise the whole of the union to take UK-wide action in the face of this crisis. At Congress there are several motions in front of HESC which propose slightly different mechanisms to put together a fight to defend jobs and defend the sector. Ultimately which the union decides to back is for HE Sector Conference to decide. But we should not allow differences in tactics to get in the way of unity around a common plan to mobilise branches, to win ballots and to fight to defend the sector.
Sean Vernell – City and Islington College, NEC and FE National Pay Negotiator
This year’s Congress takes place in one of the most serious political situations faced by those working and learning in the Post-16 education sector for many years.
In HE over 10,000 jobs are at risk this year alone, with another 10,000 staff threatened next year. This crisis is set to get worse. The wiping out of arts, humanities and social sciences in all but the most elitist universities is on the cards.
The government announced a cut of 3 – 6% to the Adult Skills Fund which covers adult education in England FE and local authorities. Subsequently more student places will disappear, on top of the one million already lost in the last decade. In FE the refusal to act on UCU demands of a national binding agreement and pay parity with teachers has led to the worst recruitment crisis in the sector’s history. A crisis that is set to get worse with the predicted 60,000 increase in student numbers in the next two years.
With workloads spiralling out of control across the sectors, physical and mental health issues are rising significantly as staff and students’ conditions worsen.
Post-16 Education is in crisis. And there is worse to come.
It is clear that the strategy pursued by the GS and her team of fighting college by college, university by university, to stem the tide of attacks on the basis of ‘building capacity’ has, at best, simply led to a stagnant membership as we lose more members through redundancy. This strategy has not prepared our branches to be ready to resist the avalanche of attacks that are set to come.
Trump leading the way and Starmer happy to follow.
Trump’s tariff wars are a part of a wider offensive his administration has launched on everything that is progressive.
On the one hand he is attempting to break with the free trade model of running the world, replacing it with a protectionist model that Trump believes will boost the growth of goods made in the US and with it jobs and prosperity. Neither economic models benefit working class people and neither model was designed to do so. Trump’s tariff wars will lead to layoffs in America and elsewhere, it will lead to a general worsening of workers’ living standards just as the free trade agreements did across the world.
On the other hand, Trump is using his ‘war on woke’ to divide workers and make it easier to push through the cuts to make America profitable again. Being tough on ‘illegal’ immigrants is a key component to this offensive.
The attacks on the transgender community are at the forefront of his agenda. A classic tactic used by all far right leaders – target a numerically very small section of society and hold them responsible for working class immiseration.
His attempts to prevent teachers teaching anything the right regard as ‘woke’ is chilling. If a teacher is found ‘guilty’ of teaching equality rights, it can lead to dismissal. The showdown with Harvard and Columbia universities shows how far Trump’s administration will go to enforce his anti-equality agenda.
Starmer is only too happy to follow Trump’s lead out of fear of upsetting the ‘special relationship’. Starmer and Reeves’ economic agenda is to attempt to make Britain profitable again through more cuts in the welfare state. As usual it starts with those receiving benefits and attempts to demonise those who survive on ‘state handouts’.
Whilst Trump cuts US spending on Nato to force European powers to increase their spending on arms, Starmer and Reeves are happy to comply. Starmer has ratcheted up the pre-war rhetoric to justify cuts to welfare – the extra £6bn a year to be spent on arms is apparently “necessary” to deter the apparent ‘real threat’ of a Russian invasion.
This appeasement of the right can be seen in Starmer’s continued support for the genocide in Palestine and his tough action on ‘illegal’ immigrants – keeping in line with Tump and an ineffectively attempting to marginalise Reform UK.
The jettisoning of Labour’s manifesto commitment to spend £28 billion to tackle the climate crisis is another example of how far Starmer will go to appease the far right. Farage, like Trump, blames the woke ‘net zero agenda’ for the loss of the steel manufacturing in Scunthorpe rather than the vagaries of the free market. Starmer, alongside the leadership of the steel workers union, refuses to challenge this lie.
We only have to look to the Birmingham bin workers strike, where a Labour Council is prepared to break the strike with troops, to see how the Labour Government will fiercely try to squash any resistance to its cuts agenda.
However, Starmer’s ‘warfare not welfare’ approach, predictably ‘has given confidence to Farage and Reform UK feeding off working people’s despair. Reform UK, now the largest far right party in Britain ever, is leading Labour in many of the so-called ‘Red wall’ constituencies.
National action to turn the tide on despair.
The only way to stop the far right cashing in on the despair of millions of workers is by providing hope. Resistance provides that hope. At this Congress delegates have the opportunity to vote for motions that can lead to resistance.
This congress and its sector conferences must be councils of war. The first decision we must take is to support motions calling on UCU to organise national action within the sectors and across. Congress and the sector conferences must signal a clear break from the college by college, university by university strategy adopted by the GS and her team. It is irrelevant how we get there – aggregated or disaggregated – as long as we do.
Our colleagues in Newcastle, Dundee and Brunel universities have shown how we can fight. They have been an inspiration to the whole union. We cannot allow them to fight alone.
We have time to rise to the challenge and resist the attacks that are coming and implement the decisions made by HEC and HESC to launch an industrial action ballot on pay. And in FE, to implement the FEC decision for an indicative ballot on pay, workload and a national binding agreement before FESC. Failure to do so gives the employers and government a green light to speed up their attacks on post-16 education.
Lessons are being learnt by the government and the employers – that if they are to win, they must hit us on multiple fronts at once. We no longer live in a world where we can fight one front at a time. If we are to be able to unite in the battles over pay and jobs, we will also need to take up the attacks on benefits, the trans community, migrants and refugees and also take up tackling the climate crisis.
We must argue that the funding of our colleges and universities must be a priority and not an increase in arms spending – we must demand welfare not warfare.
UCU’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) met on Thursday 12 December to consider what the union should do in the light of the financial crisis hitting our sector.
Tens of thousands of members face losing their jobs. Last year the union had no UK-wide campaign. Branches were left to fight alone. With the financial situation getting worse, and a limited window of opportunity to influence the Labour Government, we cannot afford to wait.
HEC voted for
a carefully structured ballot campaign over pay, to begin as soon as possible,
linked to a political campaign in defence of the sector,
on a timeline that would permit the union to call action before the end of the spring term.
Alongside the ballot and GTVO activity would be a campaign to raise the union’s emergency demands to save jobs, courses and our sector. It should include a conference to discuss the union’s demands. UCU has already agreed to focus on practical interventions that a Labour Government could make – to reinstate the block grant, for the government to cover or cancel the TPS contribution increase, and to reverse the hostile environment visa changes currently putting off overseas students from applying to university in the UK. We need to popularise these calls and debate them with politicians and ministers.
HEC also repeated the call made by Congress and the NEC for a major national demo to defend post-16 education.
We need to be imaginative and ambitious. In 2016-17, lobbying organised by The Convention for Higher Education, a loose coalition of UCU activists, academics and bodies including the Council for the Defence of British Universities, managed to force concessions from the Conservative Government in their Higher Education and Research Act.
The plan is for a joined-up strategy fighting for pay and jobs that can mobilise members to speak up about the crisis in Higher Education and put pressure on Labour to intervene. Our members are the best advocates for the sector. If this campaign develops successfully, we can also impact on Labour’s forthcoming HE funding review.
Branches facing redundancies and cuts were in the forefront of HEC’s minds. This strategy does two things: it brings our whole union together, and it puts pressure on Government to pay up for HE. If branches are fighting job losses they want to know that the whole union is behind them, and we all need to mobilise to insist Labour addresses the funding crisis of the sector.
HEC also voted to escalate procedures for branches facing redundancies to ballot for industrial action over jobs (see resolution 2 below).
The HEC meeting ended in messages of solidarity to branches facing job losses, and to UNITE UCU.
No-one should fight alone.
Resolutions from HEC meeting 12 December 2024 (including amendments)
1. Building industrial action ballot alongside a political campaign to defend HE
HEC notes the consultative ballot rejecting the pay offer and in favour of IA.
HEC resolves to
Immediately organise an IA ballot for a ‘fully-funded pay rise’ of 5.5% (2023-24 claim) linked to a political campaign for a fully-funded sector calling for emergency measures to save jobs, courses and the sector.
Run the IA ballot, HEC meetings etc., on a timeline permitting members to take UK-wide term-time strike action before the Easter break in most universities.
Recommend that the National Demonstration to Defend Post 16 education as decided at UCU Congress is called for a Saturday in February 2025 in order to support the ballot
Send out detailed briefing notes and organise regional GTVO workshops.
Call a conference to defend HE in early February promoting and debating UCU’s proposals. Organise regional lobbies and mass lobby of Parliament with the post-16 demonstration.
Consult members during the ballot on types of action through regional/devolved nations meetings and a branch delegate meeting during the ballot. Hold HEC in final week of ballot to plan action in anticipation of the result.
2. Responding to the Employers’ Offensive in the context of HE Crisis and Pay Dispute
This HEC notes
The HE employers’ offensive and the broken university funding model.
Long IA balloting-and-notification periods (TUA2016) and short windows for CR consultation (30 or 45 days, TULRCA1992) making timely ballot authorisation vital.
That branches should not have to fight on their own but that several branch that have taken or threatened industrial action have made gains or mitigated losses.
This HEC resolves to
Update branch officers weekly with a list of redundancy programmes by HEIs including VRs and CRs, and have a dedicated campaigning webpage.
Weekly anti-cuts meeting open to all branches.
Training on opposing redundancies via industrial action.
Hold a national demonstrations in early February in Wales, Scotland, England and NI and protests at MP’s surgeries in constituencies with threatened universities.
Shorten current ballot authorisation timelines, without requirement for consultative ballots.
Make every branch taking industrial action against redundancies a local dispute of national significance.
The large-scale redundancy programs and restructurings occurring in HE include a significant but varying silent redundancy of casualised workers across the sector. HEC resolves that the numbers of casualised work losses and ‘redundancies’ be added to the present count of redundancies to enable us to comprehensively assess the true scale of job losses across the sector and to inform our IA campaign with members.
The UCU’s Higher Education Committee met on Friday 27 September to decide on next steps in the 2024 national pay and related claim.
We have reached the end of a series of formal negotiations over pay and pay-related elements. Most employers are already moving to impose the offer on pay in members’ pay, but some — perhaps as many as 20 — have told union branches they intend to ‘defer’ for 11 months.
In the immediate term, HEC voted overwhelmingly to keep the dispute over pay alive. There was a recognition that we have both a major opportunity — to put pressure on the new Labour Government — and a major threat — a spiral of sectoral decline — to address.
As we set out below, the best way to develop a campaign to defend our sector includes an industrial campaign over pay. A UK-wide pay campaign can mobilise our members against the ongoing Cost of Living crisis and demand UK-wide solutions that Higher Education urgently needs.
At the Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) before the HEC, no delegate spoke in favour of the pay offer. Everyone knows that it is a pay cut, on top of the 11% cut in pay members suffered in two years previously. Staging the payment adds insult to injury. But there was doubt expressed by a number of delegates as to whether we could win more. All members, delegates and branches need a strategy to turn the situation around.
HEC voted to reject the pay offer and accept the pay-related elements of the offer. Some branches at the BDM reported that their members voted to reject the pay-related elements (terms of reference for negotiation over the other Three Fights) because the offer was too vague. But ‘acceptance’ simply means UCU agrees to go into negotiations in JNCHES over national policy recommendations. And it would mean that any industrial action and ballot would be specified in relation to the pay claim.
Such an ‘acceptance’ does not prevent branches fighting for best practice at a local level with specific local claims to employers. Nor would it stop the union campaigning publicly over casualisation abuses, chronic workload or discriminatory pay gaps.
Indeed, the strategy we attempt to set out below could provide a good platform to expose the current poor state of UK Higher Education working conditions.
The employers’ offensive
Over the last year, as many as a third of Vice Chancellors have asserted the need for cuts in jobs. We have seen a wave of major redundancy programmes across the sector. As well as creating suffering among our members in branches, the VC’s mantra of ‘affordability’ has cast a long shadow over negotiations at the top table.
Redundancy programmes and course closures are not new — ever since London Met’s infamous shrinking by two-thirds, numerous universities, including recently Roehampton, Wolverhampton and Goldsmiths have borne the brunt of horrific purges. But in previous years, major redundancy programmes were exceptional. Employers knew they risked undermining student recruitment in a ‘competitive marketplace’. Instead they mostly managed workforce numbers over time via means that avoided a public crisis, such as retirement, recruitment freezes and voluntary schemes.
Unfortunately in the face of this wave of redundancies, UCU’s approach has been to keep the fight local. Branches have been supported by the central union, but apart from independent rank-and-file initiatives there has been no attempt to bring the whole union together to fight them. Many members hear about redundancies, but in a piecemeal way. Their union is not mobilising them to offer solidarity. Even the Higher Education Committee has not been permitted to see a breakdown of redundancies branch-by-branch, despite HEC members asking for this information repeatedly.
There are two overarching factors as to why the last year has been marked by a redundancy wave. The first is the cumulative division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in market competition for students, worsening ever since 2010. Sooner or later the dam would break.
The second is the way our own union has reacted to the failure to meet the ballot threshold in Autumn 2023. Having botched the MAB by refusing to implement a summer reballot, and refusing to set up Conference-mandated strike committees to allow branches continuous reporting and control over the dispute, our union leadership effectively signaled defeat to the employers. Seeing their chance, Vice Chancellors rolled out their revenge across the country. The sector was now ‘in crisis’ despite universities sitting on billions in reserves.
We cannot continue like this. We have to say ‘enough’.
We need to discuss a serious strategy that can put meaningful pressure both on employers and the new Labour Government to change course.
We need to borrow from the successful NEU schoolteachers’ campaign for a ‘Fully Funded Pay Rise’, linking the fight over pay to the fight to defend the sector.
So how can we do that?
Building a new kind of dispute
We think UCU needs a joined up campaign, consisting of two elements: political campaign for a Fully-Funded Sector and an industrial campaign for a Fully-Funded Pay Rise. Many of the elements of this campaign are already policy, having been voted for by our Special Sector Conference in April.
This has to be a campaign that puts branches facing redundancies right at the centre. No branch and no members should be left behind.
Our inspiration should be the pay campaign run by the National Education Union (NEU). From the outset of their dispute, the NEU knew that schools in England and Wales would not be able to meet their pay demands. So they made that message part of their campaign.
They did not limit their demands to what the employers could afford. After all, a school with unbudgeted RAAC that turned the lights off after kids went home would not suddenly find cash for pay rises stashed away in a cupboard!
We need to take a leaf out of their book.
The public political campaign, which we suggest we could call For A Fully-Funded Sector, needs to be discussed and refined at branch, region and nation level, with initiatives taken up by all union bodies that can articulate both immediate and near-term demands to the new Labour Government. This would then be the backdrop for a ballot members over the national JNCHES claim (RPI+2% over pay).
HEC agreed to launch a consultative ballot as part of this campaign.
We need to urgently elaborate a strategy that all of our HE branches can get behind.
For a Fully-Funded Sector
The current home undergraduate tuition fee and loan system in England is unjust and unsustainable. Scottish universities have never had these high fees, and Northern Ireland and Wales had reduced fees. The falling real values of tuition fees, plus the competition for students built into the system, have cumulatively created the current crisis in the sector. Raising fees to £12,000+ a year, as Universities UK (UUK) wants, is socially regressive, unjust and politically divisive, will not address the ‘winners and losers’ problem, and could cause student enrolments to fall.
Recent reports that Bridget Phillipson is contemplating raising tuition fees to £10,500 a year shows that Labour is under pressure to do something. But it also shows that UUK are more influential than UCU right now.
In fact in the short term — without touching student fee levels — Labour can be called on to take three steps which together would begin to level the playing field in the sector. These were agreed by the Special HE Sector Conference earlier this year.
Cancel (or agree to pay) the TPS surcharge. These are extra costs the Treasury has imposed on TPS employers as a result of the most recent pension valuation. Schools and FE colleges are not required to pay this cost for at least a year. But Post-92 universities are shouldering an additional cost of between 3 and 5% of total salary. This partially explains why so many Post-92s have triggered redundancy programmes.
End the Hostile Environment, and ensure student visa routes are humane, affordable and rational. This means resurrecting post-study visas and visas for dependents. Labour should also abolish the migrant salary threshold for all. Right now universities outside of London cannot even internationally recruit postgraduate research assistants. Universities employ very large numbers of part-time teaching staff — none can be recruited internationally.
Bring back the ‘block grant’. This is a teaching grant to departments that was abolished for many disciplines (including all of Arts and Humanities) in 2010, and reduced heavily in others. We need to resurrect support for courses that have been denied historic levels of funding for years. This could be fixed at a student number cap, allowing the government to bring back caps on regulated student recruitment in stages.
These are all short-term demands. But none of them require tuition fees to rise.
Having cheer-led for £9k fees, the Vice Chancellors in Universities UK are now campaigning to raise even higher fees — to over £12k. But the demand to increase tuition fees is obviously unfair, and would be politically difficult for the Government. It is by no means clear that Labour will increase fees, but if they do, it won’t be enough for the VCs.
Although UUK envisage the tuition fee rise would be covered by the student loan, that would just mean that the student debt mountain would grow even faster than its current £20bn/year growth rate.
Student loans reached £236bn in March 2024. (Source: House of Commons Library.)
Paying universities directly via resurrecting block grants is simpler, focused and cheaper. It could also create some structural stability by financially underpinning departments previously reliant wholly on student recruitment.
The market system got us to the current crisis. The solution is not more of the same.
Winners, losers, and building unity
Raising home undergraduate tuition fees by £1,000 per student/year or so can ease finances slightly.
But it will escalate, rather than moderate, the market war-of-all-against-all that the sector was plunged into in 2014 when the Government allowed universities to make unlimited numbers of offers to home students (with the exception of Medicine). It will increase income to the universities with the most home students. And it will add to the loan every student will borrow and be expected to ultimately pay back — which may mean a further disincentive to working class undergraduates.
The employers’ approach is to set the national pay rate at a level the poorest university in the sector can afford. Then some universities may choose to make better offers to (some) staff. This process may be via permitted local negotiated arrangements (e.g. London Weighting or adjusted grade boundaries), one-off payments such as ‘Covid enhancements’, or, more individually, by promotion programmes and market supplements. Exceptionally it may be through universities exiting national negotiations.
The result is that what started as a ‘rate for the job’ national negotiation starts to become one of below-inflation offers followed by limited and selective local and personal negotiation. Collective bargaining, sector cohesion and principles of solidarity and equity between staff and union branches are undermined.
This process is working for the employers. Universities are spending ever-smaller proportions of their budgets on staff. In the 1970s, some research-based universities spent as much as two-thirds of their budgets on staff costs. 50 years later, and that figure has fallen to nearly half.
In their last-published release, the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency reported that UK-wide staff costs had fallen to a record low of 50.8% of expenditure in 2022/23. The proportion is lowest in England (averaged across many universities) and greatest in Northern Ireland. Recent fluctuations aside (Covid and USS being likely factors), the tendency remains downward. The last sharp downturn between the 2021 to 2022-23 financial years coincides with the sharp rise in inflation (raising capital and operating costs) and below-inflation pay rises.
Graph of staff costs as a proportion of total expenditure 2014-23. Source: HESA.
Paradoxically, as universities have become more and more focused on mass teaching, and more and more labour intensive, they have tended to spend a smaller proportion of their budgets on staff.
UCU, and its forerunners Natfhe and AUT, has always argued that pay levels should be based on inflation and the cost of living, not on what individual universities claim is ‘affordable’. Indeed, once we concede that argument, we know we become the prisoners of Vice Chancellors’ financial gambles. Employers show us empty balance sheets: redundancies become inevitable, and colleagues are put in a zero-sum game over jobs and pay. That is why a local bargaining strategy like the General Secretary’s latest misnamed ‘Building to Win’ strategy is guaranteed to spiral to defeat.
We need to reset our campaign, and fight over pay in a different way, one that does not let the Government off the hook for the Higher Education crisis.
It’s why we need an combined industrial and political campaign that calls for a Fully-Funded Sector and a Fully-Funded Pay Rise.
Redundancies and the Other Three Fights
A campaign of the type described here can create the kind of broad-based public political platform would also allow the union to highlight the worst managerial behaviour we see in Higher Education.
We all know that market volatility drives employment volatility. Fighting for secure funding is crucial to take on the public argument about job insecurity and redundancies. So when we say we want a Fully-Funded Sector we can also say we want Secure Jobs and No Redundancies within it.
The same approach applies to Workloads and Pay Gaps. We can put our members at the forefront of this campaign. Our colleagues are by far the best spokespeople. They can say that they must have Time to Think! Or they can expose the reality for women, Black members, Disabled members and others who find themselves held back by structural barriers to progression.
This should be an opportunity to enable our members to lobby MPs and others, to give members a platform to speak up about the real conditions in our sector.
This approach also gives our members a platform over Pay. We can show that we are both committed to fighting low pay in the here and now, and to viable employment for the next generation of researchers, lecturers, and academic-related staff.
Industrial action for Fully-Funded Pay
But we can and must go one step further — we will need to take industrial action to highlight how far our pay has fallen. Mobilising the union onto the picket lines and streets is crucial to show the public and MPs that we are serious. Without that step, we risk being written off as just another lobby.
The action that we took in 2022-23 was extremely hard-hitting. But it was focused specifically on employers. That meant long periods of industrial action. A campaign that is focused both on the employers and government could look different. What it looks like is something we need to discuss as a union.
Most obviously, we could start with specific days which have an impact in Westminster or other national parliaments.
But the first key focus for activists is to put UCU in a position to signal to the Labour Government that UCU members are prepared to return to picket lines. In order to do that we need to win an industrial action ballot.
Right now, to implement this plan we will need to take some practical steps. Rushing straight out to an Industrial Action ballot without explaining the strategy in branches would be likely to fail to mobilise the 50% of membership required to win a ballot. Indeed, it would also be a huge missed opportunity. We have vast knowledge and expertise among our members. We should develop the plan in conjunction with branch officers and reps.
A consultative ballot is coming our way.
We should not roll out a consultative ballot alone. The ballot should be part of an urgent serious structured discussion in our union about how we can put across our union’s arguments and mobilise our members in speaking up for our sector.
There will likely be more Q&As organised centrally. Branches can invite HEC members and national negotiators to speak at branch meetings.
This is a chance for all members to discuss how we can build a proper grass-roots membership-driven campaign to defend our sector, our colleagues and our pay.
Our sector is at an historic juncture.
The market system is publicly failing. We must make sure neither staff nor students pay the price.
National, not local, strategies are needed to win better pay and conditions
Friday’s NEC showed that far from strengthening her position at the top of UCU after her re-election, Jo Grady will find it increasingly difficult. There will be no honeymoon period for the General Secretary as the strategy she is pushing will not help members.
In HE members are facing a growing offensive. But the GS made it clear that the only strategy she will back is fighting university by university. The GS has given up on any pretence of defending national bargaining. UK-wide bargaining is vital for the protection of pay levels and employment conditions.
The growing mood is far from concentrating on merely ‘rebuilding’ branches, we urgently need a national strategy to ensure branches are not picked off one by one. Aberdeen have won a fantastic victory against redundancies but as Brighton’s dispute last year showed, employers will attempt to break union resistance at all costs. UCU HQ has been forced to call a special meeting of post-92 branches on 17 April to address these concerns. We need grassroots meetings to discuss how we defend existing agreements and conditions, such as the post-92 national contract.
Similarly, in FE the GS is in a battle with activists. The GS and her team are not supportive of an aggregated ballot to fight for a national binding bargaining agreement on pay and workload. Instead the GS prefers to continue to implement a strategy based on branches eking out local deals with employers college by college – a strategy that was voted against at a SFESC.
The GS and her team are attempting to implement the same strategy in both sectors – give up on defending or fighting for national bargaining, ditch any attempt to organise a UK-wide fight over pay, jobs and conditions, and focus on local bargaining college by college, university by university.
This is a disastrous strategy that plays into the hands of the employers. At a time when a weak and divided government has returned colleges to the public sector, and Labour is promising national bargaining when in power, we need UK-wide action more than ever.
We need to build the coming SFESC and SHESC to make sure the GS is not allowed to pursue this strategy.
Unfortunately, the discussion of NEC motions was timed out. There was also no time in the agenda for NEC to discuss the implementation of Congress motions. This is an abdication of NEC’s responsibility to give oversight of implementing these motions, and a key component in our union’s democracy.
GS loses her grip
The GS election has done nothing to resolve the union’s internal problems. Turnout was low and the vote was not starkly in favour of one candidate.
The union’s budget for next year, which was due to be put to this May’s annual Congress for approval, was rejected by NEC. There were several reasons for this.
After reports in the press that the GS’s had a 16% pay rise, NEC members asked for an explanation. It was explained that the GS was not given a pay rise but received money to help pay her libel fees. NEC were provided with different explanations as to how this was funded – one being unused holidays but another related to how she donates to the fighting fund. It was ambiguous and lacked the necessary transparency.
The dispute with UCU Unite members has become even more entrenched and acrimonious. Unite members’ grievances range from pay, breaching recognition agreements, health and safety, and accusations of bullying – each of these are very concerning. Many NEC members share the concerns of UCU Unite members over these. The amount earmarked for staff pay in next year’s budget was only 2.25% higher than last year. We were told that we had misread the budget, but not offered an alternative figure.
It was suggested that a special NEC should be called to discuss the budget and how to resolve the issues with staff unions. It is clear the GS and her senior management team are unable, or unwilling, to resolve these issues. For us, and many members of UCU, it is deeply worrying that these issues remain unaddressed.
NEC also rejected the plan to leave subscription rates static. Although it is good news that there is no need to increase subs, recent Congresses have demanded a more progressive subscription regime. Members expect the union to move incrementally in this direction, with progressive rates for our lower paid members. However, the current treasurer repeats the mantra of the previous one – that increasing the rates for higher earners will provoke them to leave the union and reduce the total subs take – without offering any concessions to support those at the lower end of the salary scale.
NEC was not in the mood to endorse this flagrant disregard of union policy and refused to endorse the proposal on subscription rates.
Officials now have to come up with a revised budget and subscription plan in time for Congress at the end of May. For a General Secretary re-elected only two weeks ago, this is a devastating loss of authority.
We need to organise for the SFESC and SHESC to ensure members’ voices are heard – to have branches united in national fights to resist the attacks in our sectors.
UCU General Secretary-incumbent Jo Grady has made a number of claims in her election campaign.
In particular, she says that were she re-elected she would treat her strategy, as outlined in her manifesto, as being ‘endorsed’ by members, and expect all members of the union, including elected members of the NEC, to follow it.
This is profoundly undemocratic for obvious reasons.
Strategy
The first problem with her approach is that the strategy itself cannot work. Any industrial strategy based on a limited industrial action programme set in advance is certain to fail simply because the employers will change their response depending on what the union does! The saying “no plan survives contact with the enemy” is attributed to Moltke the Elder, a German WWI general, but the point is well made.
You don’t need to look very far to see obvious examples. The strength of the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) in 2022 and the early part of 2023 lay in the fact that the employers did not know who was participating and therefore how to respond. On the other hand, the weakness of the MAB in 2023 came from the paralysis at the top of the union as Jo Grady and her supporters left members to hang out to dry over the summer.
Jo Grady herself had to abandon her ‘build now, fight later’ strategy in the summer of 2022 when rising inflation propelled members to support the #ucuRISING campaign.
Changing economic circumstances meant that it was politically unsustainable to advocate such an approach, and instead she had to call for members to vote to take action over pay. But she had no plan to follow through. She bypassed elected negotiations, agreed to stop negotiations over pay with the employers and tried to divert negotiations onto pay-related matters at ACAS.
Despite the rhetoric, Jo Grady has no militant strategy to defend our sectors. But worse, as a top-down leader who sees members’ industrial action as a walk-on-part in stage-managed actions, she struggles to adapt her strategy to face new challenges, such as the current employers’ offensive over jobs and conditions in HE. Moreover, it is profoundly mistaken to see industrial militancy as something which can be turned on and off like a tap. Union members will take action when they are confident they have a union leadership which listens regularly to members and which is capable of following a consistent industrial action strategy. But Jo Grady’s tenure of the General Secretaryship has been marked by stop-start inconsistency and demotivation of members.
Democracy
The second problem with her approach is that it is undemocratic. Trade union democracy is far more developed than Westminster elections: elections take place annually, replacing half of the executive committees each time, and policies made at national union conferences are binding on the executive.
In our union the rule is simple: members make policy decisions, and executive committees carry them out. This rule applies to union branches and to the national executive committee structure of our union. Congress is binding on NEC and HE and FE Sector Conference resolutions are binding on HEC and FEC. Rule 18.1 says
18.1 The National Executive Committee shall be the principal executive committee of the Union, and shall be responsible for the execution of policy and the conduct of the general business of the Union between meetings of National Congress, and shall abide by decisions passed at National Congress, subject to the Rules. The HEC and FEC shall abide by and implement the decisions passed by their respective Sector Conferences.
By contrast, governing parties in Westminster make decisions in cabinet. In some cases, parties impose policies that were never in their manifestos. Famously, in 1997, following a landslide election, Tony Blair introduced £1,000 university tuition fees, in order to begin a process of marketisation of Higher Education, a proposal entirely absent from the Labour Party manifesto. One can point to numerous other examples!
What Jo Grady is demanding is a centralisation of power around her manifesto that is incompatible with the rules of the union. If she and her supporters wished to make her proposals they would be obliged to win a vote in a quorate union branch meeting, put the motion to Congress or Conference, and then win a vote in those meetings. She wants to bypass both members and debate.
The General Secretary has tried to impose her strategy on the union three times already, and whenever it has been put to a vote, she has lost heavily. Now she is trying to wrap it up in the mantle of her GS election campaign.
But a small proportion of members tend to vote in this election, and they do so by choosing between candidates, not detailed strategy documents. Her strategy has no popular support, hence her attempt to present a vote for her as a vote for her strategy.
If you have not voted yet in the elections, please do vote!
What is increasingly at stake in this GS election is not just a vote for different candidates, but a vote for the future of our union as a democratic and effective union..
Do we want a member-led union which builds on the best of our democratic processes, where the General Secretary does what members tell her to do? Or do we want a union where democracy is reversed, and the members are expected to do what the General Secretary wants?
The alternative
We need to face up to the reality of industrial relations in post-16 education. The days of partnership with management and quiet words in the ear of the Head of Personnel have long gone — if they ever existed. Vice Chancellors want to see “blood on the carpet” and a weakening of our union. They have shown they don’t care about students or the quality of their degree teaching or marking. Most Further Education principals don’t implement national pay offers.
Our pay and conditions are under assault by university and college employers thanks to increasing inflation on top of a toxic combination of market competition, division, and a race to the bottom.
We should not underestimate divide and rule. Not every member is made redundant simultaneously. Some may be prepared to take voluntary redundancy if they don’t see a prospect for a fightback. Not every member takes part in industrial action at the moment.
We need to develop a culture in our union which encourages members to meet together, stick together and participate in strikes together.
To defend our jobs and rates of pay, we must organise members at the grassroots of the union and build members’ confidence to take action. Crucially, this means being honest. It means not abandoning them when the chips are down. Our members need a leadership who will support them when they resist. This means following through on decisions when they are made, like reballoting over the summer.
We have to rebuild UK-wide disputes because otherwise we are forced into fighting over what every individual employer tells us they can afford. Our employers will plead poverty. This is a recipe for a Hobson’s Choice between jobs and pay. HE will become more like FE just as our FE colleagues are attempting to get national pay bargaining back on the agenda.
Nothing argued here is “against strategy”: rather UCU Left is opposed to counterposing the idea of a strategy to the task of real-world organising. In fact, a serious industrial strategy means organising to fight on the terrain where the employers are weak and we are strong. It means, for example, preparing the political ground for industrial action, such as targeting professional bodies accrediting courses before a MAB.
But the best way to guarantee members have confidence in an industrial strategy is simply this: they themselves must be part of developing it in practice under the changing conditions of the struggle.
This means increasing democracy. We need members to have democratic control of strike action and MABs, continually day-by-day, week-by-week, through the development of strike committees in branches, and, in national disputes, linked up UK-wide.
The basic principle that members who take action should control that action is unanswerable.
But this is not just a moral imperative. We should never underestimate our strength.
As a group of workers, we are immensely strong. Other people can’t easily teach our courses or mark our students’ work. If we increase participation in our action, we can be more solid and effective still. That is why the HE employers pulled out all the stops to try to break our action last summer, risking their public reputations and their wider employment relations with staff. It is why FE employers pay better levels of pay to members in better organised and more militant branches.
But for members to have confidence in collective action they need to control it.
In a truly member-led union, democracy and strategy go hand in hand.
Report from the Special Further Education committee (SFEC) held on Friday 2nd of February 2024
The SFEC met to consider how to implement an aggregated ballot. This follows conference decisions to take our campaign forward if the employers have not addressed our claim for agreements that are binding on all employers.
This year the sector will receive a further £275m that is supposed to go to staff pay, this is at a time when the cost of living is still biting and the sector is in the midst of a staff recruitment crisis.
The SFEC voted overwhelmingly for a motion to prepare an aggregated ballot to be held in the summer term, if our demands are not met.
This will be the biggest campaign in further education for many years, one that could have the power to level up the sector leaving no-one behind.
This motion as amended was passed:
Winning binding national bargaining: Prepare for an aggregated ballot for 24/25
FEC notes:
The AoC’s willingness to enter into exploratory talks on implementing binding national bargaining.
The Respect campaign this year; eight colleges took strike action.
A minority of colleges implemented the recommendation of 6.5%.
The indicative ballot on national action: 87% of members voting yes, on a 51% turnout.
The FESC voted to prepare an aggregated ballot in 2024.
FEC believes:
Establishing binding national sectoral bargaining is achievable and would be a significant step forward to level up pay and conditions.
To win binding bargaining will require national strike action.
We can win an aggregated ballot
Strike action is most effective at the start of the academic year
The money is there for a significant pay award for all staff. £275m extra is available to colleges for 24/25
The special FESC 2023 voted to wait at least one year before moving to an aggregated ballot
The Summer 2023 FESC voted to prepare for an aggregated ballot in 2024
The case for a binding national agreement needs to be communicated as part of the campaign and ballot
“A new deal” and “a fair deal” are overused slogans
The NEU won an aggregated ballot and pay for all members
We can learn from EIS, they linked their strikes to the elections, raising the profile of education. They won back national bargaining
A mass campaign can firm up Labour’s support for FE
FEC resolves:
Submit an England claim to the AoC on pay and workload, with the focus on our demand for binding national bargaining
Prepare an aggregated ballot in the summer to start after the FESC, to enable strike action in September
The campaign should be called Levelling up the sector: leave no one behind
Call separate national briefings and produce publicity for all members making the case for binding national sectoral bargaining, workload and pay
The workload campaign will highlight and expand on these demands:
Agreed national policy on the delivery of guided learning hours
The resourcing of more administration staff
Nationally agreed class size recommendations for 16-18 and 19 +
A set of agreed workload and wellbeing protocols such as working from home agreements
A set of agreed boundaries for contacting staff by email or phone
UCU will campaign for and highlight:
A 10% increase in pay. This is a first step to restore more than the 35% cut in real pay for FE staff over a decade.
A commitment to close gender and ethnic pay gaps
To reduce the use of precarious employment
Launch an initiative aiming to recruit five GTVO volunteer contacts per branch for the duration of the ballot.
Produce regular forum and briefings to equip volunteers how to GTVO
Agree a target for every branch to map their workplace and recruit 15% more members
Produce a timeline for the campaign and ballot admin working back from a first strike in the second week of September
Hold regular forum open to all members to get involved in the campaign scheduled at times when staff can attend
Publicity should include FAQs, stickers, leaflets, and a dedicated website space
Promote equal pay with school teachers
Highlight excessive CEO pay as part of the campaign
Prepare a Parliamentary lobby as part of the campaign
Send MPs a briefing pack asking them to pledge to support our demands
FAQS – Frequently asked questions
What are binding sectoral agreements and why does it matter?
National negotiations covering colleges in England take places at the National Joint Forum (NJF). The Association of Colleges (AoC) represent the employers side and negotiate with the staff unions annually. Agreements are sent out to employers as non-binding recommendations.
Sixth-form colleges, who do a job very similar to ours, have binding sectoral bargaining. That means all employers have to abide by the agreements on pay and conditions. Similarly, for several years as a result of a national campaign, colleges in Wales negotiate nationally and all employers honour those agreements.
If we are to stop the pay gap with schools growing, and that between colleges, it is vitally important that we reform the national bargaining environment to ensure decisions are binding and upheld by all employers. This is what is meant by levelling up the sector and the way to achieve it. We want to ensure every member receives a decent pay award and we stop the race to the bottom on pay and conditions.
The employers agreed to “exploratory” talks as a result of our campaigns and demands. We need to turn words into deeds and it is recognised this will require a big campaign that involves all members.
Is pay, workload or a binding agreement the central campaign?
The three issues are linked. Unless we secure binding national agreements employers don’t have to honour pay awards. We also want the employers to adopt national workload agreements that would cover issues facing every college. That would include class sizes, how contact time is recognised, guided learning hours, admin time, deadlines and how and when the employer communicates with staff such as out of hours emails.
It is not one or the other. The squeeze on staff is less pay, longer hours, and more intense work and less autonomy over how we work. We have to fight back on all fronts and ensure all our employers stick to agreements.
All elements of the claim should be front and centre. Winning binding agreements is key and would be a huge step forward, especially for all those staff in colleges whose managements have not abided by decisions. But it also impacts the more organised branches where they have formed decent local agreements on pay and workload, only to see those eroded due to market conditions.
The union has to make a clear case for why binding national agreements matter. In the last campaign our demands for workload and binding agreements were not amplified, giving employers the wrong signals. That cannot happen again.
Who are we fighting: our employer, the AoC or the government?
Because of incorporation, colleges are individual entities. The AoC is an employers’ body representing the largest group of employers in the sector. We do not directly negotiate with the government despite the fact they legislate for the sector and provide almost all college funds.
Our employers, the AoC and the government could all play a significant role in implementing a new binding sectoral bargaining framework.
The employers could agree to a new binding framework tomorrow and the AoC could be the vehicle to implement that under guidance of the DfE. If our employers are unwilling to do so, then an act of government could impose a new bargaining arrangement on colleges.
We have seen the government step in before. For example, the government recently intervened to bring colleges back into the public sector to scrutinise and oversee funding and spending. Likewise, an instruction from government for colleges to merge set in motion a significant restructuring of the sector almost overnight. The big ESOL campaigns of a few years ago were able to shape government thinking and funding having a dramatic impact quite quickly, from imposing cuts to reversing them.
That is why in our campaigning and publicity we need to apply pressure to our employers and the government with demonstrations, lobbies and strikes. Where there is a will, there is a way.
Will college leaders concede a new binding framework?
There are times when the interests of employers and our members coincide, albeit for different reasons.
The fact the the AoC agreed to explore the implications of our demand for binding agreements reflects the fact that some employers are already looking at how to level the playfield. On their terms they face a staff recruitment and retention crisis pushing wages up between sectors. Many new teachers will look to schools where pay is £9k on average higher. This is coupled with competition between colleges, with some better prepared to pay more or forced to do so due to strike action.
That is why some employers are looking for ways to control wages and break out of a bargaining framework that favours competition.
What can be at stake is not whether we win a new binding framework, but whether one is ultimately imposed on us that is not on our terms. The more our voices are heard and we are visible, the better we will be able to navigate the introduction of a new binding bargaining sector.
Can we campaign during an election year?
If we campaign during a general election we can raise the profile for further, adult and prison education. The EIS were successful at linking their industrial demands during the Scottish elections.
Were Labour to come to power we would be among the first to be knocking at their door.
Can we win an aggregated ballot?
Yes. The e-ballot result last spring showed a majority of members supported a national ballot.
An aggregated ballot could ensure all branches are able to take action together at the same time. This could make a big difference. Issues like pay are national and UK-wide: that is the source of our funding.
Many branches are fairly small, with 100 to 200 members. So in many senses, the task is much easier than in the big universities where UCU has been successful at winning aggregated ballots.
Data from recent reps’ surveys and ballots shows we are not far off securing a technical majority. But if the union made a concerted effort to win an aggregated ballot we could do much better. A campaign by the whole of FE could be a sum of more than its parts. We haven’t had a serious national campaign in a long time.
What we have seen is many branches with historically small dedicated committees, who have not campaigned or been on strike for years, join action and then leap to the fore in recent campaigns, recruiting members and reps and having big lively pickets.
This has been the case in many unions. The junior doctors’ union has flourished in recent years. The RCN nurses’ union never had a strike in 106 years and then had huge member involvement. The NEU planted a flag to go for it and were able to win an aggregated ballot in much more difficult circumstances than than us.
What if my college is not in the AoC?
We want as big a critical mass as possible. Where colleges are not in the AoC, those branches should be supported to put in demands to be included in a new binding sector framework and be covered by pay and workload. Those branches could be balloted in parallel and strike alongside everyone else if our demands are not met.
When would we go on strike?
The union will submit an England claim to the AoC.
We may not need to strike at all. That is, if our employers agreed to an above-inflation pay award, which they can afford, and a national workload agreement covering all colleges. And an undertaking to implement a new sector bargaining framework for all. That is all in their gift.
Otherwise, the union will prepare to win a ballot this side of summer. If we are successful in winning that ballot. Then the motions proposed we strike and march in September. We can exert maximum pressure striking in first weeks of teaching and within the census date of colleges.
Dharminder Singh Chuhan, FEC UK-elected, Sandwell College
Nina Doran, FEC UK-elected, City of Liverpool College
Delmena Doyley, FEC London & East, Croydon College
Peter Evans, FEC LGBT+, Ealing, Hammersmith & West London College
John Fones, FEC South, Bridgwater & Taunton College
Naina Kent, FEC UK-elected, Hackney ACE
Richard McEwan, FEC London & East, New City College
Juliana Ojinnaka, FEC Black members, The Sheffield College
Regi Pilling, FEC Women members, Capital City College Group
Doug Webley, FEC Midlands, South and City College Birmingham
Elaine White, FEC North East, Bradford College
Sean Vernell, FEC UK elected, City and Islington College
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.
