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Further Education Manifesto 2024

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

If elected, our General Secretary candidate will:

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

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

City and Islington picket, 2024

Introduction

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

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

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

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

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

A failed market

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

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

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

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

The soul of FE

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

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

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

A sector that celebrates equalities

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

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

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

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

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

UCU’s current FE industrial strategy is not coherent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How we approach national bargaining

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authors

Saira Weiner, standing for General Secretary

Peter Evans, standing for Vice President

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

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

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

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

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

Safia Flissi, standing for NEC Women (FE)

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

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What went wrong with the UCU Rising Campaign?

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

How the UCU reballot over pay and conditions missed the threshold

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— Saira Weiner, LJMU

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Keep up the strikes!

Manchester Strike 25/9/23

Our Union, our Disputes, our Sector in Danger

  • Solidarity is the way to rebuild

  • Build the reballot

  • We need to debate the action we need to win

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

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

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

Turn our anger into action

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The employers’ annus horribilis

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What went wrong?

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

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

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

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

What last week revealed about what might have been

Last week’s HEC meeting showed two things.

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy, indefinite action and the alternative strategy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where next?

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need democratic renewal, starting in branches.

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

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The MAB is ending, but the fight goes on

Lobby of UCEA employers during 30 November national demonstration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Relaunch the fightback

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

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

But there are some key questions to be discussed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy in Disputes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No new information about progress in the talks materialised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy takes time

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have to go forward

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

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

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

Strike. Vote. Win.

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

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

No Capitulation. Unity is Strength.

Build the Pickets. Keep up the Action.

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E-ballots and union democracy

A debate is currently underway about how democracy in UCU should work, with some members arguing that more use should be made of e-ballots. This is UCU Left’s view.

Union democracy as principle and necessity
For trade unions democracy is a matter of both principle and necessity. The moral legitimacy of trade unions depends on our capacity to be truly representative of our members. This means all members must have opportunities to vote on matters, to attend meetings, to vote and stand in union elections.

Trade unions exist to represent working people and to improve our conditions of employment. To do this effectively trade unions must be democratic. We need democracy so that we know what members think, what they want the union’s negotiating objectives to be, what action they are prepared to take and what settlements they find acceptable. Without democracy union memberships become disillusioned, unions lose members and policies are adopted which members do not support.

Effectiveness in political campaigning, parliamentary lobbying and industrial action all depend upon union democracy.

We should all agree on the importance of democracy. What do we understand by democracy and how do we achieve it?

The importance of discussion and meetings (before voting)
Unions work best on the basis of participatory democracy. By this we mean that members engage in debate at union meetings (both in-person and online), over email and social media and then vote on the way forward. In the discussion at a branch meeting members can put motions and amendments. We can decide what we vote on. Sometimes in discussion more options will emerge or a compromise position which everyone can support will emerge. This type of debate should be at the heart of our democratic processes. This is very different from a survey conducted from Head Office where there may be only a limited number of options.

We are absolutely for the right of members to vote. We are also strongly for the right of members to have the opportunity to discuss with other members before the vote is taken. This way members are not atomised. We may know what we think, but we also need to know what other members think and why. This improves the quality of our decision-making processes. We don’t want snap votes with no chance for discussion or debate before the vote. This is disempowering of ordinary members.

Some members may object that many members are too busy and ground down with heavy workloads to get to in-person meetings. Also such meetings may not work for members who are casualised and live a long way from university and college premises or who are sheltering on account of health conditions. This is where hybrid meetings are appropriate. However, meetings are held, members need time to participate. We should endeavour to negotiate union facility agreements which not only give reps time off for union work (time on in the case of part-time staff) but also block out time so that all union members can attend a branch meeting at least once a month. Many universities and colleges block out time, when they wish, for other sorts of meetings, so they could do it for union meetings.

Plebiscites
Sometimes decisions in countries and in organisations are taken on the basis of a plebiscite, for instance the vote on a new constitution or the decision in 2006 to merge AUT and NATFHE to form UCU. Where plebiscites are run well they are held after full democratic debate and on the basis of informed choice. Plebiscites can, however, be abused by dictators, for instance to ratify annexation of territory of to take away democratic rights. In these cases, the debate is limited, the plebiscite is often called without much prior notice and there is no scope for all opinions to be debated fully. The way the plebiscite is worded can deliberately close down options. Whoever gets to word the plebiscite gets to set the agenda for the debate.

We saw in UCU an attempt by a previous General Secretary to misuse a plebiscite when members were asked whether they favoured cutting the size of the NEC in order to provide more services for members. Why was a cut to democratic structures proposed as the means for financing more services, rather than some other means of financing? Note too that this formulation of the debate shut out the debate between servicing and organising models of trade unions.

Ways of voting and the law
Union members can vote by show of hands at a meeting, electronically or by paper ballot, often conducted via the post.

Under the current anti-union laws in the UK unions are forced to rely on paper post for the conduct of voting in NEC and General Secretary elections and in ballots on industrial action. The anti-unions laws should be repealed so that trade unions can use electronic voting. Reliance on paper post can disenfranchise workers who are working away from home. It can be a form of voter suppression. This may be particularly the case for workers in temporary and precarious employment.

Trade unions should argue that unions should be subject to no greater legal regulation than professional bodies in terms of how their internal affairs are conducted.

Incidentally there is nothing in the anti-union laws at all which gives workers any right to vote on settlements. The anti-union bias of the law, and the fact that it is really nothing to do with democracy, can be seen in the fact that union executives cannot bring members out on strike without a ballot, but can send them back to work without a ballot! Of course, we are not in favour of this. We do believe in the right to vote on settlements.

Consultation or decision-making?
Are we ‘consulting’ members or are members taking the decision? In the workplace we often face phoney consultation exercises, where the employer has already decided on the outcome and consultation is cynically adopted as a means of selling employer decisions to workers. Trade unions want nothing to do with this type of consultation.

We often talk about ‘consultative ballots’ on industrial action as a preliminary to an official ballot under the law. Consultative ballots of this sort can be used to build up a case for action or to wind it down. It depends rather on how the question is worded. One thing that is important is to ensure that all options are on the table and that questions are formulated after debate among members.

When it comes to a vote of members on whether to accept an offer from the employers, this is a decision which can be taken by votes at branch meetings or electronic or paper ballot. This is a case of decision-making not consultation. It should occur when the negotiators are satisfied that the employers have really made their best and final offer.

The management of industrial disputes
For unions to be effective members need to be involved as far as possible in the running of industrial dispute. This starts with involvement in formulating the negotiating objectives. The strength of the Four Fights dispute in Higher Education is that it involves issues of concern to many members, namely pay, pay equality, job security and workloads. Sometimes union leaderships restrict the scope of a dispute too narrowly, leaving out the concerns of substantial groups of members.

The design of industrial action strategy needs to be based on two main considerations: what members are prepared to do and how the proposed sanctions will bring the employer back to the table with an acceptable offer. It is important that the employment situation of all groups of members (full-time and part-time, working in a variety of jobs) is kept in mind when designing the industrial action strategy. Such strategies should be debated in branch meetings and at sector conferences. Strike committees should be formed to manage the day to day running of the action in workplaces.

Leadership and bureaucracy
Both elected lay trade union officers and full-time officials should engage in regular listening to the views of members and should report back regularly from negotiations. It must be understood that any attempts to treat the members as a stage army who can be wheeled in and out of action from a central office does not work. On the contrary industrial militancy and strength has to be build up systematically, through union recruitment and effective workplace organising. Union members will take action when they have confidence that their elected leadership has a clear strategy for winning and believes in the capacity of members to fight for their rights.

Vote Maria and Deepa and other UCU Left candidates for such a leadership.

Branches are encouraged to pass the motion below calling for a Special HE Sector Conference. UCU HQ is not calling a Branch Delegate Meeting before the HEC on 24th February so this will be the best way to ensure democratic control of our disputes during this period of action. Twenty branches are required to pass the motion.

This branch calls under Rule 16.11 for a Special Higher Education Sector Conference to be called to debate and direct the future of our disputes. Notice for this SHESC should be issued as soon as the number of branches requesting it reaches twenty.

If you have unused preferences after voting for UCU Left candidates, we recommended using them for the following other candidates:

HE South – Aris Katzourakis
President UCU Scotland – Sarah Joss
Representative of Casually Employed Members – Sam Morecroft
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2023: The year our side breaks through or another missed opportunity?

dozens of people at a picket at UCL

Twenty twenty-two will be remembered as the year that organised labour returned. More strike days have been lost since the summer than any time since 2011. Perhaps more importantly than the numbers is the attempt to coordinate the action across different unions. We have seen rail and postal workers strike on the same day as nurses and higher education workers.  The question that faces the movement is – will we coordinate and escalate our action in a way that allows us to win?

More unions are set to strike in 2023. February has been pencilled in as the month in which up to half million workers could coordinate their action including 350,000 teachers.

Predictably the media and press have responded to the strikes with the usual attempts to blame the strikers for ruining Christmas and putting people’s lives at risk.  Despite their relentless attempt to divide the ‘public’ against striking workers, polls show that the majority of people support those taking action for more pay and to protect services.

The government and the employers have significantly lost the battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of the public.

Commentators speak of the return of strikes as a central part of daily life as a turning point. However, if this is to be a turning point that benefits the working class as a whole then we need victories.

There have been some very significant victories especially in the private sector. Liverpool Dockers, Bus drivers and Barristers. These victories are important, demonstrating the power of hard hitting strike action over a quick period of time. However, they do not generalise in a way that lifts the whole of the class, as would be the case if the current national strikes won.

The stakes are high for both sides. We only need to look to Italy and France to see what happens when strikes don’t succeed in improving working peoples living standards – the far-right feeds on despair.

National strikes – more than pay

The government and employers are digging in. They are doing so because they are desperate to keep profit margins high at any expense. The Financial Times surveyed 100 leading economists, the vast majority of which believed that the UK will have the longest recession compared to other G7 countries.

They recognise that a victory for any one of the groups of workers taking national action would open the floodgates. It is one thing for a local employer to concede to local demands but completely another for government and employers to reach a compromise with a union taking national action. For them this is more than a battle about keeping pay below inflation.

The arguments put by governments and the employers are simply not convincing. The usual tropes of ‘wage rises cause inflation’ do not cut it. The obvious wealth inequality that exists in society is well known.

A new report shows that the FTSE 100 CEO pay increased from £2.46m in 2020 to £3.41m in 2021. Median CEO pay is now 109 times that of the median UK full-time worker, compared to 79 times in 2020 and 107 times in 2019. Median CEO pay is also up on pre pandemic levels – reflected by an increase of 5% from £3.25m median CEO pay in 2019. In 2022 CEO pay surged by 32%!  CEO pay survey 2022: CEO pay surges 39% • High Pay Centre

What creates such rage about this inequality is not simply that the rich are getting wealthier whilst we are getting poorer but they are doing so at our expense!

The government and employers are becoming increasingly aware that what lies behind the solid support for the strikes is a much bigger desire among the public than simply seeing workers win a pay rise which keeps up with the cost-of-living crisis.

The inability for the government and employers to win ‘heart and minds’ doesn’t simply lie with pay inequality. It is also because the ‘public’ want to see a more democratically run society which prioritises public services which deliver for society and people.  One in which profit margins must not be the concern for a national health service, rail network or a postal service.

The strikes have also highlighted how unhappy people are at work. The bullying managerialism that is rife in every workplace, the long hours and the struggle to maintain a work/life balance, are all leading to significant increases in physical and mental ill health.

In short, the government and employers are becoming increasingly alert to the fact that a deal that would be considered by the public as a victory would not only be a victory for increased pay but a defeat for everything this government, and all the ones that preceded it over the past 40 years, have stood for – the zealot like belief in the market, competition and profit as the only way society can be run effectively.

The strikes give the public a glimpse that it ‘is not necessarily so’.

Never been a better time to fight and win.

If you add to the mix the skill shortages in key sectors like health, teaching and social care and you have an explosive combination, which puts those who are fighting back in a good position to win – or should. All the arguments that are usually put forward by union leaders that we can’t escalate because we don’t have ‘public opinion on our side’ or, ‘members aren’t up for indefinite action’ or ‘the government/employers are too strong and united’ are ones that clearly don’t hold today, if they ever did.

Incredible ballot results, solid strikes, lively pickets and excellent solidarity all demonstrate workers are up for taking significant action including indefinite action. The government is clearly weak and divided. If they called an election around the theme, ‘who runs the country the government or the unions’ as Heath did in 1972, Sunak would get the same answer…

As for public opinion, unions, union leaders, strikes and coordinated strikes have never been so popular. The role played by the dreadful Starmer – not supporting strikes and disciplining Labour MPs who appear on picket lines – has allowed the Mick Lynch and other trade union leaders to fill the political vacuum left by a rightward moving Labour leadership desperate to prove that they are fit to govern.   

However, although a useful sign of the weakness of the government’s position, unfortunately public opinion does not win strikes – more strikes and solidarity do. The Great Miners’ strike of 1984-5 highest recorded public support for the miners was 35%. But this was not the reason why the miners lost. It was the failure of the TUC and Labour leadership to turn that 35% into solidarity strike action.

The high levels of support for the strikes at the moment can quickly evaporate if they are not pursuing a strategy that is clearly putting the government and employers under pressure.

Bring down the Tories: Make the country ungovernable.

We are in a very good position to win. But to do so we will need to take the action that can win. The government and the employers are working together to ensure that they inflict a serious defeat on the rail and postal workers to show others thinking of doing the same that they too will be crushed if they follow. Just like after the miners defeat in 1984/5 trade union leaders will be lining up to tell those arguing for action, ‘if the rail or postal workers can’t do it – what chance have we?’

The government appear to want to adopt tactics learnt from the past. The government response to the 1926 General Strike was to pass laws to make it easier for the employers to break the strikes, make scabbing easier and use the army. However, the government victory came not from new laws but because the TUC, supported by the left-wing TU leaders, called the general strike off on the seventh day. This left the miners to fight alone leading to an unnecessary devastating defeat. The debate about the defeat of 1926 General strike is pursued here in this interesting debate between Duncan Hallas, leading member of the SWP and Tony Benn (sadly, both now passed) – it’s worth a watch. Tony Benn & Duncan Hallas: Lessons of 1926 General Strike

It is clear that Sunak is preparing new trade union legislation to make it even harder for workers to take legal strike action. Worryingly, Paul Novak, the new TUC GS, response to these new laws is to threaten to take the government to court. This strategy clearly will not work and its failure will not only make it even more difficult for workers to withdraw their labour but it will leave those who taking action potentially isolated. 

We’ve been here before….

To maintain the level of support from the public as well as from the workers who are taking strike action there needs be a strategy which convinces that victory is possible.

There are times in which merely the result of an industrial action ballot is enough to bring the employers back to the table and agree a significant deal. Or a few days of action can force the employers to back down. But we can’t play by the same old rules using the same strategies. Their side isn’t neither should ours.

As argued above, currently the stakes are too high for the government and the employers to respond to significant ballot results or one- or two-days action. The employers are prepared to ride out several two day strikes over a period of months. The government and employers have held the line.  The RMT and CWU are right to shift to calling more sustained action over a shorter period of time.

This doesn’t mean that the government and employers can’t be beaten. They can. But to do so we have to raise the stakes ourselves through prolonged strikes over a shorter period to make the country ungovernable. This would increase the pressure on government, challenge their current strategy of waiting out strikes and provoke divisions amongst their side as some sections of the employers would fear increased crisis and rising and generalised resistance across society.

It doesn’t automatically mean that to win workers have to take indefinite action for months and months.  In fact, if the postal and rail workers had taken all their days of strike action all in one go over a week or two-week period it is very likely the government and the employers would have conceded by now.

For workers taking strike action to sustain more prolonged action over a shorter period it will take, out of necessity to facilitate such organisation, more active participation of those on strike with the decisions and running of the disputes through strike committees.

Without such organisation prolonged strike action will be far more difficult to achieve.

For those who are about to enter the field of battle the lessons to draw from the action so far is not to adopt ‘smart’ strategies, or look to limit days of strike action over a long period of time. The government and employers and prepared for that. What they are not prepared for is sustained action including indefinite action over a matter of weeks.

Coordinating and escalating on this basis will put real pressure on the government to concede as employer’s fear where this action might end if concessions aren’t made.

If 2023 is to be the year remembered as the year in which workers won then we will need to take the action that can deliver that victory.

Sean Vernell UCU CCCG Coordinating Sec and National Negotiator.

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The Cost Of Living Crisis is Biting Now – Escalate to Win

Lobby of UCEA employers during 30 November national demonstration.

#NoCapitulation

The General Secretary has followed up the video she released last week, in which she questioned the HEC’s decisions on industrial action, with a proposal of her own. In a glossy document, she sets out a timetable for limited strike action, a reballot and possible marking assessment boycott.

The General Secretary’s proposal

Having declared last week that a marking and assessment boycott would be organised for January, it is not included in this latest plan.

Worse, as an alternative to the indefinite action favoured by HEC, for the rest of our ballot mandate she proposes a ‘strategy’ of sporadic two- and three-day strikes in February and March.

The document claims this is a ‘professional’ strategy which is based on the ‘successful management of the RMT and CWU disputes.’ But those disputes have not broken through.

If this were agreed, it would squander the mandate for industrial action in 150 universities that we celebrated with much fanfare in October. Counting the three days we have already taken, Jo Grady is proposing a total of just 13 days across the entire six month period covered by the ballot, but in an on-off manner that loses momentum and the employers can easily manage as they have demonstrated since 2019.

This is nothing like the ‘shutting down of campuses’ that the General Secretary promised. It is not even an escalation.

It is a green light for the employers to sit tight and ride out the action, just as they did last year and just as employers and government are doing in the post, rail and NHS disputes.

Why did HEC vote for indefinite action?

The reason HEC voted for an early marking boycott and indefinite strike action was because we need to try and win the dispute early, ideally without having to reballot.

Going all-out in a sustained way with indefinite action run by the grassroots of the union means a hard-hitting shutdown of campus early in term that can win the dispute and limit the impact on students.

Not only have the post and rail disputes demonstrated that ‘playing the long game’ does not deliver results, but the rhythm of the academic year demands that we take action at every point where all institutions are teaching.

The negotiations are coming to a head now, and the time to escalate is now.

The reason why the employers were planning to table an early settlement on pay is that the period December to April is when universities know their tuition fee income and finally allocate their budgets for the year. If staff want a share of that budget, they need to apply industrial pressure over this period.

On USS, we have a real opportunity to recover members’ benefits. Two of our negotiators have outlined a credible proposal for reversing the theft of USS members’ benefits on 1st April 2023. But there is a short window for putting any such proposal into action.

We cannot afford to risk the momentum we built up by wasting two months of a six month window without taking action. That’s why a January marking boycott is important. But it must be followed up with meaningful strike action in order to defend members. The GS’s document spells out that there are seven weeks during February and March during which all universities are teaching. Calling an indefinite strike in February threatens the employers with up to 42 days of strike action which would shut down the campuses and take out Semester 2.

Democracy is not an added extra

There is a marked difference between the resources being put behind the communication of the General Secretary’s proposal compared to the HEC plan. HEC’s decisions were kept secret for more than a month by UCU, despite having been taken by elected lay members following democratic debate based on input from branches.

January’s Branch Delegate Meeting is being set up on the basis of a straight choice between the two proposals. In her determination to get the BDM to endorse it, the GS is incorrectly describing her proposed strategy as ‘escalating action from February through to April.’ But it does not escalate, and the last strike date she proposes is actually 22nd March. If she is successful in persuading the BDM, the pressure will be on HEC to reverse the decisions it took in November.

Branches should not rely on these questions. They should organise meetings for the BDM and express their views through motions. This is the tried and tested democratic process used in the trade union movement. Then we must demand that those views are discussed and debated at the BDM. In October HEC voted for BDMs to hear motions from branches, but this motion was ignored.

Democracy is not an added extra. Strike action of this scale needs an elected national strike committee that can coordinate between branches and can decide whether to pause or resume action.

Of course we all want coordination with other unions, and of course we have to take issues of hardship seriously. But coordination shouldn’t be used as a reason for individual unions to hold back action. While we need to raise solidarity across the movement, the best way to deal with the threat of hardship is to use the mandate we worked so hard for to win this dispute.

The General Secretary says that indefinite action has not been used by the ‘big battalions’ of the movement. That is true – but both CWU and RMT are now being forced to escalate their strikes because the employers are digging in and counter attacking. By contrast, an indefinite strike won barristers a hefty 15% pay rise.

Members have to take democratic control of this dispute, both at the BDM and in branches but also by the establishment of local and national strike committees to assess and develop action and involve the mass of members.

We need a proper debate in our union about the next steps in our dispute, not surveys with leading questions without a proper explanation of the merits and disadvantages of proposals.

We face the biggest attack on our living standards for generations.

We can’t just revert to the same old tired plan. We have to fight to win – and that means escalating as soon as possible.

UCU Left Open Meeting

Fighting the HE disputes
What strategy do we need and how should we decide it?

Wednesday 4th January, 7pm

The General Secretary has proposed an alternative to the strategy passed by the Higher Education Committee on November 3rd. Instead of a January marking and assessment boycott followed by an indefinite strike, she advocates ten days of strike action spread through February and March.

Ahead of the Branch Delegate Meeting, join this Q&A to find out why UCU Left members of HEC voted for a MAB and indefinite action, and why we need union democracy to win these disputes.

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For action that can win – shut down the campuses!

After weeks of silence and prevarication, the General Secretary has finally announced the decisions on industrial action taken by the Higher Education Committee (HEC).

We welcome the news that the marking and assessment boycott (MAB) is to be notified to start in January. But at the same time Jo Grady has undermined our unity by publicly declaring her opposition to all-out strike action just one hour before negotiations with the employers began!

Why did HEC take the decisions that it did?

HEC voted for an early marking boycott because, as twenty branches proved in the summer, it is a powerful weapon that needs to be used before our ballot mandate expires. At the time, the GS opposed that decision, telling us that the majority for a MAB at the Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) was not big enough. We are glad she has changed her mind.

The decision for all-out indefinite strike action was taken because HEC members understand we are in the fight of our lives. We have taken blocks of action before and the employers have dug their heels in and waited it out. Members have watched the post and rail bosses do the same in response to the CWU’s and RMT’s action. The BDM was not allowed to consider all-out action, but this is how we carry out Jo Grady’s promise to ‘shut down the campuses in Semester 2.’

This is not ‘playing in the hands of our employers,’ but taking action that can win. Pacing ourselves by spreading out the action over months will not work in circumstances where the bosses and the Tories are determined to hold the line. The cost-of-living crisis has raised the stakes. If we fail to break through, our employers will have carte blanche not only to continue cutting our pay, but to impose mass sackings and contract changes. The future of our union is at stake.

Democracy

To win these disputes members need to be in control. They have to know that the union’s leaders are accountable and that the decisions of our elected bodies are not going to be ignored. We need strike committees in every institution with delegates empowered to make decisions on our disputes at a UK-wide level.

UCU Left members were among the majority at HEC that voted for a January marking boycott followed by all-out indefinite action. We were right to do so. We have a powerful mandate for action. We can’t afford to waste it.

If you support action that can win, vote for UCU Left candidates in the forthcoming NEC elections.

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How many times must members be surveyed before they are permitted to fight?

Branch reps in mandated UCU branches were astonished to read yet another email on Monday from HQ asking them whether or not members were ready to launch a marking and assessment boycott. They were asked to respond in 24 hours.

Branches had been told to expect an email of Frequently Asked Questions about the marking boycott. But in this email there was no statement about how the boycott would be actioned and members supported. Nothing about the mechanics of the marking boycott and how strike action might back up ASOS – only that deductions ‘would face the immediate threat of strike action’.

It is not surprising that ordinary branch activists, reps and members feel abandoned. From the very start of this dispute rank and file reps have had to fight to push it forward, and ever since the last ballot mandate, the General Secretary has made it clear she favours not using it. Branches feel surveyed to death!

After delayed SHESCs, branch delegate meetings and HECs, and delays in issuing the mandate so that in many branches marking has mostly been done, members can see that the GS does not want the marking boycott to go ahead.

Democracy in our dispute

Perhaps most shockingly, the message asked reps whether their branch would continue to fight if others dropped out, either because the timing was wrong or members did not feel supported. The email sought to undermine the very premise of trade union collective action in a national dispute. This is a profoundly anti-democratic proposal.

The democratic solution is to call an urgent branch delegate meeting for branch reps with a mandate, to thrash out what the union should do. That is precisely what Motion 6 at both SHESCs called for.

Until such time as branches collectively decide to stand down a marking boycott, it should go ahead. In the meantime, there is no time to lose. No action should be stood down, and HQ should get their FAQs out!

Twinning, solidarity and keeping up the fight

Branches currently without a mandate need to invite reps from branches with a mandate to ‘twin’ and raise funds to support whatever action they decide to take.

Members not taking action should be encouraged to think about serious donations, such as a day’s pay for every week that a branch is boycotting. This way we can ensure members who do face pay docking are supported.

And we need to start preparing the ground now for a long reballot over the summer, to bring as many branches out as possible together at the start of term.

The stakes are extremely high. On the one hand we can all see universities like De Montfort and Wolverhampton attempting to make cuts in Higher Education.

On the other, the employers can be forced to concede over Four Fights, pay and pensions. The employers are exposed over their complicity in making unnecessary USS cuts, and some are prepared to offer huge bribes to staff to break the strike. We can win, but we need to stand together.