Category: Debate

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UCL’s Academic Board finds the IHRA definition not fit for purpose, urges the College Council to retract its adoption

  • University College London’s Academic Board to recommend to the Council of the College that it should set aside the IHRA definition of antisemitism, and replace it with a more appropriate alternative.
  • Report finds the IHRA definition “not fit for purpose within a university setting and has no legal basis for enforcement.”
  • Findings raise serious questions about the implications of academic institutions and public bodies adopting IHRA definition. 
  • Report issues a scathing criticism of Secretary of State Gavin Williamson’s threats to withdraw funding from universities if they do not adopt the IHRA, describing this as putting their autonomy under threat. 

UCL’s Academic Board has overseen the most detailed and forensic study of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism yet, investigating its fitness for purpose following UCL’s adoption of it in 2019. 

The product of a year-long study by a Working Group established by the Academic Board, this major Report examines UCL’s decision in 2019 to adopt the IHRA definition. It has involved consultation with eminent lawyers including Philippe Sands and Sir Geoffrey Bindman, as well as academic experts on antisemitism such as Brain Klug, and representatives of UCL’s most relevant academic departments and of its Student’s Union. 

The ground-breaking Report found that the IHRA definition “is not fit for purpose within a university setting and has no legal basis for enforcement.” In considering alternative possibilities, given the inadequacy of the definition, the Academic Board decided that it should recommend to Council that the IHRA definition should be replaced through a process designed to identify a replacement definition. 

Furthermore, the Report also found that the IHRA definition is unhelpful in identifying actual cases of antisemitic harassment and is therefore a weak tool for effective university action. It observes that the definition “obfuscates rather than clarifies the meaning of antisemitism, and may in fact make it harder to identify and understand how antisemitism works.”

The Report finds that the IHRA definition risks conflating legitimate criticism of the State of Israel, or of Zionism, with antisemitism, thus threatening freedom of expression on campus. “By blurring these boundaries”, it states, “the IHRA working definition risks undermining academic freedom.”

With its measured and powerful analysis the Report delivers a devastating blow to Secretary of State for Education Gavin Williamson’s attempts to pressure universities into adopting the IHRA definition. 

His threat to withhold funding from Universities that do not adopt the definition, it says, demonstrates “how university autonomy is under threat.” It concludes by stating that “if universities are not permitted to use evidence, scholarship, research and logic to rebut Ministers’ political demands, then our autonomy and independence are seriously in peril.”

Ben Jamal, Director of Palestine Solidarity Campaign said:

“This study, the most systematic yet undertaken by a group of eminent academics, reinforces the concerns that have been expressed by a wide range of bodies since the UK government adopted the IHRA definition in 2016. The definition has been used to prevent both discussion of the facts of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and calls for action to address that oppression. It thereby undermines freedom of expression at Universities and more widely. 

Gavin Williamson needs to stop pressuring universities to adopt. Moreover, all public bodies considering adoption need to address seriously the findings of this report.” 

Sir Geoffrey Bindman QC  said:

“Concerns about the coercive attempts to force public bodies to adopt the IHRA definition are clearly shared by lawyers and academics alike. The Government must cease its pressure on institutions to curtail debate and restrict freedom of expression.”

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Report on NEC Briefing on Section 44 and collective action

UCU’s National Executive Committee met for the first time this year on 22nd January for a “briefing” and discussion on the potential for collective action in colleges and universities in defence of members facing the risks of in person activity during the worsening Covid-19 pandemic. We were disappointed that NEC members were not allowed to bring motions or make any policy decisions at the meeting but pleased that we were able to discuss some of our key concerns

The meeting was reminded of legal protections offered in the Employment Rights Act 1976 and the Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 providing individual workers with the right to refuse to work in an environment within which an immediate danger to life exists and imposes a requirement on employers to take reasonable steps to ensure employees’ safety. Referred to in abbreviated form as ‘Section 44 and 100’, UCU has developed a range of draft letters members can use to demand the right to refuse to undertake in-person activities:

https://www.ucu.org.uk/covid19letters

NEC members heard a detailed report on how the National Education Union successfully mobilised its members in halting the re-opening of schools earlier in January. As a result Gavin Williamson was forced into a humiliating climbdown and closed schools just one day after opening. The NEU were hugely successful because of the on-going discussions and involvement of members taking place at all levels. The strong leadership shown by NEU and its NEC in campaigning for mass use of Section 44 and 100, by encouraging members and non-members to submit letters to their school Heads, and the co-ordination of this through their branch and reps network, was crucial to this. NEU’s level of organisation is far beyond what UCU is doing. In NEU processes for industrial action ballots have been fast tracked and steamlined, and all NEC members are required to work with local branches to co-ordinate the use of Section 44 and 100 letters and then report back to the NEC, to ensure accountability of elected members. Branches and reps at local levels are organising WhatsApp groups to facilitate immediate communication with members. As a result, NEU have been able to repeatedly call national meetings of thousands of reps at just a few days’ notice and held a historically unique meeting of 400,000 participants.

The briefing also heard from the UCU General Secretary and other officials about the actions the union has taken in supporting individual members; including Jo Grady’s welcome public statements calling on universities and colleges to move away from in-person activities or face industrial action from UCU. These include the success at Northumbria University which was the first union branch in the UK to successfully ballot over section 44 and 100, and at individual colleges, such as New City College, where the UCU branch replicated the initiatives of the NEU and rapidly stopped in-person teaching last week without a ballot. Notwithstanding these individual examples, the overall approach of the UCU leadership has unfortunately been in stark contrast to the mass mobilisation, national strategy and strong collective action taken by NEU. In general, UCU’s strategy has been to focus upon individual rather than collective approaches, placing a servicing rather than an organising model at that heart of our response. We have not matched anything in NEU and more problematically not attempted to emulate their experience. We have struggled to get the nationally elected bodies to meet and members meetings are top down affairs restricting engagement and discussion. Even our NEC emergency meeting was a ‘briefing’, with only a short time for discussion and devoid of any potential for decision making. Astonishingly in the face of the public health crisis, the NEC is not set to meet again until 19th March.

Following the briefings NEC members had the opportunity to discuss the UCU response to the pandemic.  Across the NEC there was extensive frustration over this servicing model approach which clashes with the understanding of the lessons taken from the Strike School which recognises the importance of bold, decisive action and the mobilisation of the membership at the heart of our approach to winning demands. It was argued repeatedly by NEC members that this is impacting especially hard on our Black, disabled, women and casualised members, as we are well aware that inequalities have been reinforced due to the Covid crisis. These frustrations were not directed at staff, who are recognised as working as hard as the members in ensuring the union operates in the midst of the pandemic. However, it was recognised that the NEC does need to look at the extent to which our staffing is sufficient for an organising union.

NEC member after member across the board spoke of the increasing dangers of the working environment in both FE and HE, and in our communities, with moving references to the loss of friends, family and colleagues to COVID.  Many reps expressed the view that there is no time to wait, and UCU leadership needs to urgently build collective action to assert our right to work safely. Disappointingly the General Secretary made no commitment to take on-board elected representatives’ concerns, focusing instead on the logistical challenges of organising mass online meetings. It is clear from NEU’s experience that not only is such mobilisation possible, it is also essential.

Fortunately, due to pressures from NEC members, both FEC and HEC are due to meet over the next few weeks. These need to move quickly to change the direction of the leadership of the union. While most universities and colleges have very limited in-person activity the current branches resisting job cuts and the return to in-person working show the need for urgent, nationally co-ordinated, robust action by UCU. The terrible deaths of our members, such as Donna Coleman at Burnley College, cannot be allowed to be replicated by our managements which will put ours’, and our students’, health at risk for their profits.

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Democracy and Strategy in a trade union

rank and file open debate at UCU Congress 2018
Rank and file open debate at UCU Congress 2018

Mark Pendleton, a newly elected member of UCU’s NEC and supporter of the Grady4GS slate has produced a commentary on the structures of the UCU’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) and NEC that raises a number of important points worthy of debate. https://medium.com/@mark.pendleton/what-to-do-about-ucu-dysfunction-67dca1d00a4a

Whilst it will come as no surprise I disagree with Mark’s analysis, as outlined below, he makes a number of relevant points that should be subject to serious discussion. Before I do so, however, let me say immediately I completely disagree with the personal, vindictive and unnecessary comments made towards those currently standing in the Vice President election in UCU. To suggest four of the five candidates are ‘serious’ and ‘one completely un-serious’ is the kind of comment most of his article decries. I have no idea who he is talking about but perhaps it would be best to have kept his derogatory thoughts to himself.

The reason for debating the analysis Mark puts forward is a recognition that trade unions are not homogenous organisations. They, like all collective political endeavours, combine heterogeneous sets of viewpoints and those within them seek to convince the majority of their particular perspective on questions of importance. Any historical study of movements for social change identify these differences whether it was between the moral force and physical force ideas in the Chartists movement or between the suffragette and suffragist wings of the women’s suffrage movement. Within trade unions, such as UCU, this is given the term ‘factions’ as an identification of the members who share distinct viewpoints and act collectively to debate these viewpoints among a wider membership and challenge the dominant position of the full-time officialdom, or bureaucracy within a trade union. As such factions are essential for the development of strategy and tactics in any organisation.

Mark raises some substantive issues, reflecting on his five months as a member of the NEC:

  • The NEC is dysfunctional, it gets through barely half of its business
  • The NEC is dominated by two factions: the ‘right’ in the union around the Independent Broad Left and the ‘left’ in the union around the UCU Left
  • Together, these two factions prevent the union addressing and discussing the strategic decisions needed to be examined by UCU.
  • Mark, argues against factions, a point I’ll return to shortly, but concludes ultimately a new faction is required to overturn the dominance of the other two.

Whilst, a very brief summary of his argument I hope I have not trampled too uncaringly upon his central thesis.

The first points of Mark’s argument are easily dealt with. For something to be ‘dysfunctional’ it must by definition first ‘function’.  As Covid-19 hit the sector the UCU officials and officers chose to close down the organisation, not simply cancelling Congress but also all of its elected structures. HEC, NEC, the NEC sub-cttees and the regional bodies were all cancelled as the decision making and control of the organisation was concentrated into the hands of a small number of individuals. From March onwards it was several NEC members (including UCU Left NEC members) which agreed this was a completely untenable position for UCU to adopt and the organisation had to restart its functioning if members were to be supported in the drive to on-line teaching.  Where did UCU Left get this view from? Looking across the trade union movement it was obvious that other unions were taking a very different approach to UCU. In particular, the newly formed National Education Union was responding to the crisis by developing a hugely successful organising agenda with tens of thousands of members joining mass meetings and stopping management riding roughshod over terms and conditions in schools. Mark continues to be dismissive of this approach but UCU’s conservatism in response to management’s driving through changes has left members in a weaker not stronger position as the Covid crisis deepens.

The second point Mark makes is that HEC and NEC rarely get through half the agenda. Given each committee now has meetings lasting half the time of a face to face meeting, half the agenda is pretty much what you would expect … isn’t it? One would have thought that if we hold meetings for half the time than normal then holding twice as many might be the obvious solution to this.

Mark’s fundamental argument is not, however, the ‘dysfunctional’ meetings we sit through nor the inability to get as much discussed as we might all like but the lack of ability to develop strategic discussions and to direct the political work of the union. For him the union’s decision making structures are broken. Here, I have to say I have much more sympathy for Mark’s argument but also have to say he surprisingly, for a historian, fails to address more fundamental reasons why this might be a conclusion to draw. Mark’s focus for attack is ‘entitled brats’, disabled individuals’ unwillingness to get used to new technology and the political influence around the IBL, broadly the Communist Party and the right of the Labour Party and, in the case of UCU Left, the Socialist Worker’s Party and the Corbynite, Momentum grouping in the Labour Party. Mark has little to say about the historical role of the trade union bureaucracy in managing industrial conflict and the historical tensions between a bureaucracy and rank and file activists of a union for an explanation of the rise of factions within all trade unions.

Instead, for Mark, political factional allegiances override putting members’ interests first. It is important for Mark to place the ‘blame’ here for the reason that Mark and others in the Grady4GS slate continue to repeat the mantra that they are not a faction and are independent members unaligned with any faction. I would just like to remind Mark that it was he who contacted me to discuss block voting in the HE Vice Chair’s election on behalf of the Grady4GS faction. I must say I look forward to the recording of voting records for UCU meetings, something passed in January 2020 but not yet implemented. We’ll then be able to evaluate the independence of many of the ‘independent’ members of the HEC and NEC.

If the Grady4GS faction is indeed a third faction in the leadership of UCU let us look at its political programme. But first we should ask what it should be called – Grady4GS or Grady4GS/USSBriefs or just USSBriefs. I think we should be respectful to one another and use the name those associated with the faction prefer. Please let us know.

Mark outlines a series of potential advantages for this – his proposed faction: a suggested openness to new activists, the opportunity to introduce new ideas and a less hierarchical approach to trade unionism.

Whatever anyone’s criticisms of UCU, its rules encourage the involvement of new activists. All elected members have time limited terms of office and a throughput of newly elected members is essential for the continued operation of the union. All elected members to HEC and NEC are elected for two years with a maximum six years of uninterrupted service on the NEC. The problem of the NEC is not one of preventing new activists getting elected but the patronage that has often operated in UCU since its inception. History matters. Within the old AUT (Association of University Teachers), and continuing into the UCU, officials and officers utilised patronage to facilitate individual’s advancement within the union. Members who had no links to their local union branch, or who were looking for an alternative career path than that on offer in Higher and Further Education often gravitated to working within the union. It is still the case today that members on the NEC have proudly stated they had no role in their local branch or never held any position in the union prior to getting elected to NEC. It has also been the case that some members of NEC were not even working in the sectors we represent but have still stood for election, participated in debates and voted on the outcome of negotiations for members without any accountability. This was at its most stark in the first of the USS disputes when UCU negotiators were abandoning the final salary scheme whilst they themselves took their final salary pension. The left in the union has had to organise itself as a faction in order to increase the accountability and representativeness of the members elected onto the UCU structures since its inception. The Grady4GS faction as it operates currently is certainly a retrograde movement towards a patronage-based approach to developing an elected leadership in UCU.

What about developing strategies for successful industrial action? It was the left in the union, organising collectively, that led to the challenge to the tokenistic and minimalistic approach to industrial action in the past, as Mark acknowledges. The left in the union supported the establishment of a Commission on Effective Industrial Action (CEIA) under Sally Hunt and wrote and moved a motion to democratise election onto it. CEIA recommendations were debated and passed at UCU Congress and provided the blueprint for the successful 2018 USS dispute. No one has a monopoly on new strategies but these need to develop within a debate among the membership not simply a narrow elected committee. To suggest there isn’t a strategy within UCU is to ignore the union’s history and the development of industrial relations in Higher or Further Education. If the Grady4GS faction have alternative proposals make them open and debate them among the membership. To date the Grady4GS strategy has been to dismiss strike action and abandon the Four Fights campaign … for what? No strategy will be successful unless the members are party to the discussion and decisions over that strategy.

The third identifiable element within the Grady4GS faction’s approach is the rejection of hierarchical organisation. However, the faction currently is doing the opposite of what it suggests. As a faction which denies its own existence there can be no open debates about strategy or accountability within the faction. We have seen this with the one way communications from the centre and the refusal to take questions directly from members at meetings. Who is actually making the decisions in this faction? Mark actually admits this within his statement that he is not a member of the campaign team for the Vice President Grady4GS candidate. Was he asked? If not who excluded him? Or did he decline? In this respect the Grady4GS faction operates in a manner identical to that of the IBL. Who is and who is not involved in these factions is only known to those within the selected group. There is no openness and entry is closely controlled by those at the top of the hierarchy.

The rise of the Grady4GS faction is fundamentally a reflection of the wider political currents within UCU itself and society as a whole. There is an older small ‘c’ conservative political viewpoint within the membership which provides the IBL with their support and it is the IBL who have traditionally acted to promote the UCU bureaucracy’s viewpoint within the membership. Thus the proposals for 2 hours strikes and striking at weekends did not come from the IBL but instead from among UCU officials. There is also a more militant activist layer who want a much more militant approach to industrial relations in the union which largely looks to UCU Left for its voice and finally there is a new right within the labour movement that is also reflected in the membership of UCU. This new right is characterised by opposition to the more militant movements that have emerged in recent years and within the Labour Party this is associated with the leadership of Sir Keir Starmer.

Carlo Morelli

NEC member, UCU Scotland President and UCU Left member

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A fighting union has to fight: Finance is a serious issue – not a blame game

Unite Rep from Wood Green Bus Garage attends Imperial College UCU picket, after agreeing to donate £500 to the strike fund
Unite Rep from Wood Green Bus Garage attends Imperial College UCU picket, after agreeing to donate £500 to the strike fund

UCU’s strategy of defending USS pensions, pay and conditions in FE and HE has led to over 16,000 low paid new members joining the union. This is testament to the scale of casualisation in both sectors and to the expectation that a trade union will take demands for change seriously. This rise in recruitment has also been replicated in the increase in the wider dues-paying membership, with the result that we now have record membership levels in UCU, bucking the trend of other unions. The Left in UCU has been central to this transformation.

The 22 days of strike action in HE this year was the decision of branch delegates at a Special Higher Education Conference and backed by HEC. That was the right decision. Imagine what the HE sector would be looking like if UCU wasn’t recognised as an organisation that had to be taken seriously? However, the threats from marketisation have not gone away with the Covid crisis, rather they have intensified as employers seek to rescue their market-driven failures and break the resistance of UCU.

The General Secretary’s presentation on Thursday 2nd July to branch officers about the decision to trigger a levy of all members in order to replenish the union’s fighting fund was an exercise in retreat from these changes. The presentation was also an attempt at self-exoneration and to cast blame on the Left in the union.

This was not an open meeting or webinar, but a one-way broadcast whose only element of interaction was the answering of a hand-picked selection of pre-submitted questions.

The blame was thrown around liberally:

1) We were told that it was the NEC’s fault that the levy was a flat rate because only the NEC has the authority to determine the meaning of the union’s rules and had decided on this interpretation.

However, the General Secretary did not explain how, if the NEC had constitutional control over the process and chose a flat rate, it was now possible for her to reinterpret the rule to allow for a graduated levy!

2) It was claimed that it was the NEC’s fault for overturning cuts to strike pay and that the fighting fund would therefore run out before all the claims from the strike action had been paid.

The NEC was right to vote against cuts in strike pay in February. We were preparing for a second wave of strikes in HE which brought in 14 new branches, those that had exceeded the threshold in their reballot. Cutting strike pay would have been a signal that the union was not serious about the battle we were fighting.

3) The officers of the HEC were blamed for failing to implement the motion calling for a task force to organise a solidarity drive from the rest of the trade union movement.

In fact, the motion was passed by the NEC not the HEC. It is moreover the job of the General Secretary to manage officials to ensure that decisions taken democratically by the elected lay committees are implemented. 

4) It was suggested that it was the fault of non-striking members that more money hadn’t been raised from them during the strikes; members in branches that voted for strike action but missed the threshold apparently did not want to support their striking colleagues.

In fact, the willingness of members to support the strike fund is shown by the fact that over £20,000 was received in a single day last week.

5) The General Secretary attempted to lay the blame for the union’s financial problems on the majority on the HEC which pushed through an allegedly reckless programme of national strike action.

Members voted overwhelmingly for action in ballots for both disputes. We were right to fight then and it is right to fight now. The attacks members face will not be successfully resisted by a strategy limited to a local branch-by-branch approach. Instead we need a national campaign and national action. To do otherwise will result in members being abandoned as the sector goes into decline.

The attacks are gathering pace in both HE and FE. The need for a UK-wide defence of jobs and education is becoming clearer by the day. We have no choice but to fight. That will mean raising money. We should be unapologetic about appealing to other trade unionists for funds, reciprocating in turn when they fight. And, if we have to raise funds from our own members, it must be done in a fair and progressive manner.

Financing our struggles is an important task. It is not a weapon to be used to dish out blame as part of factional arguments within the union.

We need a recall NEC to ensure finances in the union are treated seriously and that all other means are shown to have been exhausted before any levy is introduced. If that means showing our expenditure in our accounts, then so be it. We need a structure that reflects members’ desire for a fighting union.

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We are under attack. This is not the time to end the Four Fights.

Four-fights Square

As part of a concerted attempt to persuade members to accept UCEA’s offer and end the Four Fights dispute, the General Secretary and those attempting to justify her position have launched an attack on the union’s industrial action strategy.

At briefing meetings on the offer, Jo Grady argued that rejecting it would trigger immediate reballots because of a decision already taken by the union’s Higher Education Committee. As reballots would be futile while campuses are closed, we have no choice but to accept, she argued

In fact, this is a deliberate misrepresentation of the situation. A rejection of the offer would lead to further action, but there is no reason that reballots have to take place immediately. Nothing commits the union to that, and in any case HEC will have the opportunity to amend the timetable it has provisionally set.

If this whole argument is designed to panic members into believing that there is no alternative to accepting a rotten offer, what follows from Jo Grady is an attempt to explain why the offer is so poor.

Wrong to fight?

It was a mistake, we are told, to have balloted on a disaggregated basis. This inevitably meant that we mounted the fight with a minority of branches taking action, weakening our leverage and enabling the employers to ride out the strikes despite the high level of support they had.

No one in the union believes that it would not be better to have a ballot mandate that allows the entire membership in HE to take industrial action. Better still, there would be no anti-union laws. But as Jo Grady admits, because the total turnout was 49.5%, if we had run an aggregated ballot, we would not have been able to take any action at all.

So, amid the praise heaped on members for their commitment and determination during 22 days of strikes, what the General Secretary is really arguing is that the Four Fights dispute was a mistake.

Let’s remind ourselves why we decided to have a pay and equalities dispute this year. It was because members felt that it would be unacceptable for the fight in HE to be confined to a defence of USS pensions. For the second time in two years the UCU would appear to care more about the future comfort of the more secure and better paid academics in the ‘old’ universities than it did about members suffering under the epidemic of casualisation and the persistence of inequalities across the sector as a whole.

So, for all the professed commitment to the cause of anti-casualisation, Jo Grady is arguing that we should have done nothing for our precariously-employed members, our women, BAME and disabled members, for another year.

Not only were we right to mount the Four Fights, we were right to adopt the dual dispute strategy of coupling it with the USS dispute. Because they included the big battalions, the 60 branches initially taking action represented the majority of the union’s HE membership even before they were joined by an additional 14 in reballots.

The final part of the Grady argument is that we need a period of reflection and preparation before any future industrial struggle. Rapid, ‘direct action’ strategies are ‘superficial’, argue her supporters, however much they appeal to casualised members with urgent problems. The CoronaContracts authors are right to point out how patronising and offensive this argument is.

Responding to the assault on jobs

But the wider problem is the assumption that we can all return to work as normal after accepting the offer and deliberate as to when we fight our next battle and over what issue. It is as though the leadership of the UCU has not noticed that university managements up and down the country have responded to the pandemic with an assault on jobs, wages and conditions with a specific focus on those of us who are casualised, which dwarfs anything we have faced hitherto. The idea that we have the luxury of picking the terms or the timing of our next fight is seriously out of touch with reality.

The underlying problem here is that unlike our sister union, NEU, the UCU leadership has failed to respond to the crisis with the urgent ramping up of activity and organisation that is demanded by the situation. While the NEU holds mass online rallies of 20,000 members and organises forums to arm its reps and officers, the UCU limits its dispute briefings to two members per branch as though it still has to pay their rail fares.

As UCU branches consider the offer, thousands of fixed term staff are losing their jobs. Online working has pushed workloads through the roof, while even the pretence of caring about equality has disappeared from our employers’ agenda. These are precisely the issues of our Four Fights, now turbocharged under pandemic conditions.

Why would we consider settling our dispute on the basis of an offer which gives no protection in these circumstances? To do so would be to raise the white flag to our employers, to tell them that our resistance is over and to leave our members to the mercy of their bosses.

The first precondition of resisting the attacks that are now gathering pace is to reject the deal. The timing of reballots can be debated and decided on the basis of the best chance of success. It might even make sense to declare a new dispute focused more tightly on the nature of the specific threats we now face.

In the meantime, we need to act. UCU Left is joining the HE Convention in a call for a Day of Action on June 1st. We urgently need to show solidarity with the NEU in its opposition to returning to unsafe workplaces and with our members and branches facing the threat of mass redundancies.

We should down tools on that day to attend mass rallies of the type pioneered by NEU. UCU Left members will be making this emergency proposal at Tuesday’s branch delegate meetings and at HEC on Wednesday.

Now is the time to organise and build for the massive fights ahead and to galvanise the union for future action, not to capitulate.

Reject the offer! Fight for jobs and for safe workplaces!

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Organising to defend post-16 education in the Coronavirus era • A UCU Left hosted mobilising and strategy meeting

Greenwich picket

7.30pm Monday 4 May

Click here to register

We will devote this weeks webinar to discussing strategy and how we mobilise to defend post 16 education.

In this organising meeting we will share experiences of what is happening on the ground where you are. This week’s meeting will not be recorded as we map out a response from the left. We invite all those who have reported on campaigns and initiatives to join us.

All are welcome.

The magnificent response to the health workers call for solidarity shows the potential for a more humane and decent society. How can we as educators rise to the challenge of our times.

There are number of immediate and emerging questions:

  • How do we defend our frontiers of control?
  • How do we start to position the union to take up the challenges post Coronavirus?
  • How do we raise the level of organisation and coordinate our response across the union?

We will also be discussing:

  • How do we prepare for the battle to save HE?
  • How do we respond employers in FE and HE pushing through redundancies and restructures?
  • Under what conditions do we return to work?

We want to use this meeting as a mobilising forum to build for our next webinar on the campaign for no return to work until it is safe.

It will also be an opportunity to hear from our NEC members reporting back from Friday’s NEC.

You may be interested in this discussion paper submitted in advance to the NEC.

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Home working, now and beyond:  Are we moving to emancipating electronic cottages or alienation in the home?

In this article I explore various aspects of the changes in education and working practices which we are seeing in our colleges and universities as a result of the Coronavirus crisis.  I address health and safety, contractual and pedagogic issues.

Corona Virus Crisis: one of the greatest threats to health and safety in our lifetimes.

There is by now a good deal of information regarding Health and Safety (H&S) aspects of home working. How ‘good’ that information is depends on your perspective. Below I outline some of the information that UCU,ACAS and the Health and Safety Executive have compiled. As you will see it’s generic, largely focused on keeping us at work. This is a fillip to the ‘business as usual’ approach adopted by most post-16 Education institutions. Worryingly, in prison education services most of the health and safety regulations and  legalframeworks do not apply.

Educators who work in frontline health and care services are especially vulnerable, as are the students who are being rushed into service – some of it unpaid.  Note that the Health and Care Professions Council has just published its temporary register for Allied Health Professions (paramedics, etc.) and Social Workers in order that final year students can join the workforce early:

“…to ensure there are no regulatory barriers to the following two groups practising on a temporary basis: …Final year students, on UK approved programmes, who have completed all their clinical practice placements.”

This will require considerable extra work, at no notice, for students and educators: this is no longer a H&S issue it’s a life-and-death matter. Staff and students are being sent onto the front line with insufficient, inadequate personal protective equipment (PPE). Irrespective of Government guidance, NHS staff have been left at risk of contracting Covid 19, and are working in fear that lives will be lost  This is a serious responsibility that we cannot allow employers to ignore.  We need less saluting NHS workers as ‘heroes’ and more demands for safe and adequate working conditions.

Many staff have recently shifted to online working, most of whom have been compelled to do so with little, or no training. These changes in our working conditions bring considerable H&S risks, for the most part, none of which will have been risk assessed (RA) by our employers. The Health and Safety Executive have issued updated RA guidance here.

Regarding:

  • Work stations, these are the most basic standards. Note that we, rather than the employer are tasked with ensuring that:
    • there is adequate space in the area we are working in to work safely (what does that mean?)
    • the space is well ventilated but at a comfortable temperature (we will bear the cost of additional heating)
    • our working area is free from tripping hazards (which requires space and equipment, e.g. cable ties, adequate and multiple sockets)
    • there is adequate lighting
    • electrical equipment is in a good condition (use occasional visual checks to confirm this) – who amongst us is trained to be able to evaluate the safety of the equipment we are using?
    • We know how to contact our manager in an emergency
    • We have regular online and/or telephone meetings scheduled with colleagues and managers to keep in touch and discuss any problems.

All well and good assuming that you can achieve all of the above. In most guidance there is little or no mention of disabled workers, many of whom will lose essential support workers as a result of both social distancing, self-isolation.  The government has acknowledged that

“… those that rely on the support provided by their carers are particularly at risk during this difficult period… there will be more need for care services, but sickness and the need to isolate is likely to reduce the number of dedicated social workers and care staff available to support those in need.”

This includes support workers who enable disabled staff to stay in work.

Trade unions should be demanding that IT and other support for home working, including

training needs, are met by the employer, and that financial costs are remunerated.  There are a raft of Equality issues around home working, that in the rush to shift to online teaching and other day-to-day tasks, have not been considered and/or addressed.  Warm words are spoken by employers about how to avoid social isolation, however, often, suggestions to ‘stay in touch ’are means through which to exercise surveillance over staff working at home.

The lack of risk assessments for online teaching and increased administrative work must be addressed.

We cannot ignore the disproportionate impact on casualised staff who are less likely to have access to IT equipment and support, let alone facilities to meet their contractual obligations.

Contractual issues

The aggressive position employers in HE and FE have already taken toward casualised staff began with the wholesale dismissal of staff at SOAS  and more recently Sussex, Newcastle and Bristol universities cannot go unchallenged. The implications for those discarded by their employers, as well as for staff who will be exploited with increased workloads to cover the work of the sacked will inevitably lead to increased physical and mental ill-health.

Trade unions should be demanding that employers provide or facilitate ‘water cooler’/ staff common room platforms through which staff can keep in contact and avoid isolation.

Trade unions should be demanding that all staff, including those on fractional contracts, are protected from working beyond their contracted hours. More than ever it is important that staff work to contract, in order to protect theirs and their family’s health and work life balance: we can and should do no more than what is achievable and sustainable.

There must also be recognition that some staff who are working at home will also be looking after children who are off school and studying at home, fulfilling caring responsibilities and in some cases shielding. In no instances should staff who cannot complete all of their work be subjected to absence or performance reviews.

Now was not the time to be extending goodwill without guarantees that this homeworking does not become the new way of working. Academic-Related and Professional Support staff who are now working from home will bear the brunt of the administrative work required to make the changes in teaching, assessment, timetabling, recruitment, registration etc.… Not an exhaustive list by any means. Many of these colleagues aren’t unionised, and those who are can be members of our sister unions. We should be working closely with UNISON, GMB, Unite and EIS to protect and defend and protect the interests of all post-16 Education workers.

There are contractual issues surrounding on-line delivery, which include: acknowledging and planning working time, for example in answering emails, preparation time for transferring materials to a suitable mode for on-line delivery, workload in maintaining and updating on-line materials.

Trade unions must also be vigilant in advising and supporting members who encounter copyright issues. This is very clear in terms of the post 92 national contract which distinguishes between notes made for the lecturer’s personal use and learning materials produced in the course of employment.

It is essential that we do not allow our homes to become solely a place of work. Easier said than done when so many staff working in post-16 Education do not have the luxury of dedicated working spaces and offices in the home. Many casualised staff live in multiple occupancy accommodation, and sometimes in ‘multiple locations’, which presents particular challenges in the context on restrictions on movement. Trade unions must be especially proactive in protecting their working conditions.

Pedagogic issues

Typically, whether in FE or HE we have a degree of influence over the content of our teaching and how it assessed.  With the wholesale move to online teaching institutions are setting up ‘Major Incident Groups’ predominantly the aim of continuing ‘businesses usual’. In many instances this groups comprise senior managers and administrators who are making decisions that negatively impact pedagogy. Changes in the way we teach, and the ways in which we assess cannot be made purely for reasons of expediency; the challenges we are facing must be met from the bottom up, by those doing the teaching and assessing, informed by pedagogical rather than technological approaches. Again many decisions being made are impacting on the amount of work we are being tasked to do.

We know that face-to-face teaching cannot shift online without significant redesigning of taught content, revising and reviewing information and resources about independent learning, and ensuring access to all of the technology that teachers and students will required. This is already resulted in an explosion of work and increase in workload for all of us. The Open University – with over 50  years’ experience of remote teaching – has issued new guidance for students, suggesting that much of the way which they do teaching and assessment has already  changed, and could be under constant review. A stark demonstration that face-to-face teaching assessment cannot simply be switched, at the click of virtual learning environment platform, online. Since its inception lecture capture has been vaunted as a means through which students access lecture recordings in order to clarify areas that they did not understand from the lecture. With little or no training, educators had been told that their primary function is to record their intellectual property, gift it to their employer, and at the same time, deal with the stressors related to achieving this.

The questions which will need answering and that we must be involved in decisions made include:

  • Curriculum areas where students need to spend time on work placement (e.g. health professions) or in labs (science and engineering) or workshops (arts and crafts, fashion, silversmithing etc)
  • Management of student expectations (e.g. time scale for response to emails)
  • How much formative feedback (and final feedback) to give on student assignments
  • Pastoral and academic support of students – how to maintain sense of academic community
  • On-line assessment and marking
  • Equality issues for students
  • Are there some employability skills which cannot be learned easily on-line?
  • Maintenance of the netiquette and professional behaviour between students and staff

We also need to consider the ways in which we are being called, in some cases summonsed to online meetings, which become de facto micromanagement and surveillance.

If, as chief medical officer Dr Jenny Harries announced on 30 March, the crisis will continue for several months, and stated that it could be 6 more months before things our back to normal, we should be very concerned about what the new normal might look like.  Any discussions on work planning for the next academic year should not be based on the premise that all learning will be online.

How as union activists should we respond to these health and safety risks?  I propose a call to action:

  • Trade unions must organise collectively in the workplace around health issues using existing legal frameworks.
  • Employers must be compelled to undertake risk assessments.
  • Employers must be compelled to identify and remove hazards, in particular including unsafe working practices in the home.
  • Managements must agree to respect the obstacles to homeworking faced by staff due to their personal circumstances. We should adopt the EIS’s maxim, “What I can, when I can, if I can”.
  • We must insist that managements cease to issue blanket instructions to staff which take no account of the inequalities caused by homeworking, and we must demand that as part of Equality Impact Assessments measures are put in place to prevent staff suffering detriments, e.g. promotion, advancement or job security, as a result of any obstacles they face to working from home.
  • The recognised trade unions in post-16 Education must work together to protect the terms conditions and rights of their members.

In conclusion the role of UCU is vital in protecting both academic quality and standards, and its members working conditions and health and safety.

We need active union branches, meeting online until we can meet face to face again.

We need active union reps challenging overloading and pressures on staff to cope with rapid change without proper support.

Temporary homeworking must not be used by employers to drive a coach and horses through existing conditions, to isolate staff, or to leave staff to cope unsupported with the changes forced on the sector by the Coronavirus and requirements for social distancing or self-isolation.

If we organise effectively as a union in this context we can build stronger union organisation, which protects members at work, whether working at home in electronic cottages or back in the universities and colleges.

Above all, stay safe and stay well. If you experience symptoms or do succumb to this awful virus please seek medical advice from your own GP, 111 or the NHS website.

Education Support also offers mental health support and advice for education workers.

Marian Mayer
WMSC, DMSC, National Negotiator, Chair Southern Region, Co-chair Bournemouth University UCU

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Assessment: Time to close down the exam factory

When this crisis is over, we should not turn back to a system that has so badly failed many young people.

TES article by Sean Vernell

exam

The announcement to cancel GCSE and A-level exams this year and to grade students based on a broad range of evidence, including teacher assessment, mock exams and prior attainment has raised many issues in relation to equality and the legitimacy of examinations as the key method of assessment in our education system.

Ofqual has provided some details about the way they expect practitioners to grade students. The guidelines make clear how the grades will be arrived at. They have also provided a grading guidance.

Final predictions

In some colleges, managers in their rush to online learning are encouraging staff to be less than transparent with students about the work they are doing. Suggesting that final predictions will depend on this work and even encouraging online tests, carried out with the same message to students that this is vital to final predictions.

This is not a transparent or accurate reading of Ofqual guidance in which it will clearly be the work done prior to the lockdown across a range of areas, as well as other factors, that will now be used to give the “calculated grades” that students will now get.

We can and should be honest with students about this rather than feeding students a false line that they are still preparing for a facsimile of non-existent exams. We must also be willing and confident to give, advocate and encourage positive teacher assessments which will contribute to their real grades, and which ensure that students are not disadvantaged.

Ofqual in their guidelines recognise that predicted grades can lead to students from disadvantaged backgrounds being under predicted. Rightly, Ofqual has decided therefore that student grades will not be based simply on existing teacher predicted grades.

UCU commissioned research into the way that predicted grades regularly disadvantage poorer students. The research showed that high-achieving, disadvantaged students are more likely to have their grades under-predicted than their wealthier contemporaries. Practitioners will need to be alert to any attempt to under predict students when assessing their work, especially those from disadvantaged or BAME backgrounds.

Fair teacher assessment

It is a step forward to assess students work in the round rather than use current predicted grades to award a final grade. However, to give a fair teacher assessment we must break out of the mindset of exam performance. This is vitally important for many of our young people in colleges doing GCSE resits in which the exam model, rather than their ability, is their biggest challenge. Teachers must assess their students on the basis of their intellectual abilities in the classroom and not on the way they may, or may not have, performed in an exam.

There are those within the sector who believe that we must maintain “standards”, even in a crisis. They argue that rigorous testing and predicted grades based on performance in exams is needed to ensure that students entering higher education have the skills and abilities appropriate to university.

But does exam-based assessment really prepare our students with the skills and the intellectual rigour to study at university, or prepare them for the world of work?

Now is the time to close the exam factory. Recently, at my own college, we organised an exhibition entitled Utopia, Dystopia – Voices from the Future. In this exhibition, my GCSE English students displayed essays alongside photographs which had been a stimulus for their writing. My colleagues viewing the exhibition were surprised when I told them that probably 50 per cent of the students whose work was on display were unlikely to gain a grade 4 in their GCSE exam this year.

Barriers to demonstrating their abilities

I explained to them that probably a majority of our students can write and read to at least a grade 4 standard when they are given the time to complete their work. The clock is the main barrier to students’ ability to really demonstrate their intellectual abilities.

Does it really matter if a student takes an hour to complete a piece of work rather than half an hour, as long as their work has reached a certain standard? Does being able to beat the clock really more accurately demonstrate our students’ abilities than other forms of assessment?

It is a myth that the exam-driven syllabus has raised students’ understanding and abilities. In fact, the opposite is true. The obsession with testing everything through exams has led to a narrowing of what we teach and what our students learn. The critical thinking, independent learning and research skills of young people have been severely weakened by an education system structured around testing and examinations.

But the exam system was never designed to liberate our young people’s minds. It was designed to instil, from the very earliest age, and as regularly as possible, the importance of competition. To make normal the need to compete for work, education, housing and between education institutions.

The government has now temporarily abandoned exams and performance measures and the sky has not fallen in. When the crisis is over, let’s not turn back to a system that has so badly failed our young people.

Keeping them engaged

In the meantime, to engage our students to participate in our remote learning programmes let’s drop the “do question 5 on paper 1″- type questions. There will be little incentive for students to participate in any of our online learning programmes if we maintain this approach.

Instead of focusing on exams, we should look at producing project-based work to develop student skills and knowledge. 

Let’s make sure our students get the grades that really reflect their real abilities. Let’s also make sure that when we emerge out of this dreadful coronavirus crisis we rethink our education system, removing the stultifying exam-based assessment model and replacing it with a model that allows our students to reclaim their critical and independent thinking skills.

Sean Vernell is FE vice chair of the University and College Union

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Coronavirus, capitalism and class

1280px-COVID-19_Outbreak_World_Map

The outbreak of the Coronavirus COVID-19, has created panic across the globe.  The Italian government has just placed 16 million people under quarantine. Schools, universities, gyms, museums and nightclubs have been closed across the whole country. In total across the globe 100,686 people had been confirmed as having been infected as of Friday evening. Of those, 3,411 have died.

Global markets continue to fall as the virus spreads across the world. It appears the UK government is on the verge of making an announcement that could include the shutting of schools, colleges and universities before the Easter break. Department of health and social care figures showed 163 confirmed COVID-19 cases in the UK, an increase of 47 from the day before.

Clearly it is serious and we need to ensure we do all we can to stem the spread of the virus through our own personal hygiene habits. But the real barrier to stopping the spread is the government, the pharmaceutical companies and the marketised system that has caused the virus and allowed it to spread. It is they who we will need to fight if we are going to ensure that working people, once again, are not made to pay the price of a dysfunctional system that puts profit before peoples’ lives.

The 1980s saw over half a million people die in the US alone from the HIV virus.  The Reagan and Thatcher government not only dragged their feet over the issue they propagated a vile homophobic campaign. This was taken up by the press dubbing AIDS as the ‘Gay plague’. This campaign of hate culminated in the implementation of Clause 28.

Governments opposed safe sex campaigns, an important response to prevent the spread of AIDs. Instead they preferred moralising about abstinence. It took campaigners like Larry Kramer to set up organisations such as ACT-UP, eventually changing government policy. The campaign eventually succeeded, but hundreds of thousands of gay men died needlessly before changes were brought about.

The racist Johnson will not miss an opportunity to use COVID-19 as an excuse to whip up even more hysteria over migrants and toughen immigration laws to stop people coming into ‘our’ country spreading disease, spurred on by the Sun and Daily Mail. The appalling rise of attacks on Chinese and South East Asian people since the spread of the Coronavirus is growing. We need to ensure that we show solidarity with these communities by demonstrating our support for them every time an attack takes place.

We should not allow the government to use COVID-19 to close down public protest. In Madrid tens of thousands marched to celebrate International Women’s Day despite growing fears about the spread of the virus.

Owen Jones points out that:

‘More than 3,000 people have succumbed to coronavirus yet, according to the World Health Organization, air pollution alone – just one aspect of our central planetary crisis – kills seven million people every year.’

and argues that government should show the same urgency in dealing with climate change as they do dealing with the spread of COVID-19.

Disease and death are endemic to a failing system

The outbreak of the COVID-19 has shaken the establishment. They recognise that their system simply does not have the infrastructure to deal with such an outbreak. Of course, they don’t and won’t draw the necessary conclusion from this – to reverse all the cuts to the NHS and the welfare state they have made in the last decade.

Writing in the The Guardian Polly Toynbee rightly argues:

‘…there is no way of keeping politics out of this. If this epidemic is only half as bad as the official worst-case scenario, the pressure on every aspect of public services will be tested to breaking point. The full effect of a decade of austerity is about to be brutally exposed.’

In fact it is not just the last decade in which the system has been at fault, but the way that Capitalism as an economic system based on exploitation to maximise profit, is not able to keep safe the population and the planet that we inhabit.

In the 19th century, the birth of Britain as the ‘workshop of the world’ brought with it disease and death. As millions of people moved from the countryside to the cities mass slums were created. Water-borne diseases like cholera killed thousands of working men, women and children. Frederick Engels describes powerfully in The Conditions of the English Working Class what life for working people was like living in Manchester and working in the ‘dark satanic mills’.

The outbreak of Covid-19 began in China, a country which has experienced the fastest and biggest levels of industrialisation ever seen in history, much of this in order to provide cheap manufactured products to the West and to enable it to compete with the US. What took Britain a hundred years to do in the 19th century China has managed in 35 with the same consequences for working people.

After the First World War, brought about by competing imperial rivalries, the biggest ever flu epidemic in history occurred. As Europe emerged from the rubble of that war, disease spread rapidly through the European populations and is estimated to have killed between 20 and 50 million people.

The spread of deadly viruses and the development of an economic system that brings wars, climate change and the deregulation of production has gone hand in hand.

The pharmaceutical companies and agribusiness

A central part of the inability of our society to deal with these crises is the deregulation of the pharmaceutical and food industries. There appears to be progress being made towards creating a vaccine for the virus. But why is it so difficult to find a cure for viruses that kills so many people?

Pharmaceuticals are a multi-billion-dollar business. This means that there is little or no collaboration between the multinationals, each wanting to be the first to find a cure so that they can make a fortune. It is accepted by most now that the anti-viral drugs that have allowed AIDS sufferers not to die could have been found many years before, saving millions of lives, if there had been a sharing of research.

Stephen Buranyi, writing in The Guardian quotes a UK Ebola expert saying:

‘Unless there’s a big market it’s not worth the while of a mega-company … There was no business case to make an Ebola vaccine for the people who needed it most.’

Buranyi carries on to argue that:

‘Even if research begins during a pandemic, the unpredictable nature of outbreaks means work is often shelved if the crisis dies down, and so progress halts until the next time a similar infection flares up.’

In short there is no planning by the pharmaceutical companies. Their only response is to gamble on the best place to direct resources to create new vaccines that will bring the biggest profit.

A lot has been made about the origins of COVID-19 being from a market in the Wuhan province of China. Its racist overtones are difficult to miss. That it was the behaviour of the ‘uncivilised’ people of the region, selling and eating wild animals that allowed the virus to jump from animals to humans.

Whilst it is true most viruses are spread from animals to humans, hence the names we give them (eg bird flu and swine flu), it isn’t because of ‘barbaric’ people eating wild and exotic animals. It is the unregulated agribusiness that has made the spread of disease more prolific. The industrialisation of pig, cattle and chicken farms on a scale never seen before in history has allowed new strains of flu to develop and combine which morph into killer diseases.

We will need to fight for our protection

Whilst we wash our hands more frequently, and for at least for 20 seconds or the time it takes to sing Happy Birthday twice (!), we will need, once again, to campaign for government to put in real measures that protect working people from the diseases their system has created.

This must start with ensuring if workers are laid off that those on casualised contracts are being paid sick pay from day one. No doubt the employers in the HE sector will try and use COVID-19 as an excuse not to address our demands and will threaten great reprisals if we don’t end our dispute and accept any derisory offer they make.  It would be insulting to everyone working in the sector if the employers look to us to increase workload or face job loses to mitigate the impact of the COVID-19 rather meet our demands.

It is the employers’ marketised model with its reliance on charging huge fees to overseas students and zero hours contracts that have created a crisis in the sector. Why would more of the same help to deal with COVID-19?

We must also be alert to any attempt by government to use the virus to bring in laws that make it easier for them to divide the working class. But above all we must put pressure on government to regulate the pharmaceutical companies and the agribusiness and demand that they reverse the austerity-driven cuts in the NHS and the welfare state.

Sean Vernell, NEC

Map data derived from The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, New York Times, CNBC – 27 February 2020

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UCU Left ‘Four Fights’ Negotiators’ statement, 6/3/2020

Lobby of Woburn House
Lobbying UCEA HQ in December

Dear colleagues

We are writing as UCULeft ‘Four Fights’ negotiators who have been engaged in complex negotiations which are ongoing.

It is important to note that these negotiations have not yet resulted in an offer. Nothing is on the table and nothing is agreed.

The current situation is that after constructive discussions on the pay-related elements of the claim, the employers’ representatives were sent away to consult with their members.

In this context we are concerned that the General Secretary put out a statement on Thursday that was neither discussed nor agreed with the negotiators. In that statement she says that “If we can get an offer that represents the kind of movement I have set out here on all four parts of the dispute, I will recommend that our higher education committee (HEC) should consult members on whether to accept it.”

Negotiators are elected by members to engage directly with the employers to attempt to settle a dispute. During the course of negotiations we make proposals to the employers, knowing that whatever we might negotiate, there is a democratic process that holds us to account.

Offers, deals and accountability

HEC has agreed the following process for dealing with any offer from the employers. We have not had an offer, but were we to get one this is what would happen.

  1. First, negotiators would discuss it as a package and consider whether or not to recommend it for consultation as the best that could be achieved through negotiations. If it were not ready to go out, we would go straight back to the employers to negotiate further.
  2. Once it was sent out, members would see the offer, consult over and debate it in branch meetings or strike meetings, and elect delegates to a UK-wide meeting of branch reps.
  3. At that meeting, branch representatives would debate the offer at a UK-wide level, and vote on it (in a weighted vote) to decide whether to recommend to HEC as to whether or not to put it out to members.
  4. HEC would then take a vote on whether or not that offer should be sent out for a consultative ballot for members to vote on. HEC’s decision will be based on the recommendations of branch reps from the delegates meeting.

It is also strange to see a General Secretary proposing to recommend a deal that has not yet been made. It is standard practice in negotiations to say that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. The assessment of whether an offer is acceptable cannot be made until all the details are confirmed. This is not yet the situation.

Negotiating on Pay

The second issue concerns headline pay. On Tuesday, UCU negotiators adopted a negotiating position of putting 3% on the table to give UCEA the chance to consult their members about the potential for a rapid resolution of the dispute in the context of a serious global health crisis that could engulf us all.

Let’s not forget that UCU’s claim is for RPI+3%. The employers are sitting on reserves of £44bn. They can afford to meet our claim in full.

This was, and is, a genuine offer to try to resolve the dispute, but it is for members and delegates in the process outlined above to decide whether or not it is sufficient to resolve it.

It is difficult to discuss an offer that does not exist! But were we to get an offer we would have to make a serious decision as to whether we as negotiators, collectively or individually, can recommend it to members to be decided on by the process outlined above.

All the negotiators are strengthened by every single striker and picketer. We now need to sustain and strengthen the action.

Our strikes are our strongest leverage. We can win this together.

Mark Abel
Marian Mayer
Jo McNeill
Sean Wallis