Category: Equality

Equality stories

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Action for ESOL manifesto Launch

Action for ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) launched its new manifesto for ESOL on Saturday March 3rd at UCU Head Office in north London.

A good turnout included MP Heidi Alexander, representatives from the Refugee Council, Migrant Workers Association and other partner organisations, along with ESOL researchers, teachers and UCU members from FE colleges in and around London and the Midlands.

The purpose of the launch was to celebrate the success of the campaign and to look at the new manifesto and how it can be used in future ESOL campaigning. The afternoon started with a celebratory journey through the campaign highlights and the people and protests which helped to bring about the huge success.

A wide-spread grassroots campaign led by students and practitioners, combined with the support and parliamentary lobbying of education organisations such as UCU, NATECLA, NIACE and many MPs around the country, all contributed to an almost total U-Turn on the coalition government’s plans to cut funding for ESOL learners.

Heidi Alexander MP told the launch how she was inspired after meeting students at a local Lewisham community centre and reading letters from students in Lewisham who explained why English was so important to them and why they needed to be able to continue their ESOL classes.

A video was shown, made by Reflect ESOL, of the fantastic Old Palace Yard demonstration outside parliament on March 24th last year, when ESOL students marched from the protest to hand in a petition to Downing Street with over 20,000 signatures, including Noam Chomsky, Ken Loach and Ken Livingstone.

All speakers celebrated the campaign’s success and the inspiration of all the students round the country who explained powerfully why ESOL matters.

The 2nd part of the launch focussed on how the manifesto was written and what it’s about.

Like the campaign itself the manifesto was initiated by practitioners on the ground in a collaborative process and the issues set out in the manifesto for ESOL centre around the issues faced by migrants, needs of students and ‘production-line’ teaching, marketisation and labour-market agendas, valuing the role of teachers and their input into curricula, and commitment to consistent funding.

These issues for ESOL are fundamental to how practitioners see what ESOL is and where it should be going. These same issues affect the wider FE sector, and elements of the ESOL manifesto are recognisable in other FE manifestos such as the UCU paper – “Jobs and Education, Regaining the Trust of Young People”.

Action for ESOL is now looking to the future and ways to continue the grassroots aspect of the campaign by involving students in the manifesto as its taken forward from the today’s launch, and how the ESOL community can unite around the common issues and links it has with the wider Adult, Community and Further Education sector.

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Campaign Appeal

Since Natfhe and the AUT merged five years ago to form the University and College Union, UCU Left has worked hard to build stronger branch and regional organisation in order to promote the defence of post-16 education and to fight off cuts and rising workloads and pressure at colleges and universities.

Over the past year or two we have been in the forefront of campaigning to strengthen the union’s opposition to the attacks on our members’ pensions in the TPS and USS schemes. and to campaign against the public sector pay freeze.

It was UCU Left who led the rejection of the Institute for Learning  (IfL) subscription deal in Further Education. We were subsequently supported by 90% of FE membes in a ballot. Our supporters have led local campaigns against victimisations, redundancies, observations and cuts, many of them successful.  We were central to launching the ballots against the pensions attacks when the union officials thought this was premature.

We supported the student protests in 2010/11 over tuition fee rises and promoted the campaigns for the restoration of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA) and in defence of ESOL. Our supporters drafted the widely circulated UCU Manifesto for FE a few years ago, and more recently the response to the riots during last summer.

We have strenuously defended the principle of a member-led, democratic, campaigning union against those who think the union should be a service-based union dominated by paid officials. UCU Left has consistently campaigned  for and defended the notion of effective lay democracy in the union and has fought to commit the union’s leadership to actively support the growing opposition to public sector cuts and austerity.

But campaigning costs money and, as the government attacks on education increase, so do the costs of organising an effective opposition to these attacks within the union. Producing a new website, standing a rank and file candidate in the general secretary election, as well as a range of other candidates for the NEC, has entailed significant expenditure. This means we now need urgently to raise an additional £2,000.

A campaign fund appeal was launched at our recent conference where we raised £320. Please could you use the button below to make a donation – anything between £10 and £100 – although we won’t object to more!





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Who is in UCU Left?

UCU Left is a broad left grouping of members of the 120,000 strong University and College Union. We are committed to building a member-led, democratic UCU, one which is founded on a strategy of campaigning and collective action rather than one based solely on servicing members and individual casework.

UCU Left supporters cover a spectrum of political views and affiliations and include members of various parties such as the Labour Party, Socialist Workers Party, Green Party, Socialist Party, or no party at all.

We have refused to compromise on fighting the pension cuts, defending jobs, and defending members’ contracts and conditions. We have worked to commit the union to the rejection of the current Teachers Pension Scheme (TPS) offer and to join with other rejectionist unions in a renewed campaign of industrial action.

We refused to compromise on our vocal defence of student protesters when they were arrested, beaten, kettled and in some cases jailed for daring to protest tuition fee increases and cuts to courses, despite some in our union’s leadership joining the chorus of condemnation.

We have, since our formation six years ago, been committed to organisng the greatest possible resistance to education cuts, pay cuts and the recent austerity agenda, and attempts to promote privatisation of  post-16 education and the restriction of educational access.

UCU Left has worked with student organisations and communities to help build mass opposition to the Con-Dem government’s plans to make working people pay for a crisis not of our making, for example through the abolition of the Educational Maintenance Allowance (EMA), cuts to ESOL and growing funding cuts and marketisation in further, Adult and higher education.

Our supporters are committed to the defence and promotion of members’ interests at all levels of the union, from branch reps to members of the National Executive.

This website regularly carries content, created by front line, lay members of UCU. The most recent activities of our group have been our recent conference and to view the election leaflets of candidates who we support in the current general secretary, vice-presidential, and NEC elections.

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Endorsements for Angie McConnell – candidate for Vice President

Angie has her election in address online here and there are flyers online here, below are a few endorsements of Angie’s candidacy for union vice president (FE).

Angie has been a stalwart of UCU. She’s a champion of equality, supporter of those in need and I fully expect her to be an outstanding President.

Gavin Reid Chair of Education Committee

Angie has worked tirelessly for UCU, She has been active at branch, regional and national levels. She was an inspiring chair of the NEC Equality Committee and was also chair of the union’s Legal Panel and a member of Congress Business Committee. No-one has a better knowledge of our union’s structures and procedures.

“In my opinion, Angie is uniquely well placed to become vice president, and ultimately president, of UCU and I urge you to vote for her.

Alan Whitaker, Immediate Past President

 

When I was elected this year as Chair of the Equality Committee after Angie stood down I was well aware that she would be a hard act to follow.

Angie’s commitment to promoting the interests of all members has been second to none and she remains a constant source of wise counsel and advice.

I know that she would be a first rate president of the union in the difficult times ahead and I have no hesitation in urging members to vote for her.

Laura Miles, LGBT (FE) NEC rep, Chair of the LGBT Members Standing Committee, Chair of Equality Committee.

 

As well as being a determined activists and branch officer in defence of members’ terms and conditions locally, Angie has proved herself a resolute champion and strategist in the struggle for equality in post-16 education.

As Chair of the UCU’s Equality Committee, she has achieved a considerable advance in the union’s policy and practice in this area, particularly in moving issues of equality to centre stage, and making them part of the union’s industrial agenda.

As a member of the Strategy and Finance Committee, she brought her eye for detail and her dogged perseverance, to bear on the union’s financial decision-making to ensure that the union’s assets and members’ long-term interests in the union are secure.

Her most important quality is her commitment to trade union democracy.. She has always been powerfully insistent that the UCU must be, and must remain, a member-led union, and must resist the blandishments of a servicing model of trade unionism.

The position of President, is primarily one of ensuring the observance of the constitution as a defence of members’ control over their trade union, as well as being the figurehead and public face of the union. In this respect, I cannot think of a more able candidate for this role than Angie McConnell.

She has been a reliable and insightful colleague and ally. As Chair of the Recruitment, Organising and Campaigns Committee (ROCC) since the union’s formation, I have no hesitation in commending Angie to you as our future Vice President.

Tom Hickey, UCU National Executive, Chair ROCC, member of Strategy and Finance Committee, and Chair of University of Brighton UCU

Angie McConnell has shown a huge commitment to the union she has worked locally, regionally and nationally (at the same time) and supported a great number of members in case work and even more with campaigning.

She has encouraged and supported new activists – led training and worked with Regional and National Officials to develop policy and procedures that have benefited countless union members. She has an extremely sharp eye for detail and is the person that many people go to for advice on rules and standing orders.

She has been instrumental in the steering of the equality agenda in UCU as chair of the equality committee.

I support Angie for President – she know this union inside out – she has a great sense of fairness and sound judgement, through her long standing experience across the sectors she knows the members she represents and in her unique quiet and confident manner will not shirk the responsibilities of President to bring the lay members concerns to the forefront of the union.

Maire Daley, Liverpool Community College UCU & TUC Women’s Committee

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Why I will be urging Welsh speakers in UCU to vote for Mark Campbell

This is a guest posting by Liza van Zyl, candidate for NEC (UCU Cymru vice president)

I work as a Welsh tutor on zero-hour contracts in both the higher and further education sectors in Wales, and represent Welsh speakers as a workplace union rep.  I’d like to make the case for why UCU Left should make campaign material available in Welsh.

But first I’d like to thank Mark Campbell and UCU Left for listening to the UCU members I represent, and for taking seriously the concerns of Welsh speakers.  And for the support UCU Left has given us to progress Welsh-language issues in UCU, in particular for enabling me to progress a matter of importance to my members, namely the implementation of a Congress motion, passed by UCU Congress last year, to provide materials in Welsh.

So, why does UCU Left need to go to the expense of providing campaign material in Welsh?

As everyone in UCU knows, there are three key facts about Welsh speakers, and the Welsh language, in the higher and further education sectors:

1. Almost nobody speaks Welsh (except in a few isolated pockets of North Wales).

2. Welsh-speakers are affluent and middle-class, and get preferential treatment in the job market.

3. Welsh speakers are right wing.

But actually, the fact that hardly anyone speaks Welsh is news to the 40,000 Welsh-speakers in Cardiff. And to the several hundred of my colleagues in both Cardiff University and Coleg Gwent who live and work in the medium of Welsh every day and have very little need or reason to speak English in their daily work and lives.

The fact that Welsh speakers are affluent and middle-class is news to Welsh-speaking university students. They are disproportionately more likely to come from Communities First postcodes and from the bottom end of the Index of Multiple Deprivation.

It’s certainly news to me and my colleagues, who are on zero-hour contracts and who are experiencing severe economic hardship because of the public sector funding cuts. It was news to me that Welsh-speakers get preferential treatment in the job market – I was recently unemployed for eleven months and am now earning only slightly more than a quarter of what I previously earned on a full-time lecturer’s salary.

The reason people perceive that Welsh speakers get preferential treatment in the jobs market is the same reason people perceive that asylum seekers get all the council houses: it is because some of us on the left are doing a rather rubbish job of explaining that everyone is suffering because of the lack of jobs and housing, and that the real culprits are not Welsh-speakers, asylum seekers, etc – it’s because the bankers have trashed the economy.

And the fact that Welsh-speakers are right wing is news to the many Welsh-speakers who are at the forefront of the anti-cuts and Occupy movements, who are working shoulder to shoulder with those of us in the Trades Councils to protect our public services, the NHS, and the most vulnerable in society from this wholesale unprecedented destruction of everything working people in Britain have fought for over the last several generations.

The fact that Welsh-speakers are right wing is also news to the many Welsh-speakers whose grand-parents and great-grand-parents fought in the Spanish Civil War and who were active in the anti-slavery movement.  And to those who made such a profound impact in the anti-Apartheid movement and the miners’ strike.
It’s also news to those of my colleagues (including senior managers) and students who have criminal records (including prison time) for services to the Welsh language and working-class Welsh communities through direct-action campaigns.

I was once told by a Welsh-speaking faculty dean in a Pre-92 university in England that, many years previously, his brother had received a prison sentence for Welsh-language activism in service to their desperately poor working-class community in the same week that the dean had been offered a place to study at Oxford. Their father, and the congregation of the chapel of which their father was a minister, was much prouder of his brother than of himself.  Yep, you don’t get much more right wing than that.

For years, UCU’s Welsh speakers and those of us who are trying to recruit and involve our Welsh-speaking colleagues in the union have made very little real progress persuading UCU to provide materials in Welsh. We’re told that Welsh-speakers are quite capable of reading and speaking English, and so it is silly to spend our members’ subs translating and printing stuff in Welsh.

This is an entirely reasonable argument.  After all it is entirely reasonable to expect Sikhs and Muslims to remove their turbans or headscarves if they want employment.  Just as it’s entirely reasonable for the Home Office to deport gay and lesbian asylum seekers on grounds that they’re perfectly capable of passing for straight by getting married and not flaunting their homosexuality.

As we all know, matters of language identity are just like religion or belief, or sexual orientation: they’re lifestyle choices. Not matters profoundly important to identity. Not like proper equality issues.

All of us who are union organisers and community campaigners know how very effective a recruiting tool it is to be dismissive of what people consider to be fundamental aspects of their identity. We all know how very helpful it is, in terms of increasing engagement in unions or campaigns, when we require that people give up important issues of identity and principle in order to participate.

In Wales there is a saying in response to receiving a communication or seeing a poster or leaflet in English only:

bilingualism offends nobody, but monolingualism offends thousands of people every day

So folks, we need campaign material in Welsh. I was delighted to hear that Mark Campbell wants to learn to say a few things in Welsh, that he can say when he comes to a hustings in Wales next month. I’ve certainly experienced Mark to be genuinely committed to progressing the interests of Welsh-speaking UCU members, just as he is genuinely committed to progressing the interests of all UCU members.
I’m sure there will be some who’ll say Mark’s support for Welsh-language issues is pure opportunism, that Mark has suddenly discovered within himself a burning passion for the Welsh language as a cynical vote-winning ploy.

But this is not an issue of Welsh nationalism, nor of Welsh-language campaigning. Mark, like me, is not Welsh.  I am a migrant worker in the UK to whom Welsh and English are both foreign languages, who just happens to work as a Welsh tutor. But I am a workplace union rep. And Mark, like me, believes that means you take up the issues that are important to those you represent.

This is simply an issue of effective trade union organizing. You recruit and engage folks in your workplace more effectively if you listen to them, take their concerns seriously, and don’t alienate them by requiring them to compromise something profoundly important to their self-identity. It’s about representing members, and listening to them, and progressing the issues they ask their elected reps to take up.

Mark is standing for UCU general secretary not because he wants to be a ‘union baron’, or wants loads of power, or a seat in the House of Lords one day. Or because he wants Sally Hunt’s £100,000 a year salary (he has committed to drawing the same salary if he’s elected that he gets now as a university lecturer). He is standing for UCU general secretary simply because he believes the union should fight for the interests of all its members, and progress the issues they want the union to take up.

Is Mark the person we so desperately need at the helm of UCU? Based on what I’ve seen of him in action as a workplace rep at London Metropolitan University, and based on how he’s been prepared to listen to me and my members, and take us seriously, I believe he is.  But it’s not for me to decide whether he should be UCU general secretary.  I will explain to my members why I believe they should vote for him, but it is ultimately a decision each UCU member needs to make themselves.

Therefore I will urge all UCU members in Wales to come to the Wales hustings in Cardiff next month, and urge them to grill Mark robustly until he’s well done on all sides, so they can decide for themselves if he’s the candidate they should vote for.
That is why we need UCU Left to produce campaign materials in Welsh.  So we can more effectively encourage folks in Wales to come to the hustings and decide for themselves who they want at the helm of their union.  And so that we can alert folks to an un-missable opportunity to hear a bit of Welsh spoken in a strong Newcastle accent.

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Organising Conference Report 28th Jan 2012

60 UCU Left supporters attended an enthusiastic UCU Left organising conference on Saturday 28th January.

The conference took place at a crucial moment for both the TPS and USS disputes, with debates going on in branches up and down the country. The recent NEC decision to reject the TPS deal and declare a day for strike action has created renewed momentum among the other rejectionist unions for a resumption of strike action and given new heart to those trade unionists determined to fight any sellout.
The conference was chaired by Liz Lawrence, UCU NEC member, who welcomed a number of guest speakers in the first session before participants broke into separate USS and TPS organising sessions.

John McDonnell, MP

John spoke about the worsening economic situation, saying that we were right a couple of years ago to take an apocalyptic view. Osborne’s plan was to cut the deficit using the claim that the crisis was caused by over-expenditure, cuts were needed in the public sector and manufacturing would rise to meet the gap. This hasn’t happened. Manufacturing is on its knees, with very limited new jobs.
The Government can only see new cuts, and is panicking. The Euro is probably collapsing, by Autumn the government will come back for more cuts. While the Government has the Olympics and Jubilee distractions till then, we will see more cuts, and a further onslaught on the poor.  In Greece people on the margins are people like us, families handing over children, we are going to degenerate into this. He predicted that things will get far worse than we have seen so far, the government is desperate.

Levels of resistance in the last 18 months are higher than for a long time, more momentum than in eighties: November 2010 the student march, June’s industrial action, Nov 30th was almost like a general strike in some parts. The role of individual unions and activists is to recognise that the TUC are not part of our resources but our rank and file base is. So prepare people for what we have to face and that there is a resource capable of confronting the situation. Jobs, pensions, civilised society were built over last 150 years and are now under threat. It means recognising we have a consolidated demand of bringing this government down.

Ian Bradley, a rank and file electrician in UNITE, described their dispute. The eight biggest contractors want to pull out of agreement, cut pensions, travel and lodging allowance, 25-30% pay cuts. Eventually pressured UNITE to  ballot, 80% for all out stay out, but Balfour Beatty threatened injunction, UNITE caved, but the rank and file electricians organised independent  unofficial strikes with 3,000 out anyway. Another ballot result is due this Thurs, they plan to bring everyone out.

Gopal Pryamveda spoke on the HE White paper. The White Paper has been indefinitely postponed, which shows that action can stop the government. However, they may not be doing it so overtly but we will not have the same opportunities for scrutiny of what they will now try to get away with more covertly. They will try to argue that our side is only interested in maintaining the status quo, preserving the interests of the elite, and that the White Paper ‘opens up opportunities’. However, the threat from the private education sector will continue even if the HE bill does not go to parliament.

Susan Matthews

spoke on behalf of Defend the Right to Protest. She is the mother of Alphie Meadows who was seriously injured, hit on the head by police and then charged with violent disorder during the student protests.

Alfie will stand trial. Nothing happened about the police hitting him despite him needing brain surgery.

UCU must stand with students, she said, who stood with UCU from the beginning and are still campaigning.

Sean Vernell,

UCU NEC said that the NEC decision of 20th Jan had created the potential for the rejectionist unions to reignite the strike action and stop the pensions attack. We must not delay or wait until more cuts come through in October: the fight is on now. We must fight to sustain and continue to deepen campaign. 100,000 had joined TUs in last 6-8 months. Dec 19th TUC had met, Unison, Unite and the GMB had sold out their members. Others including the NUT have rejected.

Sally Hunt  argued the government’s TPS offer is a significant improvement, but no-one else says that. Still increase in contributions, £20-£80 deducted; change from RPI to CPI indexation; increase in pension age to 68; and CARE not Final Salary. The accrual rate has changed but that gets lost. As Mark Serwotka says, there are some people in the TUs who don’t think they can win. N30 frightens some people. There is an acceptance by them and by Ed Miliband and Ed Balls of the parameters that there is not enough money to go around etc. There are alternatives – eg taxing the rich.

Members are not fatigued and we do not need a fresh mandate at this moment of time.  We have been arguing for escalation. However, some TU leaders want instead to manage a decline of the dispute. A ballot would take weeks. It would put us in danger of putting our members out of the potential to join with others in taking action over TPS. No other rejecting union is balloting its members. If we had done so it would have given credibility to a rubbish offer and put us in conflict with our partners in the coalition that we have so carefully created over the past year.
On March 24th 2011 UCU took strike action and broke the logjam. This led to the June 30 strike and then to Nov 30. The NEC decision on 20th Jan broke the logjam again. The NUT will meet other unions who have rejected the deal to discuss taking further industrial action in March.

Jim Wolfreys, NEC

USS special conference will discuss negotiators’ recommendation to suspend dispute so negotiations on designing a new CARE scheme can take place, and consideration of the concession made for those made redundant at 55 or over. The danger is we would never see dispute again if we accept the negotiators’ view.
He said Malcom Povey had done a brilliant job of the report on USS.  Whether to reject CARE was only defeated by 30 votes at Congress, so we can win at the Tuesday HE conference on not suspending USS dispute. We should tie it to TPS dispute.

Separate meetings of USS and TPS members then took place.
USS members reported back from their branches on the mood of members and decisions taken to support or reject the negotiators’ recommendations.
It was agreed that there would be a meeting organised on Tuesday at the Conference for delegates from rejectionist branches. Model motions and amendments have been circulated, as well as Malcolm Povey’s briefing paper on the USS situation. A UCU Left flyer will be produced for the day.

TPS members discussed feedback so far from branches and reactions to the survey on ‘readiness’ for industrial action which had been sent to branch secretaries last week along with a very restricted timetable for completion. NEC members reported back to those present the latest situation from other unions and the potential for strike action, including rolling action. A number of speakers stressed the urgency of the situation given that the rises in pension contributions were to be imposed on April 1st.

It was agreed to produce a set of Frequently Asked Questions and a new model TPS motion for branches and regions.
Elections

The conference heard from both Angie McConnell and Mark Campbell (candidates for VP and GS respectively). Both described being enthused by the conference and by the potential which clearly existed to resist a sellout in the TPS dispute and the lasting impact from the N30 strike.

Each described how they would do their best, if elected, to ensure that the union campaigns and fights as hard as possible using all the means at our disposal to defend education and our members’ jobs, pay, pensions and conditions, and to resist attempts by the current GS to curtail democracy in the union and bypass elected bodies in favour of email plebicites.

Mark talked about his main differences from Sally Hunt. Mark thinks we can fight and win. But Sally seems to think we can’t win so doesn’t want to fight. He talked about fighting the White paper – UCU has not been putting all its resources in. UCU Left has done a lot.

He argued that it is right to use the word ‘political’ in post-16 education. Some think TUs are only interested in economic issues – jobs, pay, pensions. But the two are connected. And our values are crucial, the value of education as liberation. For example, we should defend the opportunities for people who didn’t get exams earlier, very often the sort of people who come to his institution, London Met. He is now involved in a major battle to defend hundreds of jobs under threat there, caused directly by the cuts and tuition fee rises.

We have to defend students, be together in collective action. They had been right to protest. Nov 11th 2010 we split from Sally when she attacked students for a few broken windows at Millbank.

Mark urged people to collect further endorsements for his campaign. The online endorsement link.

Campaign materials for Mark and Angie and the other candidates were available from the conference and people were urged to hold local and regional meetings to plan the distribution of leaflets and detailed campaigning work to get the vote out in the elections which run from February 6th to March 1st. (These materials are also available here.

Congress

A team of supporters was elected to coordinate preparations for the Annual Congress in June: the writing of motions (lots of people volunteered to prepare particular topics relevant to their branches), booking rooms for fringe meetings, and so on.