HEC votes for a ballot – and a campaign to save the sector

The fight is on to save Higher Education.

UCU’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) met on Thursday 12 December to consider what the union should do in the light of the financial crisis hitting our sector.

Tens of thousands of members face losing their jobs. Last year the union had no UK-wide campaign. Branches were left to fight alone. With the financial situation getting worse, and a limited window of opportunity to influence the Labour Government, we cannot afford to wait.

HEC voted for

• a carefully structured ballot campaign over pay, to begin as soon as possible,
• linked to a political campaign in defence of the sector,
• on a timeline that would permit the union to call action before the end of the spring term.

Alongside the ballot and GTVO activity would be a campaign to raise the union’s emergency demands to save jobs, courses and our sector. It should include a conference to discuss the union’s demands. UCU has already agreed to focus on practical interventions that a Labour Government could make – to reinstate the block grant, for the government to cover or cancel the TPS contribution increase, and to reverse the hostile environment visa changes currently putting off overseas students from applying to university in the UK. We need to popularise these calls and debate them with politicians and ministers.

HEC also repeated the call made by Congress and the NEC for a major national demo to defend post-16 education.

We need to be imaginative and ambitious. In 2016-17, lobbying organised by The Convention for Higher Education, a loose coalition of UCU activists, academics and bodies including the Council for the Defence of British Universities, managed to force concessions from the Conservative Government in their Higher Education and Research Act.

The plan is for a joined-up strategy fighting for pay and jobs that can mobilise members to speak up about the crisis in Higher Education and put pressure on Labour to intervene. Our members are the best advocates for the sector. If this campaign develops successfully, we can also impact on Labour’s forthcoming HE funding review.

Branches facing redundancies and cuts were in the forefront of HEC’s minds. This strategy does two things: it brings our whole union together, and it puts pressure on Government to pay up for HE. If branches are fighting job losses they want to know that the whole union is behind them, and we all need to mobilise to insist Labour addresses the funding crisis of the sector.

HEC also voted to escalate procedures for branches facing redundancies to ballot for industrial action over jobs (see resolution 2 below).

The HEC meeting ended in messages of solidarity to branches facing job losses, and to UNITE UCU.

No-one should fight alone.

Resolutions from HEC meeting 12 December 2024 (including amendments)

1. Building industrial action ballot alongside a political campaign to defend HE

HEC notes the consultative ballot rejecting the pay offer and in favour of IA.

HEC resolves to

1. Immediately organise an IA ballot for a ‘fully-funded pay rise’ of 5.5% (2023-24 claim) linked to a political campaign for a fully-funded sector calling for emergency measures to save jobs, courses and the sector.
2. Run the IA ballot, HEC meetings etc., on a timeline permitting members to take UK-wide term-time strike action before the Easter break in most universities.
3. Recommend that the National Demonstration to Defend Post 16 education as decided at UCU Congress is called for a Saturday in February 2025 in order to support the ballot
4. Send out detailed briefing notes and organise regional GTVO workshops.
5. Call a conference to defend HE in early February promoting and debating UCU’s proposals. Organise regional lobbies and mass lobby of Parliament with the post-16 demonstration.
6. Consult members during the ballot on types of action through regional/devolved nations meetings and a branch delegate meeting during the ballot. Hold HEC in final week of ballot to plan action in anticipation of the result.

2. Responding to the Employers’ Offensive in the context of HE Crisis and Pay Dispute

This HEC notes

1. The HE employers’ offensive and the broken university funding model.
2. Long IA balloting-and-notification periods (TUA2016) and short windows for CR consultation (30 or 45 days, TULRCA1992) making timely ballot authorisation vital.
3. That branches should not have to fight on their own but that several branch that have taken or threatened industrial action have made gains or mitigated losses.

This HEC resolves to

1. Update branch officers weekly with a list of redundancy programmes by HEIs including VRs and CRs, and have a dedicated campaigning webpage.
2. Weekly anti-cuts meeting open to all branches.
3. Training on opposing redundancies via industrial action.
4. Hold a national demonstrations in early February in Wales, Scotland, England and NI and protests at MP’s surgeries in constituencies with threatened universities.
5. Shorten current ballot authorisation timelines, without requirement for consultative ballots.
6. Make every branch taking industrial action against redundancies a local dispute of national significance.
7. The large-scale redundancy programs and restructurings occurring in HE include a significant but varying silent redundancy of casualised workers across the sector. HEC resolves that the numbers of casualised work losses and ‘redundancies’ be added to the present count of redundancies to enable us to comprehensively assess the true scale of job losses across the sector and to inform our IA campaign with members.