HEC snubs the membership and delays the fights

Report of Higher Education Committee of Friday 2nd July


Meeting for the first time since annual Congress and Sector Conferences, UCU’s Higher Education Committee decided on Friday to delay a Special HE Sector Conference (SHESC) until after the summer. 

This is despite an instruction from Sector Conference (Motion HE3) to hold a Special Higher Education Sector Conference (SHESC) in the first two weeks of August in order to progress the Four Fights and USS campaigns. This delay is unfortunate. It sets back the timing of ballots and threatens our ability to take industrial action over pay, casualisation, equalities and pensions during the autumn term.

UCU Left HEC members voted for the earliest possible date for a SHESC, but HEC voted by one vote for the latest date on offer – September 9th. Branches will now have the difficult task of meeting to submit motions before a deadline of August 23rd. 

The only minor advantage to this delay is that it should give time for the 2021-22 JNCHES dispute (UCEA’s 1.5% ‘final offer’) to come to a head so that the dispute over the 0% award of 2020-21 to be rolled over into it. But this is not a good enough reason to delay getting the campaign under way. Unison is already balloting 48 of its HE branches for action in the autumn over the 20-21 dispute. 

UCU Left motions and amendments attempting to commit USS negotiators to abide by conference positions and to initiate a ballot on USS over the summer were, unfortunately, defeated. Not only are some in the leadership intent on delay, they also want to water down the demands of members and lower the sights of what can be achieved.

This refusal by the majority on the HEC to implement the clear decisions of the policy-making body of the union is not only undemocratic, but sends a signal to our employers and the pension company that we are not serious about the fights that are necessary. The situation can be rectified but only by branches organising seriously for the September Special Conference and insisting that the campaigns are organised and the ballots are initiated.

On the positive side, a motion calling on all UCU members to make a donation of £4 or more to the Liverpool strike fund was carried, as was a motion to set up a UCU campaign group to coordinate opposition to the cuts to funding for arts courses.

A motion on Rhodes Must Fall, which had already fallen off a recent NEC agenda, was again not heard through lack of time, as was a motion on making HE safe for trans and nonbinary students.

Members vote to REJECT ‘Four Fights’ offer – Now #Fight4TheFuture

London College of Fashion

UCU members in Higher Education have voted overwhelmingly to reject the employers’ offer to settle the Four Fights dispute. 61.2% voted Reject, 38.8% to Accept on a 30% turnout.

This is an important result. UCU members have decided that the offer was not worth all the sacrifices that we made, including the 22 days of strike action. They are right — the offer gave no guarantees on casualisation or gender pay, speaking only of ‘expectations’ that employers would engage in, using existing consultation arrangements to ‘move in the right direction’. There was no commitment to ban zero hours contracts, despite such contracts being illegal in some countries. And there was no requirement to come to local agreements with unions or even to engage with them properly if there were not existing mechanisms to do so.

On race pay there was virtually nothing, and the employers insisted on treating workload allocation only under existing provisions regarding stress and health, rejecting our demand that workload models should be agreed in every institution. And, of course, there was nothing on pay.

In the context of huge and savage assaults on jobs, with potentially hundreds of thousands of casualised jobs going — and many already have — plus attacks on pay and conditions, a reject vote is exactly the right message to send to our employers. It signals that members still want to fight against the effects of marketisation, now exacerbated by Coronavirus, on a UK-wide basis, not institution by institution.

At last, a Higher Education Sector Conference (HESC) has been called to draw up a national response to the attacks on jobs, pay and conditions being pushed through by institutions under the cover of Coronavirus. Whether we revive the terms of the 4 Fights dispute or draw up a new claim in light of the latest attacks as the HEC motion suggests, is a secondary question.

We need a national strategy in defence of HE and our jobs.

This needs to include a commitment to fight all job losses, starting with casualised workers and against all worsening of terms and conditions. It needs to include the demands of the 4 Fights in relation to casualisation, workloads and an equality pay claim, and address the intersectionality of the pay gap whilst strengthening the emphasis on the race pay gap and employment of black staff.

Crucially, it needs to reject the idea of pay cuts implicit in HQ’s ‘Jobs First’ strategy. This is a policy that has never been endorsed by union members, but it would erode terms and conditions, and fracture national pay arrangements without defending jobs, especially of casualised staff.

Marian Mayer
Jo McNeill
Sean Wallis
Mark Abel
(Four Fights negotiators 2019-20)