Austerity – UCU Left

15 March 202315 March 2023

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

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

No new information about progress in the talks materialised.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Democracy takes time

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

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

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

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

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

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

We have to go forward

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

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

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

Strike. Vote. Win.

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

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

No Capitulation. Unity is Strength.

Build the Pickets. Keep up the Action.

10 August 202215 August 2022

Time to get organised to win the HE ballot!

UCU members will need to get organised to win the ballots in Higher Education. After the UCU Rising campaign on Wednesday 10th August, it’s all hands on deck to deliver the hard-hitting, ‘transformative’ campaign promised by UCU HQ.

We are in the middle of a huge fight over pay across every sector across the UK, from education and transport to communications. People are not falling for the lie that wage increases cause inflation. The government stood by and allowed oil giants to hype fuel costs, triggering price increases across the economy. Headline average inflation of more than 11% understates the impact on ordinary people, with up to 50% increases in supermarket prices for vegetables and staples.

RMT leaders Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey have become overnight celebrities for speaking the plain truth: workers have no choice but to fight for a pay increase that keeps up with inflation. Cuts in pay for skilled workers reverberate across the economy. If salaries fall, without workers’ spending, jobs and pay in service sectors will be trashed. The RMT and CWU are leading the fight, and millions can see it.

But other unions need to organise to bring workers out on strike. Indeed, we cannot afford to ignore threats to the right to strike by Conservative Party leadership candidates. The Tories are gambling on taking on all the trade unions at the same time – something that even Margaret Thatcher never dared do.

Alongside the other HE trade unions, UNISON, GMB, EIS and UNITE, UCU has rejected the paltry 3% pay offer from the HE employers. All bar one have declared a dispute, and UNISON has already begun to ballot for action in the autumn.

Against RPI, this ‘increase’ is equivalent to permanently slashing pay by almost 3 grade points, or half a pay grade. We can’t afford to accept this.

Following robust campaigns and ballots, elsewhere workers have been winning higher increases. Leading the way is UNITE. Among other successes, UNITE was able to raise airport workers’ pay by 21% at Gatwick and 10% at Glasgow. In FE, UCU has won an uplift of £2,668 and a £500 one-off payment at Hugh Baird College in Liverpool after threatening strike action. So far some 35 FE branches have live mandates for industrial action after being offered increases around the 2.5% mark.

A series of unions have won ballots and are already taking action, including the RMT on rail and underground, train drivers in ASLEF, and the CWU communication workers. Even without a union, Amazon workers are staging wildcat walkouts over pay. Other unions, including the NEU schoolteachers, and UNISON in HE have announced ballots in the autumn.

This is the context for the launch of the union’s ‘UCU Rising’ campaign. The UCU leadership has accepted something that union activists have been telling them for years: you have to campaign ahead of a ballot in order to win it. You also have to lead from the front to give members the confidence that you are serious.

We have exceeded a 50% turnout in aggregated ballots in the past. In 2005, just before UCU was formed, General Secretaries Sally Hunt and Paul Mackney toured union branches to convince members and reps that their respective national unions wanted to win the ballot. The result was a turnout of around 54% in each union.

Similarly, the 2017-18 USS ballot in pre-92 reached a turnout of 56% overall. The key ingredient was a political campaign among members that mobilised reps and activists to win the argument that now was the time to fight – and vote.

So the fora and webinars with Jo Grady announced by UCU to launch the dispute are welcome. We need more than leaflets and posters when members are mainly working online. We need to create impetus over the summer even if many are on leave. The union needs to set the clear expectation that we intend to win this ballot.

One might think that given the scale of the attacks and this wider groundswell and enthusiasm for unions like the RMT, winning a ballot in HE would be straightforward. But there are underlying concerns among members.

Strategy

First, there are unresolved questions about industrial strategy. Members need to know the union is serious about taking the kind of action required to force up offers over pay.

Last year the union called strike action on dates which had limited impact on the employers, and did not increase pay offers at a national table. In some cases strikes were in Reading Weeks or out of term-time, meaning that no leverage was placed on the employers’ ability to access their primary source of income, students.

On the other hand, branches were able to deploy marking boycotts extremely effectively, but with a local impact. Organising on a rank and file basis, with no real support from the centre, union members learned they had real leverage over their employers, and displayed true grit in standing up to employers’ pay deduction threats. One after the next, the employers negotiated local agreements to end the action. But strong action in a minority of branches was insufficient to shift the employers nationally.

It is clear that the UCU leadership expected the marking and assessment boycott campaign to fail, and understated its success because they stood aside. We all know its limitations. But we cannot ignore the fact that it exposed the weakness of the employers who annually threatened 100% pay deductions since 2006. With the exception of Queen Mary University of London, the employers did not impose 100% pay deductions: only at Goldsmiths and the RCA were any deductions for boycotts made.

A marking boycott is not a panacea, and we cannot afford to wait until critical marking periods next year to fight over pay. We will need to win a second autumn ballot in any case. But the lesson is clear: if we are prepared to take hard-hitting industrial action we can win. We need to apply this lesson to our strike action strategy.

Organisation

The second issue concerns our own organisation: we will need a serious effort to drive up the turnout.

The ballot will be aggregated across all employers, over seven weeks.

The last time UCU ran an aggregated ballot in HE over pay, ending in February 2019, the turnout (41%) was an almost replica of the previous disaggregated turnout (average 42%). Then in the autumn of 2019, a return to disaggregated ballot and a combined ballot envelope (USS, pay) pushed up turnout to an average of 49%, and 57 branches were able to take action. In the last year, average turnouts were at, or just below, 50%. This is too close to call.

As we noted above, the last time we beat the 50% turnout by a comfortable margin across pre- and post-92 was in 2005-6, just before the merger. We know what we need to do: campaign across the entire union to increase participation.

Along with pay, the USS dispute is also clearly winnable. The changes railroaded through on 1 April cannot be justified. USS is taking ‘deficit recovery contributions’ amounting to one fifth of all payments into the scheme (over half a billion pounds a year) when their own monitoring assessment of the projected deficit says these contributions are no longer required. This is theft on a grand scale, and these payments should be paid into member benefits and the cuts reversed.

Next steps

We need to rally members to get behind this campaign now.

We can expect to get a clear timeline this week, so branch officers and reps know what they need to do when. The campaign should start now, well before ballot envelopes hit doormats and pigeon holes.

There are a range of tasks to be worked through from ‘GTVO preparation’ to organising rallies to launch the ballot. Activists are asking what they can do to help. We should treat every member as a potential activist, asking them to call meetings in departments timed for when the ballot begins.

Members are extremely angry. They need to know that the union is serious about winning these parallel disputes. It is never more true to say that we are in the fight of our lives!

It is time to get organised.

10 January 202210 January 2022

The ‘Big Squeeze’ needs huge resistance.

As the new year begins the UK becomes the first country in Europe to record 150,000 deaths due to Covid 19 and one of only five countries globally to have hit this catastrophic milestone. Johnson and his cronies are determined to make working people pay for this pandemic, not only with their lives but with their living standards too.

We are facing, what the CEO of the Resolution Foundation think-tank calls, ‘an overnight cost of living catastrophe’ – the ‘Big Squeeze’ on working peoples living conditions. This is made up of three elements. First a massive 50% increase in energy bills which, according to the Financial Times, averages out per household at an increase in bills from £1,277 to £2,000 per year.

This of course will hit the poorest families hardest as a greater proportion of their income is spent on essentials like heating. This energy price increase will lead many into fuel poverty.

The second attack on the cost of living comes in the guise of a rise in national insurance. The government is expected to claw back £12.7 billion through this rise, leaving an individual worker over £400 on average worse off per year.

The third way we are being made to pay for the pandemic is through the rise of inflation. The Consumer Price Index (CPI) now stands at 5.2% and looks set to continue to rise. The Retail Price Index (RPI), a more accurate figure because it includes mortgage rates, has risen to 7.1% in January. Clothes and food costs are rising and are set to soar. Prices are rising much quicker than wages. More and more people will be forced to use food banks to survive.

That is how the ‘Big Squeeze’ is going to affect working people. But what about the captains of industry, how do their living standards fair as the ‘Big squeeze’ begins? As it happens, you will be surprised to know, not too badly. Some employers grabbed more pay in the first four days of this week than an average worker in Britain earns in a year. A new report from the High Pay Centre shows that this is 86 times the pay of an average full-time worker in Britain. Pascal Soriot of AstraZeneca was the highest earning CEO, grabbing £15.45 million, ahead of Brian Cassin of Experian who was paid £10.3 million.

The arrogance and conceit the wealthiest in society have for the rest of us is echoed in the way Johnson and his cronies govern Britain. The latest scandal to envelop Johnson over the £100,000 given to him by a Tory donor to refurbish the Downing St flat in return for favours is just another example of how he holds his office and the electorate in contempt. Texts revealing that he offered Lord Brownlow the go ahead for his Great Exhibition project at the same time as he was providing Johnson with the money for the flat decoration demonstrates just how corrupt Johnson and this government is.

In total, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, a person earning £30,000 will see their take-home pay plunge by £1,660 the biggest cut in household earnings for a half a century.

The ‘Big Squeeze’ – make the employers pay

The ‘Big squeeze’ is portrayed by the media and politicians as if it is inevitable like a natural disaster, unable to be resolved and out of the control of human intervention.

It’s the pandemic, the rise in oil prices or the cyclical rise and fall of the markets that is to blame. We will be told by government and employers that any collective action to defend living standards will only make a bad situation worse. Demanding wage increases to match the rise in the cost of living will only increase inflation.

But this is not the case. The ‘Big Squeeze’ is a political choice and continues government policies designed to maintain a system that has corruption, inequality and poverty baked into the pillars and foundations that up hold it. A reliance on fossil fuels and a refusal to take control of the energy industry through public ownership, will mean that a basic human need such as energy is at the mercy of fossil fuel corporations and energy companies, tearing up the fabric of our climate and planet for profit, whilst pensioners die from the cold out of fear of putting on their heating.

Rather than taxing the profits the wealthiest make out of our labour, they take more out of our wage packets instead. A policy of taxing the richest 1% would raise £262 billion which would cover the cost of the pandemic (The Guardian).

The old and false orthodox trope of mainstream economics which says that demands for higher wages leads to the rise in the cost of living will be familiar to all of us who have been on strike over pay.

The employers and government argue workers receiving higher wages for their labour inevitably means that the employer will have to put up prices of their commodities to pay for the wage increase. This is only true if you accept the parameters of the argument that has been set by the employer. When striking for a pay rise workers are fighting for a fairer redistribution of wealth in society. As we have seen profit margins have increased throughout the pandemic and with it the gap between the wealthiest and the poorest has increased.

The employer’s attempt to blame those fighting for an increase in earnings for the rise in the cost of living are merely seeking to protect their wealth and privileges. Our wage rises can come out of a redistribution of wealth. Leaving the rich with only one luxury yacht to maintain rather than two!

Fear of a backlash

Divisions are opening up within the government about how to respond to the cost-of-living crisis. Jacob Rees-Mogg, the public’s favourite Tory MP, is campaigning for Johnson to drop the £12.7 billion national insurance clawback out of fear of a backlash by working class voters. He is right to fear a backlash. The rise in fuel prices that ignited the up-rising in Kazakhstan will not have gone unnoticed in government and ruling class circles.

The levels of poverty in Britain are already high. The threat of further attacks on our earnings, pensions and welfare state to pay for the crisis will mean that many will not be able to survive the coming months. The trade union movement has over 6.6 million members. Although this is half of what it was at its height in 1979 it is still around a quarter of those in work. If organised properly this is a significant critical mass that could turn the government fears of a backlash by against them and their policies into a reality.

UCU’s HE sector’s action over pay, conditions, equality and pensions in this context provides an important example of the kind of national action that is needed across the movement. UCU’s Further Education Committee will, hopefully, be agreeing a timetable for a campaign over pay and workload, including industrial action to start in February.

There is a real appetite to resist the employer’s offensive on wages and conditions Strikes and solidarity show that we can win as recent local disputes have demonstrated. These localised strikes are different to the ones in the past. They level of engagement and the generalisation of the workers immediate concerns to locating the causes in a wider context of an unjust and an unequal society has become the norm.
But we need to spread these fights wider across the trade union movement. Members will respond to the calls for action if they feel that their leaderships are serious about mobilising to strike rather than simply using ballots as a lobbying exercise.

The possibility of coordinated action amongst teachers, local government workers , rail workers and UCU members is a real possibility as ballots are launched in these sectors.

The government and the employers have signalled what they intend to do in 2022. We know the devastating impact their attacks will have on millions of working people. We have no option but to respond to the ‘Big Squeeze’ with monumental resistance.

Sean Vernell UCU NEC

13 September 20157 November 2021

Jez he did!

Jeremy Corbyn’s stunning victory in the Labour leadership election will change the face of politics in Britain. His campaign focused the angry anti-Tory, anti-austerity feelings shared by millions.

In the article below Sean Vernell assesses the significance of the victory.

Jez he did! Corbyn’s victory brings with it ‘a new kind of politics’.

Jeremy Corbyn’s successful bid to win the leadership of the Labour Party has sent shock waves through the political establishment. His victory was overwhelming and gives him a huge mandate for the anti-austerity policies he put forward during the leadership campaign.

Corbyn’s first act as Labour leader was to speak out against the Tory Trade Union Bill and to join tens of thousands on the “Refugees welcome here” protest in London.

Despite the virulence of the attacks on him, his success in the election, with almost 60% of the first preference votes, was unequivocal. The significance of this victory is enormous. For two months all the political pundits, media hacks and the three other candidates have tried to make sense of his growing mass appeal not just with party members but also with a new generation that has, in the past, been turned off from official politics.

This election campaign has revealed just how out of touch the political establishment are with the true feelings of working people.

They used terms like ‘Corbynmania’ and ‘hysterical’ to describe the tens of thousands that his campaign attracted across Britain. The establishment pundits could only rationalise his popularity by putting it down to some form of mass neurosis.

They cannot understand why working people have such a profound sense of rage and injustice towards those at the top of society who continue to get wealthier whilst they get poorer. They fail to understand the frustration and anxiety that working people feel everyday as their work/life balance firmly tilts towards work – resulting in them having no time to spend playing and watching their children grow up.

They fail to understand the young.

A generation that has been brought up in an education system where developing the capacity to think and be critical has been replaced by ‘employability’, targets and tests. They have made it more difficult for children from working class backgrounds to access further and higher education by scrapping EMA and raising tuition fees. This is a generation that has been demonised by the press and blamed for successive governments’ failure to provide them with decent secure employment.

It is this discontent and these fears that Corbyn’s campaign gave voice to.

His campaign attracted 300,000 new members to join the Labour Party. At the core of his campaign lay an army of 16,000 volunteers who built the rallies and made the calls to get the vote out.

The offensive begins.

The campaign against Corbyn will no doubt start from day one. The media and the right within the Labour Party will try to portray Corbyn and his supporters as being out of touch with the electorate and who couldn’t possibly win a general election.

There’s nothing new here. This was exactly the excuse that Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair used to ‘modernise’ the party in the 80’s and 90s. They argued that the Labour Party (ie the left) had lost touch with the centre ground of British politics and needed to reconnect with the electorate.

For them that meant moving to the right and embracing the market, privatisation and ‘humanitarian’ wars.

Behind the Blairites’ political strategy lay an acceptance that working people are instinctively right wing and had lost any notion of a collective response to society’s

problems. They had, the Blairites believed, swallowed the individualist, ‘there’s no such thing as society’ politics of the Thatcher era. They concluded from this that rather than challenge these ideas the ‘modern’ Labour Party had to mimic the Tories if they were to win office again.

But it was always mistaken to believe that working people had simply accepted these ideas. Social survey after social survey throughout the 90s showed that on key Tory policies like privatisation and taxes most people were to the left of the official Labour Party.

What the Corbyn campaign proved is that by fighting on a principled, anti-austerity, anti- privatisation, anti- war platform and by putting forward alternatives based on collectivism he could attract people into engaging with official politics again.

But, of course, this is precisely what the establishment fears. After their hacks have spent hour after hour writing column after column complaining about the apathetic working class and tut-tutting at their refusal to turn out in elections, they are now faced with the potential of all those ‘chavs’ turning out to get actively engaged in politics.

The narrative will now change to complain about how Corbyn’s ‘new kind of politics’ is ‘too simplistic’ and that his supporters are not qualified to really understand the complexities of running a modern dynamic economy like Britain’s. The Press, employers and the right within the Labour Party, who are a part of the establishment, will collude to do everything that can to destabilise and undermine the Corbyn leadership. They will be relentless.

That is why trade unionists and activists need to rally support for Jeremy Corbyn’s anti- austerity stance and his democratic right to lead the Labour Party.

Corbyn’s victory: A real boost to every campaign

Corbyn’s victory will lift the confidence of all those who wish to fight back against austerity and injustice. Every trade unionist will feel more confident to take on every bullying manager knowing that their views are not extreme – we are now the mainstream.

He has long been a friend to trade unionists in struggle and to those fighting to defend educational provision. He is on record as proposing a National Education Service (like the NHS), opposing free schools and academies, supporting lifelong learning (to be paid for by a 2 percent increase in corporation tax), scrapping tuition fees and reinstating grants, and abolishing the charitable status of private schools. Clearly these policies will be enthusiastically supported by all those who work and are taught within the education sectors.

Every anti-racist and anti-war activist will feel more confident knowing that the leader of the Labour party is for scrapping Trident, pulling out of NATO and will oppose sending the poor and unemployed of one county to go and kill and maim the poor and unemployed of another.

There will be pressure, no doubt, even from Corybn’s own supporters to seek compromise with those who are hell-bent on destroying him. We will need to resist those pressures.

The real power to defeat austerity and prevent the new moves to war in Syria, for example, lies in building a mass austerity movement in the workplaces and on the streets. This means seizing every opportunity to block the Tories’ plans in the coming weeks and months. It means building on the mass solidarity in support of refugees and migrants and against racism which has mushroomed in the last few weeks.

The main defence against all those forces that seek to undermine Corbyn’s mandate is the movements that gave birth to Corbynism in the first place. As long as we are clear about this and continue to build the movement against austerity, war and racism then the excitement and enthusiasm for a new kind of politics ushered in by the election of Jeremy Corbyn to the leader of the Labour Party, could be the harbinger of real hope and change for the left in Britain.

Next stop Manchester, Sunday 4th October.

The week after, on Saturday 10th October, the UCU Left conference, which could hardly be better timed, ‘Education in the front line: how do we fight the austerity agenda?’ will take place in central London. You can register for this by visiting the UCU Left website, www.uculeft.org, where there is also a downloadable flier.

Sean Vernell, UCU Coordinating Secretary City and Islington College and FE national negotiator.