ballot – Page 2

31 October 20196 November 2019

We won the vote – Now let’s start the action

The ballot results are in. UCU members throughout Higher Education are ready to fight to defend their pay and pensions, and to stand up against inequality, unmanageable workloads and casualisation.

On pay, 73% of members voted yes to strike action, on a 49% total turnout. 55 university branches declared with a turnout greater than 50%. On USS, 44 out of 64 USS institutions hit the threshold. Herriot-Watt topped the poll at 71.59% turnout.

Branches in Northern Ireland do not have to beat the 50% threshold, so Queens University Belfast, Ulster University, Stranmillis University College and St Mary’s University College Belfast are also able to strike.

62.33% of balloted UCU members are in branches eligible to take strike action over pay. In the USS pre-92 universities, the equivalent figure is 80.62%.

These are the highest votes ever in a UCU national pay campaign, outstripping those in last year’s pay ballot.

The votes were overwhelmingly for action. But thanks to the Tory Anti-Union Laws, turnout is the key. 55 branches exceeded the 50% threshold required. Given the obstacle that this represents for trade unions, our results are very positive. The union decided to conduct disaggregated ballots precisely so that some branches would be able to fight even if we didn’t reach the threshold overall.

What must happen now

It is time to name the date for action.

The 55+ branches with legal mandates must begin escalating action in mid-November (see list below). The other branches need to continue the campaign to reballot – see below.

The pension action will begin to put pressure on the employers in UCEA and UUK and on the pension bosses at USS. We know they won’t shift their positions without it.

The pay action (including equality, workload and casualisation) unifies members young and old, and unites us with our colleagues in other unions in each university or college. Pay also unifies the sector, pre- and post-92.

Successful pay ballots allow other workers who are not in UCU to participate in strikes. (It is unlawful for employers to discriminate by union membership and branches can extract statements from HR to that effect.) It also means that post-92 institutions will be able to take strike action alongside pre-92, offering mutual solidarity and presenting a united front in defence of HE and the staff who work in HE.

It is time to lift the lid on local issues of casualisation and gender and race pay inequality – and show they are endemic to our sector.

We can take action alongside postal workers defending their jobs and school students fighting climate change.

General Election

The general election gives us the perfect opportunity to put a spotlight on the future of Higher Education.

If we want to insist that government has a responsibility to ensure that universities pay their staff properly, address the scandals of rising casualisation and unequal pay, and protect the USS pension scheme for future generations with a government guarantee, we could not ask for a better moment to take action!

Reballots and organising solidarity

Meanwhile, branches who reached 40% or more should be reballoted with the aim of joining a second wave of action in January. Many branches are only a few dozen votes short of the threshold and have a very good chance of breaking through on a reballot. Bringing out more branches would be an excellent way for our action to escalate in the new year. See the graphs above. Branches which fell below 40% should have the right to opt in to the reballot.

All those not in a position to strike yet can support striking members by contributing to a strike fund levy.

UCU in Transformation – One Year On
#UCUTransformed2019
London, Sat 2 Nov 11-5
Called by London Region UCU

In the meantime we face a major organising task. Regions have a crucial role to link up branches striking with those balloting, organising regional demonstrations and encouraging demonstrative action.

The first step to linking up activists and reps will be the #UCUTransformed2019 one-day conference called by London Region UCU on Saturday 2 November.

This will be the first chance to debate the next steps in the struggle with other reps and activists. Reps in branches that missed the threshold will want to discuss the Herriot Watt GTVO strategy. Other regions should call activist meetings as soon as possible to do the same.

Branches with live ballot mandates

The institutions in which members can now take action are:

Aston University
Bangor University
Bishop Grosseteste University
Bournemouth University
Cardiff University
Courtauld Institute of Art
Durham University
Edge Hill University
Glasgow Caledonian University
Glasgow School of Art
Heriot-Watt University
Liverpool Hope University
Liverpool Institute of Performing Arts (LIPA)
Loughborough University
Newcastle University
Open University
Queen Margaret University
Queen’s University, Belfast
Roehampton University
Sheffield Hallam University
St Mary’s University College Belfast
Stranmillis University College
The Institute of Development Studies
The University of Aberdeen
The University of Bath
The University of Dundee
The University of Kent
The University of Leeds
The University of Manchester
The University of Nottingham
The University of Sheffield
The University of Stirling
Ulster University
University College London
University of Birmingham
University of Bradford
University of Brighton
University of Bristol
University of Cambridge
University of Edinburgh
University of Essex
University of Exeter
University of Glasgow
University of Lancaster
University of Leicester
University of Liverpool
University of London, City
University of London, Goldsmiths
University of London, Queen Mary
University of London, Royal Holloway
University of Oxford
University of Reading
University of Southampton
University of St Andrews
University of Strathclyde
University of Sussex
University of Wales
University of Warwick
University of York

5 September 20195 September 2019

Get organised to defend USS and pay

Take the fight to Boris – Defend Higher Education!

What is at stake

This is what is happening to our USS Defined Benefit pension. If we were to accept UUK’s offer, USS will pay us a pension worth less, pound-for-pound, than three quarters of the value (72.22%) of the 2011 CARE scheme.

And that scheme was a huge cut from the Final Salary scheme that had existed for years.

This is a deliberate policy by the employers, working in concert with those in USS and the City who would like to see the back of Defined Benefit. In 2018 UUK used their majority on the Board (and the casting vote of the Chair) to impose Defined Contribution.

The entire case for increasing contributions is predicated on a ‘deficit’ that has been widely debunked. The simple fact is that if the pension scheme were not ‘de-risked’ there would be no projected deficit. ‘De-risking’ (selling off investment assets and buying gilts) began after the employers demanded it in 2014.

This attack is not a one-off. It won’t be stopped by negotiations — however clever the negotiators. Sally Hunt knew that. That’s why in 2017, she used her influence on the HEC to build the strike. She silenced the right wing of the HEC, openly campaigned for strikes and allied with the Left to make sure they took place.

Members took up the call and responded brilliantly. 14 days of strikes stopped USS and UUK wrecking the Defined Benefit scheme altogether.

We could have fought and won to commit UUK to No Detriment. Had we done that, we would not have to fight now.

But two years on, USS and UUK are turning their backs on the Joint Expert Panel, the result of the 2018 dispute, ignoring UCU, and demanding 20% more from members — all for the same pension benefits.

With the employers imposing 1.8% on pay, USS members will have an effective 0.2% pay increase (CPI, meanwhile, is at 2% and RPI 2.8%). This is a huge pay cut.

Worse, increased employer contributions will inevitably provoke the university employers. Trinity College Cambridge has left the scheme. As costs on them rise, universities will demand 100% DC. And every cut in DB pension value means less for members to defend.

We cannot leave it to the Joint Expert Panel to rescue us. USS is being undermined by market greed.

Record profits, winners and losers — staff and students lose

Our pension is the victim of Higher Education marketisation.

It is no accident that 2011 marks the beginning of the decline for USS, a scheme that survived stock market crashes and paid 1/80th Final Salary for decades. Before 2011 members paid 6.35% employer contributions. After UCU lost that round, contributions were forced up to 7.5%, and Final Salary was closed to new members.

Before 2011 the employers’ surpluses (profits) were small. Universities were not expected to turn a profit. For example, in 2003, HESA reported a sector surplus (both pre- and post- 92) of £65 million.

But by 2016 the sector surplus was £1.5 billion (on stricter reporting standards)!

The mad competitive scramble to recruit undergraduate students and bank £9,000+ tuition fees has set university against university, college against college. It has encouraged them to borrow over £10 billion in capital projects, and it has created winners and losers.

Graph: Winners and losers. Surpluses as a percentage of total income by institution (2016-17), HEFCE. Total surpluses in 2017 were reported to be £1.1 billion.

The premise of USS’s stability is mutuality — that the sector works together to provide pensions and the employers together contribute stability to the investment strategy by underwriting the portfolio. This is known as the ‘employer’s covenant’.

But Higher Education competition is destroying mutuality and trust. Why would UCL loan to USS to underwrite the risk of King’s, its competitor down the road? Why would King’s underwrite UCL?

Anyone who thinks that accepting this offer will ‘tide over’ USS has not been paying attention.

Members struck for 14 days in 2018 because they knew that our fight to defend USS was also a fight to defend the future of Higher Education. We had to resist the war of all against all that the sector had become locked into.

Made in Westminster

In 2016, HE Minister Jo Johnson drove through the Higher Education and Research Act. This allowed universities to declare bankruptcy, as Greenwich School of Management (aka ‘GSM London’) did in July.

No wonder employers are concerned about carrying each other’s risk!

The Tory Government is divided over Brexit. A snap General Election is likely. We have a tremendous opportunity to put Higher Education on the map and put the responsibility for this crisis back where it belongs — in Government. The demand for a Government Guarantee to underwrite USS makes total sense. But we need one now, not when USS is frittered away to nothing.

Since our strikes in HE, Further Education members struck over pay and marched on Parliament against cuts in funding. Our members’ action put FE on the political map and extracted £400 million from a right-wing government led by public school boys!

Taking action in own defence gives members confidence to stand shoulder to shoulder with our EU colleagues and students over Brexit, and stand up to any attempt to divide us in a snap election.

Get organised for Round 2

We have to fight to defend our pensions and pay, and we have to organise the fightback now.

As well as pay cuts, the other symptoms of HE marketisation are rising inequality, casualisation and workload.

We have a fantastic opportunity to bring all of these fights together in the two ballots, uniting both sectors.

Balloting begins next week.

The only way to defend our pensions is through strike action beginning in the Autumn Term. We need to approach Get the Vote Out with military seriousness in branch after branch.

We won the first battle, but if we don’t fight now, we will lose the war. We need to mobilise everyone who stood on the picket line in 2018 to organise meetings in department after department — it is time to unite to win the ballot to defend USS, defend pay and defend Higher Education for future generations.

1 June 20194 June 2019

The Fight Of Our Lives – Round 2

The Augar report

The disastrous HE tuition fee market experiment of 2011 is unravelling.

The much-trailed Tory-commissioned review into HE funding, the Augar Report, is proposing cuts in tuition fees to £7,500 but a much harder ‘hit’ on students: faster repayment schedules with a lower repayment threshold, a lower interest rate but students will carry a debt for 40 years instead of 30.

In UCU Left, we have always argued for cutting tuition fees to zero, bringing back grants, and demanding that “all who may benefit can come” to university (the so-called Robbins Principle). For us, Higher Education is the gift each generation bestows on the next – access to knowledge at the highest level. Make the super-rich pay their taxes, and this is entirely feasible.

But that is not what this cut is about.

Indeed, the Institute for Fiscal Studies reckon that the wealthiest students would benefit the most from the changes.

But this change – the unilateral imposing of new rates for degrees – is also a colossal market intervention on a supposed independent market!

The shockwaves will be massive.

So far the government has said it will not bail out colleges. Yet many universities have taken on large long-term debts for building projects. The Times reported in January that universities had taken on £10bn in loans.

Second, the market changes are intended to reduce student intake in certain subjects – Arts and Humanities disciplines in particular – that have seen the greatest expansion. Colleges which are dependent on these courses are likely to suffer the greatest.

If the changes are implemented, this new round of state intervention will likely drive some universities into the wall and propel students out on the street, indebted and degree-less. This happened in the USA with the collapse of the Corinthian Colleges, and if Augar is implemented, it is bound to happen here. The HE Bill (now ‘Higher Education & Research Act’) changed the constitution of university funding to explicitly allow universities to go bankrupt without being required to teach students to completion.

The Tory ex-HE minister, Jo Johnson, criticised the report, saying, correctly, that it will destabilise university finances. You’re not kidding.

Even before Augar, press leaks were of universities teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. Sir Michael Barber, Chair of the ‘Office for Students’, was reported in response saying that “no university is too big to fail”.

Now that boom-time is coming to an end, the employers are trying to make us pay the price. Just as they siphoned up the profits of HE expansion, faced with boom turning to bust, the university employers are trying to make us take the pain. They have held down pay increases below inflation yet again, driving down the proportion of budgets going to staff costs (pay and pensions) across HE, driving up surpluses and capital investments. Across our sector, from Westminster to the Open University, we have seen wholesale redundancies amidst shiny new buildings.

In the Pre-92 sector, the market is undermining the pension scheme. And the same approach is now being applied to TPS. Treating Post-92 colleges as independent universities justifies the Tory response to the Teachers Pension Scheme crunch – no more money – triggering cuts and redundancies, and potentially break-away pension plans.

We need a concerted national plan to defend the Post-92 Contract, redundancies and escalating workload in these universities. Most of all we have to fight like a national union and defend the sector.

So once a fightback in Pre-92 begins, we should use this to inspire resistance in Post-92. We are now committed to a pay fight uniting both parts of the sector. See below.

The USS crisis

In UCU Left, we have long argued that the USS crisis derives directly from HE market competition. In 2017, we saw Cambridge and Oxford colleges threaten to go it alone. This May, Sir David Eastwood, USS JNC chair, wrote to Bill Galvin, USS CEO, to say that USS needed to account and pay for the risk of HE institutions breaking away from USS.

Market madness is undermining USS.

Is USS in trouble?

USS is paying out less in benefits than it is taking in. In 2018, USS received £2.2bn in contributions and paid out only £2.0bn – a 10% surplus.
Neither the scheme’s assets, nor returns on those assets, are currently being drawn upon to pay benefits. The scheme is ‘immature’, growing and healthy.
Yet, at the insistence of the employers, USS management is ‘de-risking the portfolio’ by moving investments from equity (stocks and shares) to debt (gilts), causing a loss of 4.8%pa+ to the scheme. This is because government bonds and gilts have a low level of return, below CPI. Long-term this means inflation ‘eats the pension pot’, creating a real deficit.
This is heaping risk upon the scheme and eroding its long-term viability. The models used by USS Ltd to estimate its future viability are seriously mathematically flawed in other ways.
The only reason to ‘de-risk’ is if you think the universities won’t be around to act as guarantors to the pension fund. And the reason you might think that is because of the current market madness engulfing the sector.

The current huge USS contribution hikes are in essence covering the cost of the ‘employer covenant’ – the guarantee that employers collectively make to guarantee the future of USS. This works on the presumption that universities will be around in the future, to support USS in the future. But market competition makes university survival less certain, pushing the scheme into a winding-up (‘de-risking’) valuation methodology. Hence ‘de-risking’, the misnamed process of devaluing the assets by dumping them in low-interest bearing government bonds and gilts.

The root of the problem is simply this. In a winner-takes-all, devil-takes-hindmost cuthroat competition, universities see each other as unknown risk bearers at best, enemies at worst. Thus in May, Trinity College Cambridge announced it was leaving USS because it did not wish to carry the pension risk of other colleges’ pensioners.

It is bad enough that costs on us are sky-rocketing. Worse, paying these additional contributions is to reward and encourage failure!

We cannot address this crisis by negotiating and hoping. We need leverage.

Look what happened after we stopped striking. We went backwards.

The USS Board shredded the First JEP Report – and any move to avoid ‘de-risking’ – because they believed UCU had demobilised.
One of our USS trustees, Jane Hutton, was forced out for criticising USS’s approach to the valuations.
The Pension Regulator is saying that even ‘Option 3’ is unlikely to be viable.

We are heading for disaster unless we fight.

We have to fight back

When we fight we can rebalance the equation.

Before we struck in 2018, everything seemed lost. USS was heading for the abyss of 100% Defined Contribution. Within two weeks into 14 days of strikes, and UUK were beginning to backtrack.

But we stopped our strikes too early. Not because the JEP was not well-intentioned – but because the Achilles heel of the JEP was that USS Board could ignore its recommendations.

Every Pre-92 branch of UCU faces a stern test. How will we rebuild the fight to defend USS?

We need to get organised.

Starting now, how do we organise a Get the Vote Out Campaign that instils confidence in our members to strike in the Autumn?

We will face two arguments.

“We fought before but here we are, so what’s the point?”
- Our strike was successful but it was only one battle in a war to defend our pension. If we had continued to victory, we might have won outright.
“Pension cuts are inevitable.”
- They were not inevitable for the entire life of USS until 2011. What changed is the market competition in the sector, and USS adapting to it by ‘de-risking’ USS.

This is Round 2 in the fight of our lives. A serious fight to defend USS has every change of winning, and in the process building a bigger defence for the future of Higher Education in the UK, uniting with students and everyone who cares about the future of society and the role of universities in it.

We should re-raise the demand that as part of the Augar review, the Government should guarantee USS (and underwrite TPS costs). After all, they are directly intervening in the market they created and undermining the UK university sector as a result.

What next?

UCU’s HE Conference decided on the following key actions:

Declare a dispute with the employers immediately over the imposed extra contributions.
Ballot members in September and October for serious strike action in the autumn term.
Build a big political campaign calling members into action, including a Day of Action.
Call a Higher Education Sector Conference in the late autumn term to review next steps.
Organise a pay campaign alongside pensions and unite the whole union across HE.

Branches need to call General Meetings before the end of the Summer Term, to report back on Congress and HE Conference. Invite our new General Secretary Jo Grady, a USS negotiator or an HEC member to speak.

It is time to wake up the ‘strike committees’, ‘action committees’ and other campaign networks that branches built up before and during the last USS strike. Every single member who took strike action has a stake in this fight.

We need to plan the biggest possible Get the Vote Out campaign for September and October.

We need to explain that we won the battle, but we have not yet won the war.

We can put this right in Round 2.

But we need to get organised.

Obvious Question: How can we fight a climate crisis with a bankrupt university sector?

9 November 201811 November 2018

Report on UCU HE pay sector conference, 7 November

HE votes to re-ballot and campaign on pay, equality, casulisation and workload – prepare to organise and fight

Following a serious debate about strategy, delegates at Wednesday’s HE Sector Conference voted to relaunch a hard-hitting national pay campaign, focusing on pay, equality, casualisation and workload.

Delegates came to the pay conference in the wake of industrial action ballot results which delivered an overall vote of 69% for strikes and 80% for action short of strike on a 42% turnout, the highest figures ever for an HE national pay ballot. However, as we know, only eight out of 147 branches of the union exceeded the 50% turnout threshold required under the Tory anti-trade union legislation.

The debate

Given the solid support for action there was no desire to wind up the pay campaign.

But there were tactical and strategic differences about how to go forward.

A number of motions (composite motion 1, and motions 2 and 3) argued for a selective re-ballot of members in branches which had come close to reaching the threshold. Motion 1 used the 35% turnout as a benchmark, allowing others to opt in. This would be a ‘disaggregated’ ballot, counted branch-by-branch, just like the most recent ballot and the USS ballot.
Against this position was a motion (Motion 5) which argued for an aggregated national ballot in the Spring Term and for fighting over next year’s pay claim. This means that all members get to vote, and all votes are counted centrally. The delay would offer branches some additional time to prepare.

The conference heard how branches such as Herriot Watt had sailed over the threshold (achieving a 65% turnout) by implementing a meticulous GTVO campaign. If this experience were generalised across the union, combined with speaking tours by HEC members and other measures, many more branches could reach the threshold in time to take action alongside those which already have a valid ballot.

The merits of aggregated and disaggregated ballots was debated. An aggregated ballot would mean that if the 50% threshold was crossed, all members could strike and take ASOS together. It would be a national strike as well as a national claim. But the disadvantage is that if the 50% threshold was not crossed, the dispute would be over. It is one roll of the dice.

The recent turnout at 42% is a lot higher than the ~35% turnout in 2016, but there is still some way to go to reach 50%. We would all be in it together, but there is an increased risk of not getting over the threshold. The fact that branch results would be hidden in the total also tends to soften the responsibility of individual branch activists to fight to reach 50% in their own institution. This is why UCU Left believe that in light of the Tory union thresholds, we have nothing to lose by disaggregating a national ballot. A national pay campaign, if necessary, could be led by a significant number who reached the thresholds.

For this tactical reason, UCU Left members argued to mount a disaggregated ballot and to build on the current ballot result. As one speaker put it, “our task is to march every branch over the 50% threshold” in pursuit of the national claim, an act that would strengthen their ability to fight independently in front of their own employer. Continue reading “Report on UCU HE pay sector conference, 7 November”