Building a national UCU HE campaign in 2024

The UCU’s Higher Education Committee met on Friday 27 September to decide on next steps in the 2024 national pay and related claim.

We have reached the end of a series of formal negotiations over pay and pay-related elements. Most employers are already moving to impose the offer on pay in members’ pay, but some — perhaps as many as 20 — have told union branches they intend to ‘defer’ for 11 months.

In the immediate term, HEC voted overwhelmingly to keep the dispute over pay alive. There was a recognition that we have both a major opportunity — to put pressure on the new Labour Government — and a major threat — a spiral of sectoral decline — to address.

As we set out below, the best way to develop a campaign to defend our sector includes an industrial campaign over pay. A UK-wide pay campaign can mobilise our members against the ongoing Cost of Living crisis and demand UK-wide solutions that Higher Education urgently needs.

At the Branch Delegate Meeting (BDM) before the HEC, no delegate spoke in favour of the pay offer. Everyone knows that it is a pay cut, on top of the 11% cut in pay members suffered in two years previously. Staging the payment adds insult to injury. But there was doubt expressed by a number of delegates as to whether we could win more. All members, delegates and branches need a strategy to turn the situation around.

HEC voted to reject the pay offer and accept the pay-related elements of the offer. Some branches at the BDM reported that their members voted to reject the pay-related elements (terms of reference for negotiation over the other Three Fights) because the offer was too vague. But ‘acceptance’ simply means UCU agrees to go into negotiations in JNCHES over national policy recommendations. And it would mean that any industrial action and ballot would be specified in relation to the pay claim.

Such an ‘acceptance’ does not prevent branches fighting for best practice at a local level with specific local claims to employers. Nor would it stop the union campaigning publicly over casualisation abuses, chronic workload or discriminatory pay gaps.

Indeed, the strategy we attempt to set out below could provide a good platform to expose the current poor state of UK Higher Education working conditions.

The employers’ offensive

Over the last year, as many as a third of Vice Chancellors have asserted the need for cuts in jobs. We have seen a wave of major redundancy programmes across the sector. As well as creating suffering among our members in branches, the VC’s mantra of ‘affordability’ has cast a long shadow over negotiations at the top table.

Redundancy programmes and course closures are not new — ever since London Met’s infamous shrinking by two-thirds, numerous universities, including recently Roehampton, Wolverhampton and Goldsmiths have borne the brunt of horrific purges. But in previous years, major redundancy programmes were exceptional. Employers knew they risked undermining student recruitment in a ‘competitive marketplace’. Instead they mostly managed workforce numbers over time via means that avoided a public crisis, such as retirement, recruitment freezes and voluntary schemes.

Unfortunately in the face of this wave of redundancies, UCU’s approach has been to keep the fight local. Branches have been supported by the central union, but apart from independent rank-and-file initiatives there has been no attempt to bring the whole union together to fight them. Many members hear about redundancies, but in a piecemeal way. Their union is not mobilising them to offer solidarity. Even the Higher Education Committee has not been permitted to see a breakdown of redundancies branch-by-branch, despite HEC members asking for this information repeatedly.

There are two overarching factors as to why the last year has been marked by a redundancy wave. The first is the cumulative division between ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ in market competition for students, worsening ever since 2010. Sooner or later the dam would break.

The second is the way our own union has reacted to the failure to meet the ballot threshold in Autumn 2023. Having botched the MAB by refusing to implement a summer reballot, and refusing to set up Conference-mandated strike committees to allow branches continuous reporting and control over the dispute, our union leadership effectively signaled defeat to the employers. Seeing their chance, Vice Chancellors rolled out their revenge across the country. The sector was now ‘in crisis’ despite universities sitting on billions in reserves.

We cannot continue like this. We have to say ‘enough’.

We need to discuss a serious strategy that can put meaningful pressure both on employers and the new Labour Government to change course.

We need to borrow from the successful NEU schoolteachers’ campaign for a ‘Fully Funded Pay Rise’, linking the fight over pay to the fight to defend the sector.

So how can we do that?

Building a new kind of dispute

We think UCU needs a joined up campaign, consisting of two elements: political campaign for a Fully-Funded Sector and an industrial campaign for a Fully-Funded Pay Rise. Many of the elements of this campaign are already policy, having been voted for by our Special Sector Conference in April.

This has to be a campaign that puts branches facing redundancies right at the centre. No branch and no members should be left behind.

Our inspiration should be the pay campaign run by the National Education Union (NEU). From the outset of their dispute, the NEU knew that schools in England and Wales would not be able to meet their pay demands. So they made that message part of their campaign.

They did not limit their demands to what the employers could afford. After all, a school with unbudgeted RAAC that turned the lights off after kids went home would not suddenly find cash for pay rises stashed away in a cupboard!

We need to take a leaf out of their book.

The public political campaign, which we suggest we could call For A Fully-Funded Sector, needs to be discussed and refined at branch, region and nation level, with initiatives taken up by all union bodies that can articulate both immediate and near-term demands to the new Labour Government. This would then be the backdrop for a ballot members over the national JNCHES claim (RPI+2% over pay).

HEC agreed to launch a consultative ballot as part of this campaign.

We need to urgently elaborate a strategy that all of our HE branches can get behind.

For a Fully-Funded Sector

The current home undergraduate tuition fee and loan system in England is unjust and unsustainable. Scottish universities have never had these high fees, and Northern Ireland and Wales had reduced fees. The falling real values of tuition fees, plus the competition for students built into the system, have cumulatively created the current crisis in the sector. Raising fees to £12,000+ a year, as Universities UK (UUK) wants, is socially regressive, unjust and politically divisive, will not address the ‘winners and losers’ problem, and could cause student enrolments to fall.

Recent reports that Bridget Phillipson is contemplating raising tuition fees to £10,500 a year shows that Labour is under pressure to do something. But it also shows that UUK are more influential than UCU right now.

In fact in the short term — without touching student fee levels — Labour can be called on to take three steps which together would begin to level the playing field in the sector. These were agreed by the Special HE Sector Conference earlier this year.

Cancel (or agree to pay) the TPS surcharge. These are extra costs the Treasury has imposed on TPS employers as a result of the most recent pension valuation. Schools and FE colleges are not required to pay this cost for at least a year. But Post-92 universities are shouldering an additional cost of between 3 and 5% of total salary. This partially explains why so many Post-92s have triggered redundancy programmes.
End the Hostile Environment, and ensure student visa routes are humane, affordable and rational. This means resurrecting post-study visas and visas for dependents. Labour should also abolish the migrant salary threshold for all. Right now universities outside of London cannot even internationally recruit postgraduate research assistants. Universities employ very large numbers of part-time teaching staff — none can be recruited internationally.
Bring back the ‘block grant’. This is a teaching grant to departments that was abolished for many disciplines (including all of Arts and Humanities) in 2010, and reduced heavily in others. We need to resurrect support for courses that have been denied historic levels of funding for years. This could be fixed at a student number cap, allowing the government to bring back caps on regulated student recruitment in stages.

These are all short-term demands. But none of them require tuition fees to rise.

Having cheer-led for £9k fees, the Vice Chancellors in Universities UK are now campaigning to raise even higher fees — to over £12k. But the demand to increase tuition fees is obviously unfair, and would be politically difficult for the Government. It is by no means clear that Labour will increase fees, but if they do, it won’t be enough for the VCs.

Although UUK envisage the tuition fee rise would be covered by the student loan, that would just mean that the student debt mountain would grow even faster than its current £20bn/year growth rate.

Student loans in England are large by international standards. — Student loans reached £236bn in March 2024. (Source: House of Commons Library.)

Paying universities directly via resurrecting block grants is simpler, focused and cheaper. It could also create some structural stability by financially underpinning departments previously reliant wholly on student recruitment.

The market system got us to the current crisis. The solution is not more of the same.

Winners, losers, and building unity

Raising home undergraduate tuition fees by £1,000 per student/year or so can ease finances slightly.

But it will escalate, rather than moderate, the market war-of-all-against-all that the sector was plunged into in 2014 when the Government allowed universities to make unlimited numbers of offers to home students (with the exception of Medicine). It will increase income to the universities with the most home students. And it will add to the loan every student will borrow and be expected to ultimately pay back — which may mean a further disincentive to working class undergraduates.

Winners and losers - 2019 (Source: UCEA) — ‘Winners’ and ‘losers’ – 2018-19 (Source: UCEA)

In recent years, this scenario of ‘winners and losers’ has been used by the employers to undermine national pay negotiations.

The employers’ approach is to set the national pay rate at a level the poorest university in the sector can afford. Then some universities may choose to make better offers to (some) staff. This process may be via permitted local negotiated arrangements (e.g. London Weighting or adjusted grade boundaries), one-off payments such as ‘Covid enhancements’, or, more individually, by promotion programmes and market supplements. Exceptionally it may be through universities exiting national negotiations.

The result is that what started as a ‘rate for the job’ national negotiation starts to become one of below-inflation offers followed by limited and selective local and personal negotiation. Collective bargaining, sector cohesion and principles of solidarity and equity between staff and union branches are undermined.

This process is working for the employers. Universities are spending ever-smaller proportions of their budgets on staff. In the 1970s, some research-based universities spent as much as two-thirds of their budgets on staff costs. 50 years later, and that figure has fallen to nearly half.

In their last-published release, the UK Higher Education Statistics Agency reported that UK-wide staff costs had fallen to a record low of 50.8% of expenditure in 2022/23. The proportion is lowest in England (averaged across many universities) and greatest in Northern Ireland. Recent fluctuations aside (Covid and USS being likely factors), the tendency remains downward. The last sharp downturn between the 2021 to 2022-23 financial years coincides with the sharp rise in inflation (raising capital and operating costs) and below-inflation pay rises.

Graph of staff costs as a proportion of total expenditure (HESA) 2014-23 — Graph of staff costs as a proportion of total expenditure 2014-23. Source: HESA.

Paradoxically, as universities have become more and more focused on mass teaching, and more and more labour intensive, they have tended to spend a smaller proportion of their budgets on staff.

UCU, and its forerunners Natfhe and AUT, has always argued that pay levels should be based on inflation and the cost of living, not on what individual universities claim is ‘affordable’. Indeed, once we concede that argument, we know we become the prisoners of Vice Chancellors’ financial gambles. Employers show us empty balance sheets: redundancies become inevitable, and colleagues are put in a zero-sum game over jobs and pay. That is why a local bargaining strategy like the General Secretary’s latest misnamed ‘Building to Win’ strategy is guaranteed to spiral to defeat.

We need to reset our campaign, and fight over pay in a different way, one that does not let the Government off the hook for the Higher Education crisis.

It’s why we need an combined industrial and political campaign that calls for a Fully-Funded Sector and a Fully-Funded Pay Rise.

Redundancies and the Other Three Fights

A campaign of the type described here can create the kind of broad-based public political platform would also allow the union to highlight the worst managerial behaviour we see in Higher Education.

We all know that market volatility drives employment volatility. Fighting for secure funding is crucial to take on the public argument about job insecurity and redundancies. So when we say we want a Fully-Funded Sector we can also say we want Secure Jobs and No Redundancies within it.

The same approach applies to Workloads and Pay Gaps. We can put our members at the forefront of this campaign. Our colleagues are by far the best spokespeople. They can say that they must have Time to Think! Or they can expose the reality for women, Black members, Disabled members and others who find themselves held back by structural barriers to progression.

This should be an opportunity to enable our members to lobby MPs and others, to give members a platform to speak up about the real conditions in our sector.

This approach also gives our members a platform over Pay. We can show that we are both committed to fighting low pay in the here and now, and to viable employment for the next generation of researchers, lecturers, and academic-related staff.

Industrial action for Fully-Funded Pay

But we can and must go one step further — we will need to take industrial action to highlight how far our pay has fallen. Mobilising the union onto the picket lines and streets is crucial to show the public and MPs that we are serious. Without that step, we risk being written off as just another lobby.

The action that we took in 2022-23 was extremely hard-hitting. But it was focused specifically on employers. That meant long periods of industrial action. A campaign that is focused both on the employers and government could look different. What it looks like is something we need to discuss as a union.

Most obviously, we could start with specific days which have an impact in Westminster or other national parliaments.

But the first key focus for activists is to put UCU in a position to signal to the Labour Government that UCU members are prepared to return to picket lines. In order to do that we need to win an industrial action ballot.

Right now, to implement this plan we will need to take some practical steps. Rushing straight out to an Industrial Action ballot without explaining the strategy in branches would be likely to fail to mobilise the 50% of membership required to win a ballot. Indeed, it would also be a huge missed opportunity. We have vast knowledge and expertise among our members. We should develop the plan in conjunction with branch officers and reps.

A consultative ballot is coming our way.

We should not roll out a consultative ballot alone. The ballot should be part of an urgent serious structured discussion in our union about how we can put across our union’s arguments and mobilise our members in speaking up for our sector.

There will likely be more Q&As organised centrally. Branches can invite HEC members and national negotiators to speak at branch meetings.

This is a chance for all members to discuss how we can build a proper grass-roots membership-driven campaign to defend our sector, our colleagues and our pay.

Our sector is at an historic juncture.

The market system is publicly failing. We must make sure neither staff nor students pay the price.

6 November 20236 November 2023

What went wrong with the UCU Rising Campaign?

lobby of UCU HQ in 2018, with 'no capitulation' placards

How the UCU reballot over pay and conditions missed the threshold

The turnout in the reballot, at 42.59%, will be a huge disappointment for every union member who wanted to see a fight over pay and conditions. But a 68.32% vote for strike action, and a 75.57% vote for action short of a strike, shows that tens of thousands of members still wanted to fight.

This is not the end of the campaign. But our union has some hard questions to ask itself.

Did the UCU campaign run out of steam, or did the UCU leadership undermine it? Was there a fundamental problem with UCU’s industrial strategy, or was the strategy that was agreed undermined by inaction and compromising in HQ?

Every success has a thousand parents. But every failure is an orphan.

Let us get one thing straight. Members are not to blame, nor are branch reps. Some may be ‘tired’, but very many are angry and extremely fed up – mainly at the lack of adequate support and the inconsistent leadership from the top of the union.

Many of the members who fought the employers over the USS pension scheme and won are the same members who saw their fight over pay, casualisation, workload and pay gaps frittered away by our union leadership.

We know that the employers can pay staff more – but they don’t want to. On average, universities underspend by about 4% of the pay bill each year. Since 2009, the employers have taken a strategic decision to spend less on staff pay in order to build up surpluses and invest in buildings in their competition to recruit ever more students in the Government’s Tuition Fee Market.

On top of this, from December every pre-92 employer is going to receive a windfall amounting to around 5% of the total pay bill thanks to the fall in USS contributions (won by our members taking weeks of strike action). It’s Christmas all year round for pre-92 Vice Chancellors.

We must not let the post-92 institutions and their leaders off the hook either. Despite additional pressures on recruitment that some post-92s have seen, and the ideological attack on Arts and Humanities from the Conservative Government, many of our post-1992 universities are in good financial shape. There is no justification for the squeeze on pay across the sector. Where the tiny minority of universities plead poverty, why don’t they cut pay and spending on Senior Managers, not on ordinary staff? Why aren’t they vigorously challenging ideological attacks on our subject areas and questioning the broken HE funding model?

Had we won the ballot we could have demanded our share as a national union. Now it looks like we are going to have to put demands on our employers locally. But that risks undermining national pay bargaining. We also have to rebuild the campaign for a new ballot. We have to understand what went wrong to come back stronger for the next round.

The problem is that the resolve that got the fight over the line over USS has not been applied by our union leadership over pay and the other three fights.

The USS campaign won in spite of a wobbling UCU leadership for three connected reasons. First, the 2018 strike which broke the employers’ plan to drive through DC won because it overturned General Secretary Sally Hunt’s plan to fudge a deal. Second, members kept up the fight, with the joint strike action earlier this year keeping the pressure on. This was particularly crucial after the disaster of April 2022, when the leadership organised token strikes (including Reading Week strikes) before the crunch point, and then abruptly called no further action. Third, the political campaign over the valuation (#NoDetriment) coupled with the changes in the financial position of the USS valuation projections due to rising interest rates made it possible to box in the employers and gain an historic victory.

So the problem is not ‘the strategy’, whatever armchair generals might say. The strategy debated at (Special) HE Sector Conferences and the Higher Education Committee has been undermined multiple times. We are facing a bunch of employers highly incentivised to wait out short bursts of action, so if an agreed strategy is not implemented by the leadership, they gain confidence and decline to negotiate. We need to make good on the promises made by the GS in 2022 – to shut down university campuses until we are satisfied we have won, instead of tinkering around the edges with time-bounded action.

Throughout the entire Four Fights campaign this year, members’ determination and organisation was unfortunately not matched by the same resolve at the top. Instead, the General Secretary repeatedly waved the white flag, from ‘the pause’ to foot-dragging over putting strikes back on, repeated e-polls and ballots. The result for ordinary members was confusing. It felt like we were being turned on and off like a tap, with last-minute announcements and late-notice “briefings” – including briefings labelled as Branch Delegate Meetings after reps arrived at them.

The pause was bad enough. The ACAS negotiations went nowhere slowly (yielding a no-strike Terms of Reference for prolonged negotiations, and an offer on the three fights worse than 2019-20), but allowed the employers to harden their position around their ‘final offer’ on pay, while undermining membership control of the strikes. It took members and branches to challenge the repeated consultations and e-polls just to keep the action on. A clearer signal to the employers that the union was divided could not really be imagined.

The silence of the leadership during the summer Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) was deafening. Remember that it was the General Secretary’s strategy to delay the MAB until the summer – or at least this is what we were told when indefinite strikes from February were opposed! But there was no planning from the centre, no adequate support and no strategy from the top on how to use the MAB to win a deal.

Questions from branches were batted back to local officers and reps with minimal answers from HQ, and branches had to fight to persuade the union they should and could take strike action to defend members against punitive MAB deductions. Branches had to lobby for an increase in strike pay, instead of there being an open appeal to build up a war chest across the union for MABbing members in advance.

Ordinary members were absolute heroes. Many bravely took the difficult decision to take part in the Marking and Assessment Boycott, face down threats of massive pay deductions, have difficult discussions with colleagues and managers, and organise locally to keep going. Others felt massively conflicted but did not take part themselves, some giving hundreds of pounds in donations to support colleagues. All of this participation and solidarity was organised in staff rooms and Zoom and Teams meetings, in departments and between colleges. Unofficial ‘rank and file’ organisation, branches, regions and the Solidarity Movement sustained the MAB while there was near silence from the official union structures.

Thus it was that there was no official Branch Delegate Meeting from the start of the MAB in May until the HEC in August when the General Secretary and the HEC majority planned to call it off. The General Secretary’s supporters on the HEC pushed for a fruitless negotiation with UCEA over reducing the pay deductions, but not over the claim (to her credit, the GS attempted to put pay back on the table). And the summer reballot never happened, leaving members out on a limb.

When the August Branch Delegate Meeting voted for winding down the MAB in the absence of a reballot, and called for strikes at the start of the Autumn Term, it was clear that the ability to apply direct industrial leverage was diminishing. Not surprisingly, given the opportunity, some branches voted to call off the strikes when given the opportunity.

UCU members, reps and activists have been busy building the reballot over the last month. We have had numerous conversations and debates with members. Many members tell us that they are fed up. Some said they won’t vote because of their anger at the leadership. Again and again, the message is the same: we trust our local branch reps, but we don’t trust ‘the leadership’.

Not all branches did miss the threshold, with some reaching 60% by their own count. However, it is clear that there is a great deal of frustration even in those branches at being let down by forces external to the branch. There is a feeling of having policy foisted on them and, worse, that those policies were inconsistent.

Some of that righteous anger is directed at the Left – why did we allow the GS and the union’s HEC majority to undermine the action? The fact is that we tried to stop them! But a small shift in the composition of the HEC following Congress towards the GS-supporting ‘Commons’ and ‘IBL’ factions allowed crucial HEC votes to go the way the GS wanted, including over the negotiation approach and the failure to implement the summer reballot.

This is an unnecessary defeat for our union. In the context of a win over USS, it risks dividing us. We should all beware the argument that ‘members don’t care about pay, equality, workloads or casualisation’. That is clearly wrong – members in pre- and post-92 institutions have just taken part in a massive MAB to try to move the employers over precisely these demands!

Indeed, one of the lessons of this action has been that the employers are prepared to wait out hard-hitting industrial action by the union, particularly if the union appears divided at the top, wherever they think an end-date is in sight, be that the end of a bout of strikes, or the end of a mandate for action. But we also know that some VCs were ready to settle, but UCU’s management of the MAB at the top failed to capitalise on the splits.

Their wait-and see approach was not cost-free for the university employers. The action exposed Vice Chancellors’ priorities starkly. Academic standards could go in the bin. Student complaints might be addressed by warm words, fake degree awards and an occasional bribe – but no reimbursement of tuition fees. The administrative chaos in some institutions at the implementation of the disproportionate and unfair MAB deductions exposed the inability of VCs to prepare. A better-prepared UCU could get universities and professional bodies to commit to academic standards from the start. The inconsistency of deductions across the sector show that employers are not as united as UCEA would have us believe.

The 2022-2023 academic year will go down as the most disrupted in history, with students missing weeks of lectures and many not receiving their results until September or October. If you think like a Vice Chancellor, and view Higher Education as a commodity, this has been a terrible year. It should be no surprise that overseas student recruitment has been negatively affected, alongside a drop in home students who now face 40-year loans thanks to the Conservative Government imposing them on the new intake.

UCU members inflicted a major blow on our Vice Chancellors, and given them a year they will not forget in a hurry. They know that they cannot afford for this to happen again.

The question is, what UCU leadership can deliver the victory that members so dearly deserve? How can we learn the right lessons, understand the weaknesses on the employers’ side and ensure we come back stronger and more effective than ever in the near future?

UCU needs a different kind of leadership. We need to ensure every level of our elected officers and representatives believe our members have the power to change the future of Higher Education for the better — and other sectors too.

We need a GS, Presidential team, and NEC that are committed to democracy through our sovereign structures, to implemented policy efficiently, and to deliver the win our members sorely need on pay and conditions. This is what our UCU Left candidates will do.

— Saira Weiner, LJMU

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.

29 July 202029 July 2020

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)

9 June 202011 June 2020

UCU Left report on HEC Meeting on 8th June: Don’t bury the #FourFights

Four-fights Square

The Higher Education Committee (HEC) re-convened for a further on-line HEC meeting on the 8^th June following the inability to deal with questions relating to the Four Fights and USS disputes at its last meeting of the 27^th May. Before commenting on this it is worth noting that two important decisions were taken at the Higher Education Committee (HEC) on 8^th June, both of which were supported by UCU Left members. The first to support the “Take the Knee” protests called by Black Lives Matter and Stand Up To Racism on Wednesday 10^th June. The motion (see below) was overwhelmingly supported 22:6 with 9 abstentions. The second motion (again see below for the motion) moved by a casualised member called for support for the vibrant campaign being waged by casualised staff and branches against redundancies in response to Covid-19. Unfortunately, neither motion was given the usual opportunity to a full debate but both were moved and voted on, this was due to the lack of time taken with the discussion which the HEC was originally convened to debate.

Four Fights & USS disputes

The reconvened HEC’s business concentrated primarily upon the unresolved question of how to defend members in the Four Fights and USS disputes. The Branch delegates’ meeting (BDM), held prior to the HEC of 27^th May, rejected the settlement of the Four Fights and sought to retain the Four Fights and the USS dispute as live disputes. The one vote at the HEC of 27^th May that was clear was that the HEC voted to support the position of the BDM and rejected employer (UCEA) proposals over the Four Fights as insufficient. May’s HEC therefore voted to reject a proposal to put the UCEA proposals to members. This was the view taken by UCU Left members.

The short time available for the original HEC meeting prevented discussion of the 14 motions which could then have outlined a strategy for the development of the two Four Fights and USS disputes. These included not moving to immediate ballots but retaining the disputes as on-going. This was in line with the decision of the BDM and was the specific question of the consultation within the branches prior to the BDM. Other motions to the May HEC would have called for the holding a Special Higher Education Sector Conference on the Four Fights dispute. Again something supported by the BDM meeting, but not subject to the original consultation. This could have allowed branches to determine the means by which a campaign would take place and, not least, provide a focus upon campaigning over job cuts to casusalised staff, which is at the heart of employers’ response to the current covid-19 crisis.

Unfortunately, the reconvened HEC did not discuss these outstanding motions but instead took up almost all its time examining the process of voting on proposals already rejected by the last HEC. The Chair clarified after one hour’s discussion that the vote would be on adopting the principles as outlined by the BDM, rather than on the implementation. The HEC’s decision should not be misinterpreted as seeking to stop the Four Fights campaign, despite the fact that all the outstanding motions from the May HEC were remitted again, this time to the HEC in July. While there is little open support for the UCEA proposals, either at the HEC or the BDM, the consultation with members must come with a strong recommendation for rejection. If the implementation is decided outside HEC it will be an attempt to undermine the Four Fights dispute and abandon the fight over equality and causalisation. It is important to recognise that members do not vote for action at the drop of a hat. Without a concerted campaign from the union that convinces members both that we can fight and that the union is willing to back a fight members know they are being treated cynically, like a stage army; being led up the hill only to be led back down again. It is this that is leading the majority of the new HEC to overturn the previous HEC decision and now put the UCEA offer out to consultation. This is a model adopted by the last General Secretary.

The HEC voted by majority 22 to 17 to refuse to separate off the question of rejection of the offer from that of consulting members and so overturned the HEC decision of 27^th May. UCU Left members voted to separate the two questions. Branches and members now need to campaign to keep the Four Fights alive. UCU must not cut the feet from under our casualised colleagues, nor ditch the campaign over equality or accept the inevitable increase in workloads now facing all staff. The Four Fights dispute arose out of the campaign by activists to force the union to ensure UCU took the questions of inequality and discrimination facing so many of our more vulnerable colleagues at the heart of our union’s work. Those members on more secure contracts recognised that without a campaign to raise the terms and conditions for the least well paid the terms of conditions for all will be lowered.

Emergency motion, Solidarity with George Floyd

HEC sends solidarity to George Floyd’s family and condemns the systematic racism that caused his death. We stand with all protesting against police brutality.

HEC believes that the UK has many BAME deaths in custody, and disproportionate BAME people in prisons. BAME are more likely to die from force or restraint and of Covid 19.

HEC demands all Principals and VCs to commit to ending institutional racist practices in the post 16 education sector.

1. Decolonise the Curriculum

2. End the BAME attainment gap.

3. End the race pay gap.

4. Support the protests of Black Lives Matter movements and SUTR.

5. Calls on all to join taking the knee on Wednesday 10 June at 6.00pm #TakeTheKnee

6 Supports the call to take by Dianne Abbott and Stand up to Racism for an independent inquiry into disproportionate BAME deaths in the Covid crisis in the UK.

Emergency motion, HE Casualisation crisis

HEC notes:

The consequences of the HE casualisation crisis are becoming clearer. The lack of UCU coordination on this has led to several brave campaigns being mounted by the most vulnerable precarious workers (many BAME) in defence of livelihoods, their students, and the future of the institutions.

HEC resolves:

To engage in widespread media campaign to publicise grassroots anticasualisation efforts, including (but not limited to) Precarious@Gold, @EssexGTAs, @KingsGTAs, @CleanersFor, and @CoronaContract.
To encourage members and branches to donate to solidarity funds for such campaigns.
To expand UCU’s anti-casualisation work to support and dovetail with the work of said grassroots organisations, with the involvement of the anticasualisation committee. Said work will include both UK-wide campaigning, and concrete regional support for local branch work, via organisational and collective casework support.

‘UCU to equip all members with know your rights training aiding the pushback against covering for casualised staff
UCU recruit and support a member, or group of members in a precedent setting case on resisting job loss due to Covid
to consult more closely with ACC and coronacontract
Jo Grady will speak directly with casualised organisers from corona contracts
to publicise any good practice on retaining of casualised staff’

Arrange mass online meeting to organise opposition to casualization in HE, before the end of June 2020.

‘Negotiate with UCEA on guarantee of at least two years job security for
casualised staff.
Develop a section of website on supporting Corona job retention
Name and shame institutions that engage in bad practice, by
media and articles by sympathetic journalists
Defend staff in the workplace who refuse to take on previously employed casualised colleagues’ work.
Consult with ACC about ALL actions concerned with casualisation’

Urgently to mount a campaign to call on securely employed staff to defend casualised staff whose contracts have not been renewed or whose hours have been cut by refusing to take on new or additional work produced by redundancies, non-renewal and a reduction of their hours. This shall be accompanied by a strong and regular communications strategy with direct input from the Anti-casualisation committee.
To reinstate the annual anticasualisation training and organising conference established by Congress 2013 composite motion 9, beginning in summer 2020 with an adapted online programme for the coronavirus context. It will be organised with direct guidance and input from the Anticasualisation Committee to ensure development of targeted, reproducible, confidence-building training to empower and recruit anticasualisation reps, officers and activists vital to the fight for jobs, safe working environments, and secure work.

6 March 2020

UCU Left ‘Four Fights’ Negotiators’ statement, 6/3/2020

Dear colleagues

We are writing as UCULeft ‘Four Fights’ negotiators who have been engaged in complex negotiations which are ongoing.

It is important to note that these negotiations have not yet resulted in an offer. Nothing is on the table and nothing is agreed.

The current situation is that after constructive discussions on the pay-related elements of the claim, the employers’ representatives were sent away to consult with their members.

In this context we are concerned that the General Secretary put out a statement on Thursday that was neither discussed nor agreed with the negotiators. In that statement she says that “If we can get an offer that represents the kind of movement I have set out here on all four parts of the dispute, I will recommend that our higher education committee (HEC) should consult members on whether to accept it.”

Negotiators are elected by members to engage directly with the employers to attempt to settle a dispute. During the course of negotiations we make proposals to the employers, knowing that whatever we might negotiate, there is a democratic process that holds us to account.

Offers, deals and accountability

HEC has agreed the following process for dealing with any offer from the employers. We have not had an offer, but were we to get one this is what would happen.

First, negotiators would discuss it as a package and consider whether or not to recommend it for consultation as the best that could be achieved through negotiations. If it were not ready to go out, we would go straight back to the employers to negotiate further.
Once it was sent out, members would see the offer, consult over and debate it in branch meetings or strike meetings, and elect delegates to a UK-wide meeting of branch reps.
At that meeting, branch representatives would debate the offer at a UK-wide level, and vote on it (in a weighted vote) to decide whether to recommend to HEC as to whether or not to put it out to members.
HEC would then take a vote on whether or not that offer should be sent out for a consultative ballot for members to vote on. HEC’s decision will be based on the recommendations of branch reps from the delegates meeting.

It is also strange to see a General Secretary proposing to recommend a deal that has not yet been made. It is standard practice in negotiations to say that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”. The assessment of whether an offer is acceptable cannot be made until all the details are confirmed. This is not yet the situation.

Negotiating on Pay

The second issue concerns headline pay. On Tuesday, UCU negotiators adopted a negotiating position of putting 3% on the table to give UCEA the chance to consult their members about the potential for a rapid resolution of the dispute in the context of a serious global health crisis that could engulf us all.

Let’s not forget that UCU’s claim is for RPI+3%. The employers are sitting on reserves of £44bn. They can afford to meet our claim in full.

This was, and is, a genuine offer to try to resolve the dispute, but it is for members and delegates in the process outlined above to decide whether or not it is sufficient to resolve it.

It is difficult to discuss an offer that does not exist! But were we to get an offer we would have to make a serious decision as to whether we as negotiators, collectively or individually, can recommend it to members to be decided on by the process outlined above.

All the negotiators are strengthened by every single striker and picketer. We now need to sustain and strengthen the action.

Our strikes are our strongest leverage. We can win this together.

Mark Abel
Marian Mayer
Jo McNeill
Sean Wallis

1 March 20206 March 2020

Let’s push on to victory

After the first five of our 14 strike days, the employers are looking for ways to settle. There were talks last week in both disputes and more to follow this week.

Both sides know that the future direction of higher education is at stake. The employers’ commitment to marketisation means that only the bottom line counts in the scramble for dominance or survival. Students are palmed off with an increasingly inferior educational experience as they are crammed into lecture halls and their contact time is cut.

While for staff, the imperative is driving down the wage bill by whatever means available. Wave after wave of voluntary severances push workloads to levels incompatible with healthy lives. A reliance on the cheapest possible employment arrangements – zero-hours contracts, worker and agency contracts which don’t come with employee rights, and short-term contracts – keep people guessing about how long they will be earning.

Riches

None of this is because the sector is impoverished. Only the contrary, higher education is richer than it has ever been. Even after the splurges on new buildings and the grasping of Vice Chancellors enriching themselves, universities are sitting on billions in reserves.

Our strike has put the employers on the back-foot. They did not expect the level of support for the demands that we have put forward.

Our demands are necessary and urgent for our members, but also counter the fragmentation and marketisation of the sector. Reinforcing the national mutual agreement to maintain the USS pension scheme and creating a new national agreement to set a floor for employment standards would limit the scope for dangerous speculation at the expense of the sector, students and staff.

How are we doing so far?

We are making real progress on USS. The employers are increasingly learning to accept they cannot assume they can pass on escalating costs to staff and accepting that ‘de-risking’ – a strategy they pursued since 2014 – is a non-starter. We have not won yet, but if we do win, we will complete unfinished business from 2018.

We are also making progress in the Four Fights, with the employers realising they are going to have to reach a national agreement of minimum standards of some sort. Our negotiators are making some progress. The employers are trying to say that they ‘have no mandate’ to enter into such an agreement. But they have gradually made concessions.

UCU negotiators are seeking from UCEA the following:

a UK level sector wide agreement establishing a series of expectations of employment rights and working conditions for the Higher Education sector, including abolition of zero-hours contracts and ‘worker contracts’ (apart from genuine one-off engagements).
a set of core principles for tackling race and gender inequality on pay outcomes and an implementation timescale.
a set of commitments on workload review that reinforce the Pay Framework 2004 principle of Equal Pay for Equal Value is properly realised in terms of time and bring workloads under control.
to a meaningful pay increase based on RPI that meets the joint unions’ claim of ‘keep up and catch up’.

If we want to defend academic freedom in every university, we have to set minimum employment standards for the sector. A national agreement will have to be backed up by local negotiations that enforce minimum standards at each institution. There can be no slippage of national minimum standards. We have to stop a race to the bottom.

Inequality

The sector is institutionally racist and sexist. The further you go up the payscale in departments and management structures, the smaller the proportion of women and BAME staff. Appointing a few professors or senior managers won’t cut it – the universities are structurally discriminatory.

Addressing casualisation and the two or three tier workforce is a basic necessity to address inequality. It is no accident that the universities with the greatest gender pay gaps are medical and research-intensive universities. Casualisation and poor promotion prospects are the ‘glass ceilings’ – the structural impediments to addressing inequality.

The money is there

So far the employers have made no meaningful improvement on the pay offer. That has to change. Our pay has fallen 20% in real terms while university incomes from student fees have skyrocketed. Staff costs are now 55% of budgets – a record low (in the 1970s they were 70% of budgets). The sector has reserves in excess of £44bn, with surpluses of over £1bn a year coming in. The money is there. We need to force the employers to rethink what they do with the money that is sloshing around the sector.

It was strikes that broke the employers’ determination to trash USS in 2018, and it has been our strikes that have dragged the employers to concede further.

We have to strengthen our action, and we have the advantage of having our students on our side. We know our action is impacting on them, but they also appreciate we are fighting for the future of the sector. We are fighting for them, whether they wish to have a future in academic employment or not.

We have to organise to win. This is not the time to let the picket lines dwindle. But we also need to reach out to the rest of the trade union and labour movement for moral and financial support. Whenever we do so we get a great response.

Sector-changing deals are within sight provided we keep the pressure up!

29 January 202030 January 2020

The Results Are In – Members are Ready to Fight!

Members vote more than 3:1 Yes
14 more branches join the fight, 8 post-92
Over 50,000 HE members in 74 universities able to strike

The latest round of ballots in Higher Education were reported on Wednesday 29 January.

Another 12 institutions have joined the “Four Fights” dispute, 8 of which are post-92, and 6 have gained a strike mandate in the USS pensions fight.

It brings the total number of universities taking part to 74, 14 of which are post-92.

Two institutions have mandates for both disputes, and the University of Oxford, which won a mandate on pay but narrowly missed the threshold on USS, also crossed the threshold. Similarly University of East Anglia gained a mandate on pay.

In total, 14 additional branches have gained a mandate for strike action over one or both disputes, including Imperial College London, which also balloted locally over pay (they are outside national pay bargaining).

The figures are impressive. Slightly more than 4,500 balloted members have joined the USS fight, taking the total percentage of balloted members eligible to strike to around 87% of the pre-92 USS sector.

In the pay dispute, the total number of additional strikers is slightly more, which increases the strike coverage from 60% to 67% of the entire HE sector.

Using 2019 balloted membership figures*, the number of balloted members in branches able to participate in strikes now exceeds 50,000.

GTVO success

Some branches raised their turnout very substantially between October 2019 and January 2020.

Bath Spa, the University of the Arts London (UAL) and the University of Worcester all increased their turnout by 20 percentage points. For example UAL (with nearly 700 members balloted), increased their turnout from 34% to 54%.

Topping the list of ‘gainers’, the Royal College of Art (100 members) increased their turnout by 28 percentage points.

Unfortunately Worcester just missed out of 50% — another victim of the Tory Anti-Union Law.

Members vote Yes to action

But this is turnout. What matters democratically is whether members are voting Yes. The Yes votes are highly impressive. The average Yes strike vote on the Four Fights claim was 76%, and on USS, 79.4%.

The ballots also cover Action Short of a Strike, where numbers and mandates are very similar (Four Fights: 85% Yes, USS: 83% Yes).

Members are expecting to be asked to take 14 days’ strike action over USS, and possibly over pay. Anyone who thinks that members are not prepared to take hard-hitting action, or want yet another “consultation” needs to look closely at the ballot results.

The results are in. Members are ready to fight, and members in 15 more branches have proved it.

Balloted institutions

The institutions which achieved a turnout of 50% or more are:

USS
1. King’s College London
2. Imperial College London
3. Keele University
4. University of Oxford (already has live ballot on Pay)
5. SOAS, University of London (also on Pay)
6. Birkbeck College, University of London (also on Pay)

UCU results

Pay/four fights
1. SOAS, University of London (also on USS)
2. The University of Huddersfield
3. Birkbeck College, University of London (also on USS)
4. The University of Winchester
5. University of the Arts London
6. De Montfort University
7. University of East Anglia (already has a live ballot on USS)
8. University of Greenwich
9. University of East London
10. Leeds Trinity University
11. Bath Spa University
12. Royal College of Art

UCU results

Total number of institutions now able to strike over USS or pay/four fights: 14 + 60 = 74.

Not a single branch balloted voted No. But thanks to the Tory anti-union laws, thousands of members are not permitted to strike.

Note

*Membership has grown since, in some branches by as much as 20%.

28 January 202028 January 2020

UCEA: Must Try Harder

Strike to win - pickets and student supporters in Cambridge, 4 December 2019 — Strike to win – pickets and student supporters in Cambridge, 4 December 2019

Colleagues will have seen the email from UCU General Secretary Jo Grady today, Tuesday 28 February, announcing UCEA’s “final offer” on the Four Fights dispute.

This “final offer”:

offers no increase on the 1.8% pay imposed (a real-terms pay cut of 0.8% against August RPI)
makes limited concessions on casualisation, but mostly says that employers should obey the law
makes no tangible progress on reducing catastrophic levels of workload
makes no tangible progress on gender and race inequality

The offer is an insult, but it does show that UCEA is frightened by the prospect of our further strike action. They are trying to buy us off, but with crumbs rather than anything meaningful.

This shows that we were right to take the 8 days of strike action, but that we will need to put on further pressure through our next 14 days of strike action in order to get a real offer.

We do not agree to trade off the interests of different groups of members.

UCEA claims it did not have a mandate to make more far-reaching commitments. But if their subscribers are under pressure from branches preparing to strike, they are far more likely to give them such a mandate.

Democracy

Jo Grady’s email bypassed UCU’s own lay elected negotiators, who did not agree its content.

But most seriously of all, it pre-empted UCU’s own Higher Education Committee, who are set to meet on Thursday.

A democratic organisation such as a trade union would normally avoid making any statement until the elected officers and reps responsible for making a decision are able to meet.

What now?

Our eight days of action shocked the employers. But it is our threat of future strike action is what is really worrying them.

We should continue to mobilise for action. The employers do not want us to take strike action on the same timeframe as the 2018 USS dispute as they know how effective we can be at that point in the academic year. So this is exactly what we need to do. We can get a far better deal than this.

It is standard practice for employers to say their offer is “final”. There is no reason to accept, and everything to lose if we do.

HEC must throw out this ‘offer’ — and UCEA must try harder.

16 December 2019

‘Hotdesking’ in the lift: Edinburgh grad students organise against attacks on working conditions

Graduate students at Edinburgh have been organising a creative and highly democratic campaign to highlight the university’s attacks on their working conditions, after managers told research students in the School of Social and Political Science that they would be moved to an under-equipped and under-resourced building across campus from existing post-graduate work space in the Chrystal MacMillan Building (CMB).

Dozens of grad students took part in a work-in on 10 December, using the lifts, toilets, stairwells and management office corridors in the CMB in protest a decision which will increase competition among students over desk space.

In a statement issued by the campaign on 11 December, the campaign said:

We are outraged at the lack of involvement of the PGR community in any decision-making concerning our space. No conversations about students’ needs and the new plans had taken place prior to the decision being communicated to us in September. As the PhD community, we fundamentally disagree with the undemocratic process of decision-making by School management as well as the proposed reduction of PGR hot-desking space based on a top-down interpretation of our needs. The monitoring of our card and network access data is totally unacceptable, and does not provide a sufficient justification for a reduction of space. In response, we have organised ourselves and to date held four extremely well attended, democratically-run meetings, involving over 150 PhD students and creating a space where we can discuss how we understand our needs as PGRs and come up with a set of key demands. They are the following:

To let us keep our PGR space in the Chrystal Macmillan Building (the West Wing) or offer us an equal or better space.
To make a long-term commitment to improve work and community space provision as student numbers and needs increase.
To democratise decision-making across the school, making it transparent and inclusive of students at all levels.
To extend democratic control of our work- and community spaces to us.”

Sophia Hoffinger, PhD student in Social Anthropology added:

The lack of transparency and participation that the School is displaying in matters that affect us as students directly is inexcusable. We should be involved in the decision making processes that affect us, rather than being presented with faits accomplis. Instead, we are being treated as expendable, our contracts made precarious and our office space scarce.”

The campaign has won broad support from grad students picture Emilia Belknap via Twitter — The campaign has won broad support from grad students
picture Emilia Belknap via Twitter

Following the work-in management made some concessions, admitting that “nothing is set in stone”. Campaign members told UCULeft.org they will be continuing to mobilise in the New Year. Lukas Slothuus, a PhD student in Political Theory said:

This action was incredibly encouraging because it showed the strength of unity and the power of organising. PhD students are usually very poorly organised, both in trade unions and among themselves. We’re breaking out of that situation by organising in a way that brings collective joy and concrete wins at the same time. There is a genuine feeling among our campaign that we will win, and that it will spur us on to many more victories in the future — around things like tutor pay and unpaid labour.”

Grad student organising has brought incredible energy to many UCU branches in recent years, with campaigns tackling the issue of casualisation and poverty pay as well as poor working conditions springing up in many places. Although ‘Where’s Our Space’ is a broad campaign involving grad students both inside and outside UCU, Lukas told us that experiences on the picket lines helped push forward student organising around the issue:

Several of us were part of the UCU strike, and the conversations we had on the picket lines with more senior staff were really encouraging for building the campaign. All the issues we are facing are of course connected — from lack of work and community space to poor pay for hourly-paid teaching staff. It is a sign of the never-ending forward march of precarity and neoliberalisation of the university.

In our UCU postgrad network we have discussed the importance of lowering the barriers of entry into the union for young researchers. There is a danger that the union might be perceived as only for senior academics, while in reality it is us young researchers who are the most precarious and the most vulnerable to pension cuts. There are three crucial lessons to learn from this, in my view: One, to create exciting, effective, and mass-based campaigns for early career researchers. Second, to link our struggles beyond the union into student struggles — the undergraduate students have a lot of concerns that align well with ours. And third, to link up local, regional, and national campaigns. In our Where’s Our Space campaign, we have received countless messages of solidarity from across Britain and proposals from campaigns across many universities to join forces, collaborate, and coordinate. This will be a crucial feature of winning our struggles in the future.”

UCU Scotland President Carlo Morelli agreed that grassroots campaigns by PhD students should win the backing of UCU members and branches. He told UCULeft.org

As UCU Scotland President I send solidarity from UCU members throughout Scotland. Our eight days of strike over casualisation is part of the protest of PhD students and tutors to have decent working conditions. Irrespective of where we are within Higher Education we have a common goal of protecting education from those who treat it solely as a market for exploitation and personal enrichment. We stand with undergraduates, postgraduates and all those working in the sector to defend a collective, unified education sector.”

Report by Anne Alexander

Send messages of support for the ‘Where’s Our Space?’ campaign on the Twitter hashtags #phdprecarity and #wheresourspace or email wheresourspace@gmail.com