Tag: FE

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Defending post 16 education: taking the fight to the next level

From the pandemic to the cost-of-living crisis, war and the failure to tackle the climate crisis, the employers and government are determined to make us pay with a sustained attack on our wages, pensions and jobs.

The magnificent strikes in HE over the Four Fights and USS pensions have shown (and continue to show) the real grit and determination of UCU members to put up resistance and protect their pay and conditions.

In Further Education, 40 colleges are about to be balloted over pay and workloads as part of UCU’s Professional Respect Campaign. This follows the successful strikes by 15 colleges in the autumn term of 2021, where the vast majority succeeded in winning gains on pay and conditions, and at seven colleges in the North West, two of which have already succeeded in getting good pay deals for 2021/22.

Whilst we have not picked the terrain on which we fight, nevertheless, the terrain is favourable for further victories in both sectors if we are able to continue to mount the same resistance shown by UCU members recently.

Divisions at the top

The Tory government is wracked with acrimony and division. 41% of Tory MPs voted to support a motion of no confidence in Johnson, reflecting the loathing of him in their constituencies. After the lies of ‘Party-gate’, the booing at the Jubilee celebrations shows that his traditional support has turned against him.

Even his attempt to defend his behaviour by arguing that he got it right on the ‘big issues’ is not working. The 150,000 deaths from Covid – the highest per capita rate in Europe – and the greatest cost of living crisis in over 50 years both demonstrate that on the ‘big issues’ he got it significantly wrong.

The war inside the Tory party will continue to rage and will reveal that the ‘nasty party’ is destroying itself.

Our employers have shown that they aren’t all-powerful either. In both FE and HE they are trying to use the pandemic and the cost-of-living crisis, not only to cut costs but to deepen the marketisation of post-16 education. Every time our members have taken the fight to them, they have been rattled and divisions have opened up.

In this context a well organised and determined strike movement can not only stop the attacks, but also start to put forward its own progressive educational agenda – one based on the needs of our communities instead of competition and the whims of the market.

A strike movement that seeks to level up the playing field and has at its centre the fight for equal access to post-16 education for all would quickly gain huge support amongst our students and our communities.

The first step to achieving this is to do all we can to ensure that we win the industrial action ballots in HE over Four Fights and USS and in 40 FE branches, so that we are ready to strike in the new academic year.

Solidarity at the bottom

One of the important developments within UCU over the past 18 month has been the birth and growth of the Solidarity Movement (SM). Initially set up by four HE branches facing job losses, the Solidarity Movement brings activists together to share experiences and maximise support for those in struggle. Holding regular meetings, launching twitter storms and organising twinning campaigns, the SM has made an important difference to members in dispute. It has also, at crucial times, helped to pressure the national leadership of UCU to stick to the action that members had voted for.

We need to extend and widen the networks of the Solidarity Movement in HE and in FE. With 40 colleges moving into battle, this would be an ideal opportunity for FE branches to set up their own solidarity network.

Equality at the centre

The backdrop to our strikes in the past year is one in which has seen a relentless attempt by government to divide members through launching bigoted ‘culture wars’ with relentless attacks on Trans rights, dressed up as a defence of freedom of speech, and to the attempts to reverse the gains made by the Black Lives Matter uprising in the wake of George Floyd’s murder.

But they failed to divide us. The strikes in FE and HE have revealed that more than ever Black,  LGBTQ+, women and disabled UCU members have taken up central roles at all levels within the unions. This development has been a central factor to ensuring that the demands of the strikes are ones that reflect the central concerns amongst the lowest paid in both sectors.

We need to continue to deepen this by building the widest possible movement against state racism.  We should for example encourage members to take part in the campaigns around Child Q and against Priti Patel’s racist Nationality and Borders Act. Congress this year made a firm commitment to support the rights of Trans people by passing Motion 38 – a significant moment in the fight against transphobia in our union. We need to ensure that every branch takes up a similar position.

This means at college/university level, branches must equip themselves with the facts about the reality of institutionalised discrimination at their institution. This could include facts about the proportion of casualised staff that are Black and/or women. We need to map how discrimination is applied in our workplaces so that we can use this information as part of our campaigns.

Leadership from the front

To do all the above we need leadership at every level of the union that is prepared to fight. There are many inspiring examples of our members providing this kind of leadership at a local level – from the colleagues fighting ‘fire and rehire’ tactics at Richmond Upon Thames College to the magnificent victorious strike at Liverpool University against redundancies and many more.

Unfortunately, this tenacity and sacrifice has not always been matched by the national leadership. The motion (L1) passed at Congress strongly criticising the GS’s handling of disputes should be seen as a warning.

We need an NEC/HEC/FEC that carries out the wishes of its members and a GS that champions those decisions, not one that attempts to stifle them because they don’t fit a preconceived idea of the ‘right strategy’ drawn up at the top of the union.  Their role is not to question the wisdom or otherwise of these decisions but to implement them.

This is what being a ‘member led’ union actually means.

UCU needs leadership at a national level as well as a local level which is prepared to lead from the front rather than hiding behind radical slogans which cover up caution and pessimism.

A new generation of ‘organic’ leaders exists in every branch and college. It is they who need to become the next branch/regional/national officers.

Regions

We need to pay more attention to the Regional Committees (RC).  In every region there are branches that are well-organised while others find it difficult to sustain themselves. One of the RC’s roles is to identify the well-organised branches and use their strengths to level up the whole of the region.

Regional Committees are not simply an extension of the Regional Offices. RCs are elected bodies where lay members come to together to discuss what is happening at their institutions, to share experiences of how branches are dealing with issues that arise and to decide the priorities for the region.

The RC role is to take initiatives based on Congress and Conference policies such as organising a solidarity rally for those on strike, putting on a webinar about how to combat transphobia in the workplace or organising a meeting around the Campaign Against Climate Change’s new pamphlet on climate jobs.

Well-organised Regional Committees are not a luxury but a central part of our ability to build a union that can deliver action across the country.

Conclusion

We are not alone in our battles. The announcement that 40,000 rail workers across 13 different networks will be taking their first national strike for 40 years is one sign that organised labour is beginning to resist. Like us, rail workers are fighting over pay, jobs and conditions. But at the heart of their dispute is the anarchy of the market thanks to privatisation of the rail network.

40 years of neoliberal economics has created the conditions where the sectional barriers that once might have prohibited workers uniting to defend their common interests have been significantly broken down. Workers across all sectors have common cause to unite and fight government and employer-led attacks. Solidarity must be at the core of everything we do for those in our own sectors who are fighting back and for those in other unions.

Our members have been through a lot over the last two years. But they have come out of this period better organised and more determined to protect the profession they passionately care about. Our task in the coming period is to take the platform that has been created to the next level – to develop a member-led, industrial strategy that uses every collective form of protest to build a national strike movement that unites both sectors that can defend post-16 education.

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Strikes and solidarity show that we can win

Thirteen of the fifteen FE colleges that balloted and/or took action have resolved their disputes. All have succeeded in getting more out of their employers than when they started. At my college, Capital City College Group (CCCG), members voted to accept the latest offer on an observation policy, pay and workload after taking ten days of strike action and a threat of six more. The open classroom policy that saw managers coming into classrooms, ‘anytime, anywhere’ has now been replaced with at most three 15-20-minute observations a year, not triggering any capability policy, and with advance notification.

Forty people joined the union since the strike started, with only two leaving. UCU at CCCG has reached a 91% density across the group among teaching staff and are in an even stronger position to fight in the future.

The lesson to draw from the FE disputes is that striking works. There is no doubt amongst UCU members who took part in action that this is the basic lesson to be learnt from the campaign.

Engagement and levelling up

But there is something else that is significant about our dispute. The level of engagement on picket lines, protests and other activities was greater than it has ever been.

For many years the level and character of industrial action has been much lower and sectional in outlook than the street movements.  But the recent spate of local strikes across the movement shows this gap is beginning to close. Not just in size, but also in sprit, defiance and imagination.

Our experience in FE is mirrored in other disputes that UCU are involved in. Mass rallies outside Goldsmith’s College and the RCA reflect this. The three-day national strike that kicked off UCU’s campaign over pensions, pay, casualisation and equality has seen enormous picket lines with lots of dancing and singing. The teach-outs on the picket lines demonstrate the way in which those on strike are putting forward a wider political alternative over a range of issues; from decolonizing the curriculum to unions, class and inequality. 

This is happening in a ‘post-Covid, post COP’ environment without a Labour opposition in Parliament, and against a background of a maturing crisis in tuition fees.

The same process is also happening outside of the UCU. Strikes involving Unite, RMT, PCS and GMB members have seen large and lively picket lines with flares and more singing and dancing.  From the scaffolders at British Steel in Sunderland fighting over pay or engineers at Weetabix striking over fire and rehire to bus drivers in South Yorkshire striking over pay and the security guards at Great Ormond hospital demanding equal contracts – all show great determination and organisation to use their collective power to win. 

Mick Lynch, GS RMT announces balloting 10,000 tube workers across London over restructure and 50,000 railworkers in defence of pensions in the New Year.

Of course, we will need far more action for the levelling up to reach the levels of the hegemonic impact streets movements like the Stop the War Coalition or the Climate Emergency protests achieved.  But this process is taking place.

The sign that the character of the street movements is penetrating strikes is not only found in their vibrancy but also in their ability to locate the problem with the government and the system itself. Workers are fighting over economic issues; pay, pensions, workload, casualisation, redundancies and conditions.

But these strikes are not conducted in a sectional way despite being localised. These local economic strikes are seen by those involved, and wider, as the fault not of just one employer but all employers and the way the government rigs the system to allow those at the top to get rich at our expense.

In the post sixteen education sector, whatever the disputes have initially been called over, the galvanizing strand that runs through them all is the demand for an end to the stultifying grip of marketisation and for professional respect.

The levelling up is not just in one direction from the street movements to the picket line but from the picket line to the street protest. The demonstrations around COP26 were noticeable by the trade union representation on them. In London there was an 800-strong trade union block. In Glasgow striking bin workers were at the centre of the monster 30,000 march on Friday to coincide with the school climate strike.

Students leading the 2,000 strong Higher Education London demo

Solidarity

There is something else that sets these strikes as apart from those have taken place in the past – the level of solidarity for the strikes. The UCU Solidarity Movement has pioneered a new network that has allowed local strike experiences to be generalised across the union. Generous donations have been voted on at mass union meetings to support those who are taking action.

At our rallies at CCCG we had local government and health workers, teachers, rail workers, students, HE strikers and a UNITE representative sent by Sharon Graham’s office as well as MPs and local Labour councillors.   

The solidarity not only lifted the confidence of those on strike but located their strike in the wider battles and concerns of the movement.

There are also signs that the trade union leaders are responding to this new mood of militancy. The CWU hosted a solidarity rally in support of the RMT tube strikes in London and in support of UCU ‘s national action. A thousand people attended the online meeting on a Friday night and the organisers allowed contributions from the floor. UCU hosted a follow up meeting where 400 attended.

It was good to see Sharon Graham and Jo Grady take to twitter and attack Sadiq Khan’s attempt to use the issue of women’s safety in London to try and force the RMT to call off their strikes on the underground.

The need to build solidarity for all those in struggle must now become the central aim of all activists in trade unions. Some of us who are old enough to remember how we used to take striking workers around different workplaces to raise support for the strikes need to share their experience of how to do so. Arthur Scargill, in an interview in New Left Review in 1975, describes how the solidarity built by students who took striking miners around workplaces in different cities was central to the victory of the miners in 1972.

In the run up to Xmas UNITE are threatening strikes to hit the supply lines for Tesco’s over pay and in the New Year the RMT will be balloting their members in defence of their pensions. The NEU will be holding an indicative ballot of pay and workload. The potential to coordinate strike action involving tens of thousands of workers in the New Year is coming into focus.

There is a real opportunity in every union to set up solidarity networks around the current disputes to maximize support for those fighting back.

A mood to fight

It is clear there is a change taking place in the workplace. Localised resistance is growing.  Alongside the sense that there can be no return to pre-Covid days where bullying and harassment, low and unequal wages, insecure contracts and increase workloads were making the experience of work so unbearable, for so many, there is a determination to be rewarded for the sacrifice working people made, and still are, during the public health crisis.

Whilst the strikes that are taking place are a sign of a developing trade union movement, there are not enough taking place to shift the balance in favour of ordinary working people. We need more of them. This won’t happen simply by wishing action into existence: it takes leadership with the determination to initiate action. 

There still is a reluctance in some of the bigger unions to hold national ballots in fear of not breaking through anti-union thresholds. Some have tried but did not succeed. In UCU we were quite right not to organise our last ballot in HE on an aggregated basis, despite the final results narrowly beating a 50% turnout in both ballots. It would have been an unnecessary gamble to do so. It was close, and in an aggregated ballot the pressure on individual branches to deliver is less.

We now have a majority of university staff out on strike, with others being reballoted to join in a second wave in February. Other unions should rethink their aversion to using the tactic of disaggregated ballots to get coordinated action off the ground. Whilst it might not be what we want, it is better than accepting that the Tory union laws mean that we can only organise ballots around local disputes.

A new trade union movement is being forged on the picket line. The movement needs to rally to their battle cry and do all we can to ensure their success.

In unity lies strength – a victory for one is a victory for all.

Sean Vernell UCU NEC