Tag: FourFights

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The HE disputes can be won. But members need to take control.

 Our Higher Education disputes are at a crossroads. The strikes this week and next are the last we can take on our current industrial action mandate. USS and UUK have imposed their attack on the pension scheme. UCEA is not talking to us over pay and the pay-related issues of our Four Fights.

Strike action now is still important, of course. Strong visible action shows members require a proper pay increase in the face of rampant inflation, and strengthens the union over local casualisation, workload and pay gap demands. But we are not where we should be.  

Strategic failures

We have arrived at this point through a series of failures by our union. The majority of these have arisen out of a refusal by the leadership – HE officers, full-time officials and the General Secretary – to implement democratic decisions taken by members. This has resulted in members continually having to make the best of sub-optimal situations in order to prosecute these fights.

The first failure was the refusal to ballot members over the summer and hold a Special HE Sector Conference last August, as instructed by June’s Sector Conference. This meant that despite the urgency of the attacks on USS, the ballot was delayed until October instead of taking place over the summer as Conference wished.

The whole point of the timetable passed at Conference was that serious, sustained action could take place in the autumn term. That is how we ended up with just three days of strike squeezed in before the Xmas break. Not only that, but the notifications to employers cited work-to-contract as the only form of ASOS, allowing employers to claim that non-rescheduling of classes was not part of our action because it had, inexplicably, been listed separately on the ballot paper.

The second failure was the decision by the General Secretary and the majority of the pension negotiators to make a compromise offer on USS. UCU conferences voted for a ‘no detriment’ position on the basis that the valuations of the scheme were flawed and there was no objective basis for increasing contributions or cutting benefits, and if there was a need for more contributions, the employers should pay them.. Abandoning this position meant conceding the central argument in defence of the scheme.

USS retreat

Worse, the General Secretary appeared to believe that a compromise deal was possible in February which could end the dispute. As a result, again contrary to the union’s policy and against the wishes of delegates attending branch delegate meetings, USS strikes were separated from action over the Four Fights, soft-pedalled and delayed again to coincide with meetings of USS JNC at which this deal was supposed to materialise.

This proved to be a staggering miscalculation. True to form, not a single employer representative broke ranks and the cuts were pushed through on the casting vote of the chair. The industrial action taken in February was fractured between the two disputes, giving the green light to UCEA to urge punitive deductions for ASOS, a course of action which some institutions have eagerly embraced.

Throughout, the leadership has consistently minimised the action called. The settled policy of the union is for escalating action to win disputes, and the September Special Sector Conference even supported a motion calling for indefinite action. The point of this was to deter employers from sitting out our bouts of strikes by always notifying at least one batch of action in advance.

Token action

Neither escalating nor indefinite action has been implemented. Ignoring the clear wishes of BDM’s, the majority on HEC even opted for a pattern of regional one-day strikes. This kind of token action has been definitively rejected by Congress, not least when it adopted the report of the Commission on Effective Industrial Action in 2017. Fortunately, the left on HEC managed to salvage a degree of credibility for this action by making it the five-day blocks we are currently engaged in. But yet another delay in calling that action means that some branches find themselves striking out of term-time, and members are rightly concerned about the union’s strategy.

The same HEC meeting voted for a reballot window of five weeks. We have ended up with one of only three weeks, throwing another unnecessary obstacle in the way of our disputes. When questioned about this at last week’s NEC, the General Secretary claimed that HEC’s wishes had been ‘unimplementable’. She was also challenged on the assessment of the disputes in her GS report, where she effectively argues that national disputes are unwinnable because the employers are too well organised and we are too weak unless all branches are out. Her conclusion is that unless we can win an aggregated ballot, we should not fight.

This kind of defeatist talk is not acceptable in the middle of a national battle. It contrasts sharply with the positivity and determination of members who have made considerable sacrifices to wage these disputes. It is also, plainly, wrong. In 2018, our union began the dispute with a third smaller union density, and won against employers who were just as organised! But the union led from the top, balloted on a no detriment basis, involved reps to identify optimum strike dates, and called escalating action. 

We can still win

Both these disputes have always been winnable, and despite the set-backs, they still are. But control of them must be in the hands of members. Members have consistently made the right decisions about the strategy required, and UCU Left members on HEC have consistently tried to have those decisions implemented. 

The next phase now hinges on the reballots. Assuming we get a good number of branches over the threshold, the Special HE Sector Conferences on April 20th and 27th will set the forthcoming strategy. Branches need to debate motions for those conferences in time for the submission deadline of 6th April. Crucially, we need a marking and assessment boycott along with a plan for strike action, both alongside the ASOS e.g. to hit exam boards, and as a response to punitive deductions. And we need to insist that Conference decisions are implemented!

Those at the top of the union who don’t have the nerve for this fight should stand aside. Now is not the time to throw in the towel. The employers remain extremely vulnerable to targeted and effective industrial action, as the strikes at Liverpool and the RCA have proved. We need to learn the lessons of those disputes and organise to win.

UCU Left open meeting
Winning the HE disputes: For a member-led strategy
6pm Monday 28 March
Register: bit.ly/UCUL-28mar

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Branches criticise the General Secretary’s strategy for the HE disputes

UCU Left report on the Branch Delegate Meetings, 12 November

The two Branch Delegates’ Meetings (BDMs) took place on Friday. These had been called after the ballot results on USS and the Four Fights campaigns had been released and over 100 branches were represented. 

BDMs do not have constitutional status in UCU but emerged in the original 2018 USS strikes to ensure branches were up-to-date with the most recent developments in the dispute.  Crucially BDMs ensure members can feedback on developments in the dispute and that this feedback comes immediately to negotiators and to HEC. As a result BDMs provide an informal mechanism for a kind of direct democracy in UCU. If their views are ignored by the HEC, as occurred after the second ‘#NoCapitulation’ moment in 2019, branches can bring motions of no confidence to Congress. Branch delegate voting is weighted by sector conference delegate entitlements, so the votes of big branches carry more weight than those of small ones. 

The BDM on the USS dispute highlighted the extensive knowledge and understanding within branches of the key questions of strategy and tactics. Overwhelmingly, branch delegates reported that they recognised the importance of the timing of the dispute and the need to maximise our leverage on employers and USS prior to the February deadline for the decision on changes to contribution rates. Most delegates reported large branch meetings with members, where the majority view reflected the need to launch serious industrial action prior to the Xmas break. Token action was rejected as simply insufficient. Indeed, even in branches where the GS’s questions had been put out to members in a survey, without debate and discussion, delegates reported responses that were highly critical and questioning, with members objecting to the narrow range of options being offered.

The Four Fights BDM followed a similar pattern, although with more reps ‘in the room’, the format of the meeting was very frustrating for delegates, and large numbers of delegates were not called. This meant two things. First, it was difficult for reps to get an idea of the overall pattern of voting because they did not know what other branches had concluded. The weighted votes of the meetings were not reported to delegates.

But the second problem is that the Four Fights dispute is simultaneously a UK-wide battle and a series of local ones, because whatever is agreed at “New JNCHES” must be implemented locally, and UCEA always claim that local employers will not give them a mandate (basically, because some want to hold on to the worst employment practices, like zero hours contracts or bogus self-employment). The battlelines in the fight over casualisation, workload and inequality are inside every workplace. Branches’ experiences are different, and it is essential for reps to hear what those differences mean. A dispute of this kind relies on a culture of solidarity, and we must factor in local confrontations into the union’s overall strategy.

For example, members at the Royal College of Art are engaged in a bitter local battle over casualisation and workload. At the time of the BDM, RCA UCU members had taken 9 days of strike action and were about to begin 5 days more. But frustratingly they were not called to speak. Neither were Goldsmiths (with 3 weeks of strike action announced) or Sheffield, both branches where the Four Fights dispute intersects with their local disputes over redundancies. Branches benefit from building local campaigns of key demands under the Four Fights umbrella, and using them to build support for ballots and industrial action.

Nonetheless in both meetings, nearly all the delegates who spoke recognised the need to keep the fights together and not decouple them. Some wondered why two separate BDMs had been called. Delegates argued against delayed ballots and aggregation, instead proposing to move to reballot branches which missed the 50% threshold in order for them to join further escalating industrial action as early as possible, before February 2022.

There was criticism of the short ballot window from branch delegates, particularly the large number that missed the threshold by handfuls of votes. Many believe that they actually exceeded the 50% threshold, but delays in the post to Civica meant late postal votes weren’t counted.

Likewise in the USS meeting, branch delegates favoured campaigning beyond strike action, which should already have been underway. On USS, UCU policy is for legal action against USS, a trade union campaign for the defence of defined benefit pensions, and lobbying MPs and journalists. Our defence of USS cannot be understood as a narrow vested interest, but part of a wider campaign against the marketisation of higher education and – because pension attacks are fundamentally an attack on younger workers – an inter-generational defence of the right to a decent retirement for all workers.

Although the results of the BDM voting have not been released, these debates indicated that branches and their delegates reject the proposals coming from the General Secretary and UCU officials. Members recognise the seriousness of the dispute and want the union to respond with the seriousness that the threat requires.

We will know what decisions HEC took on the basis of the BDMs very soon.