How do we build the Marking Boycott?

UCU members urgently need to discuss how to implement the marking and assessment boycott called by the union. The General Secretary wrote to reps in Four Fights branches with a mandate saying that the action would be called, and press releases have gone out from UCU. In this article we summarise the lessons of previous marking boycotts and set out a strategy for this phase of the action.

This is the first time that members have been called to boycott marking in a UK-wide dispute since 2006. There is huge political support for the action, with branches recording over 80% votes in favour, and only slightly lower figures for strike action. This is despite employers threatening 100% pay deductions for participants.

But we need to urgently work out, and coalesce behind, a clear action plan.

The first step must be for UCU to formally notify employers of the boycott. Under the anti-union laws, calls for strike action and ASOS must be pre-notified 14 days’ ahead of the start of the action. With marking already begun in many institutions there is no justification for any delay.

The second step is to call meetings in every branch with a live mandate to talk through what this means in practice.

The lessons of previous boycotts

One of the lessons of the 2006 dispute is that a small minority of members can completely disrupt marking, provided that they are supported. But since 2006 the employers have sought to construct ways to ‘mitigate the impact’. These range from draconian threats of disproportionate pay deductions to attempting to force marking processes quickly, dropping second marking requirements, and paying postgraduates to mark work set by other staff. However, these measures come up against the reality of the market system in Higher Education that they themselves have encouraged. Prompt organising can pay dividends.

Successful marking boycotts have now been held at a number of universities since 2006, including SOAS, Liverpool, the Royal College of Art (RCA) and Goldsmiths. Liverpool is probably the most directly comparable to the situation most branches are in. But the other disputes show that casually-employed staff can fight back effectively with the marking boycott.

Last year, Liverpool University tried to play hard-ball with 100% pay deductions. A high level of branch organising held the line. And then Liverpool students rebelled after the employer issued made-up marks, prevented students graduating, etc.

Liverpool members keep repeating one point however: their marking boycott did not succeed by the use of ASOS alone. It worked because the branch backed it up with, and eventually switched to, strike action. A similar strategy was used at the RCA.

Addressing pay deduction threats

This is probably the issue on most members’ minds right now, and quite rightly.

Firstly, we need to organise to ensure that members taking the action are supported financially by the entire union, and know they are being supported. UCU needs to launch twinning arrangements between university branches with a mandate and those without, invite speakers to general meetings and launch local fundraising drives. We all have a stake in winning this fight.

Secondly, UCU has called strike action. The principal purpose of these strikes (see below) should be to back up the marking boycott, by offering to stand down the action if the employer does not threaten high pay deductions. (NB. Legally, notice must be issued in advance due to the 14-day rule, but strikes can be stood down without notice.) In recent disputes, employers have made pay threats ranging from 40% in Leicester to 100% in Liverpool. What is considered ‘disproportionate’ is in the hands of the branch.

Thirdly, employers must be put on notice that if they escalate high pay docking threats it will have a big political effect in terms of the reputation of the university, and to when students can expect to receive their marks.

We should call staff-student assemblies in every university to talk through the action, why we are taking it and why we call on the university to mitigate the impact. The employers want to scrap pensions, undermine pay levels and increase workload and inequality. They want to create teaching factories, while at the same time reaping the benefits of high fees and lifetime student loans. This is an attack on current and future students.

Finally, the branch needs to organise! Nothing in the above can be done without regular members’ meetings. Liverpool UCU called daily online strike meetings at 9am where members could meet online to discuss the action.

Importantly, it is essential that meetings involve members taking part in the action and members who are not. Boycotting members must not be left to fend for themselves! This is a fight for everyone.

What about other mitigations employers might make?

The employers will be looking to other types of mitigation, from demanding marks are submitted early, reducing oversight and removing second marking requirements, and offering marking work to postgrads and other staff.

  • Preventing the speeding up of marking. Employers are not free to change marking timetables to rush marking through. A combination of the student-market ‘customer’ regime, and Covid and strike mitigation measures mean that students themselves are entitled to request extensions to delay submission. Last year saw record requests for ‘extenuating circumstances’ extensions. Any attempt to speed up submission or marking should be denounced publicly. Course leaders and heads of department should object in defence of their students! And of course we must insist that workload agreements are upheld where they exist, and that individuals’ workloads are not altered to undermine the boycott.
  • Defending second marking and other processes. Marking is rarely done once by staff working alone. Second marking, marking consolidation meetings, etc. are all points of pressure covered by the marking and assessment boycott. Specific instruction on ASOS and the processing of marks is likely to come from UCU, but in the past the ASOS has been interpreted to include not just the marking itself but all aspects of the assessment process. Again, this is a clear issue of quality assurance and control.
  • Recruiting postgraduate students and other staff. Anyone who is approached to mark must be encouraged to join UCU – and asked not to mark! Anyone performing work for the university is eligible to join UCU, and the low paid can join for free. Both existing marking and any ‘additional marking’ are covered by the marking boycott, whether this is paid by the hour or as part of contract. Casually-employed staff in SOAS and Goldsmiths have both won disputes by boycotting marking, and branches can be approached for speakers.

The basic legal position for external examiners is that they are not covered by the ballot (because they were not balloted in this employer), but are free to choose to resign out of solidarity.

At the risk of stating the obvious, the Liverpool dispute showed the power that members have over marking.

The quality of a degree is dependent on ensuring that staff expert in the subject teach and mark. The more specialised the question, the more difficult it is to find an alternative marker. Questions and answers are neither routine nor generic. Mark too low, and the university gets student complaints. Too high, and you discredit the degree and the university.

How can strikes back the boycott?

The UCU GS email announcing the action also said that a Branch Delegate Meeting would be called on May 10, with action called from May 12. It then asked branches to meet to decide what strike action they would like to call.  However, this risks sowing confusion, and does not reflect the motions passed at the Four Fights Sector Conference.

There are, in broad terms, three possible types of strike action that might be called alongside a marking boycott. These are:

  1. Strike action called to provide an alternative course of action from ASOS should the ASOS attract disproportionate pay deductions. This is what Motion 6, which was passed, explicitly called for. In Liverpool the employer threatened 100% pay deductions (a ‘lock out’) so the branch called strikes for the whole branch, replacing ASOS with strikes. That way the members taking the action were not left on their own, and the marking boycott continued to be effective. The employer was punished politically and industrially by its hardline approach bringing the whole union out on strike in solidarity.
  2. Strike action to be called on targeted days to be determined locally. Targeted strikes can be useful, but require some discussion. Targeting exam boards for example, might be possible, although of course the employer may circumvent this by delay. Where branches have had most of their marking already done, this type of action may be necessary. The earliest date offered of 6 June may well be far too late for some branches: they need to push hard for earlier dates.
  3. Strike action on UK-wide- or nationally/regionally-coordinated days. Motion 7 calls for occasional coordinated dates to boost the campaign over casualisation and workload, and the same principle would apply for the pay equality fight.

Note there are significant practical and policy limitations over the types of local settlement that UCU is in a position to reach (see below), and the motions that have been passed allowing for action to be stood down based on employer conduct should be understood as backing up ASOS, rather than opening the door to a local settlement of the dispute.

How can the whole union support branches with a mandate?

Employers settle disputes when the cost of continuing is greater than the cost of settlement. The fact that up until now the employers have set their public faces against reaching agreement over the Four Fights – or indeed over the USS pension – is because it suits them to do so. This does not mean that they will hold this position forever.

The action that is being taken forward now will be hard-hitting if we can implement and hold it. The employers fear ‘forty Liverpools’: branches that have learned their power.

But it also means that the whole union must urgently rally round, by fundraising and solidarity.

Not everyone in a branch with a mandate will be able to take part in the marking boycott. Some will have late deadlines or marks will have been submitted. Academic-related and professional services staff may be only tangentially involved and research staff do not (should not) have marking duties in their contract.

All members not taking part in the boycott should be called on to donate to members taking the action. In particular, members in branches without a mandate must be asked to donate a credible amount. If a substantial number pledge, say, one day’s pay a week for the duration of the boycott, then that would amount to two weeks’ pay over the course of ten weeks. A few members can contribute more; many will afford less. But this is a reasonable benchmark.

Alongside fundraising, members can take part in demonstrative action short of industrial action, including demonstrations and protests.

Finally, precisely because we are engaged in UK-wide disputes, all branches will need to ballot again in order to take action together at the start of the next academic year.

Reballoting over the summer

After giving money, the greatest solidarity members can give those in the front line is to pledge to join them as soon as possible. So alongside fundraising and participating in demonstrations and protests alongside members taking action, branches should start planning to reballot over the summer if the employers have not settled.

Motion 15 from the HE Sector Conference called for strikes in induction week in the 2022-23 academic year. Induction weeks vary from institution to institution (from 12 to 26 September at least, and possibly later). Newly-successful branches have mandates that run until early October. To ensure that as many branches as possible are successful, the best bet is to have a long ballot. Disaggregated ballots (ballots counted on a per-employer basis) can have different end dates, to make the most of when staff are expected to return from leave.

What about an aggregated ballot? Recently some reps and branches have been calling for a return to aggregated ballots, arguing that we need to bring the whole union out on strike. Perhaps the longer period over the summer justifies a return to aggregation?

There has been some debate in the union over aggregated ballots, with the General Secretary pitching in with her opinion. Aggregated ballots are simpler to run, for one thing. And if successful they mean that members in weaker branches can strike.

The method of balloting is not a question of principle for the left, but tactics.

Aggregated ballots have disadvantages. The first concerns legal challenges. Although UCU has been careful not to draw attention to this publicly, in an aggregated ballot one employer can file an injunction and stop the whole union’s action.

The second disadvantage is that the ballots are all-or-nothing. If UCU were winning an average turnout of 55% or higher in disaggregated ballots, we could likely afford to take the risk of calling a UK-aggregated ballot. But this is not where we are.

Finally, there is the question of organising. The irony of the Tory anti-union threshold is that unions like UCU that have switched to disaggregated ballots have shown that you can organise to get the vote out and recruit reps in the process. This then makes switching from ‘get the vote out’ to ‘get the members out’ more straightforward.

The Tory anti-union law has galvanised unions and branches who got this right. Between 2018 and 2019 A lot of branches, including the biggest, boosted turnout from around 40% to above 50%. In 2020, both the Royal College of Art and University of the Arts London UCU branches smashed through the threshold by organising. Cardiff UCU shows you should never give up, successfully getting through the threshold this time by a renewed organising focus.

The issue at the present time also concerns the message that we send to the employers. If we say we are going for an aggregate ballot, in effect we are saying we are prepared to risk not getting over the threshold, and stopping our action. With colleagues preparing for a marking boycott we think this is the wrong message to send!

The current phase of action requires us all to up our game. We need an even higher intensity of organising, not just to get the members out, but to hold the action. We must ensure that the employers blink first.

Local settlements

As the pressure starts to bite, employers may start seeking local settlements. We need to be clear that all branches are in UK-wide disputes, and so a local settlement is not a way out for an employer. If in doubt, talk to union officials and the national negotiators!

But there are goodwill actions that an employer might make. In 2019-20 some branches were effective at using the UK-wide action to put political pressure on their university managements to negotiate over casualisation and workload (UCL and many others) and equality (notably Bristol). Of course, the first act of goodwill we ask employers to make is to not make threats of high pay deductions for ASOS.

UCU is committed to UK-wide pay bargaining, and it is not possible for the union to reach local deals over pay in return for standing down action. Where there is an offer to stand down strikes, it would not be to end the action or dispute, and ASOS would continue.

The same applies to USS negotiations. There are practical useful demands around seeking that employers break ranks within UUK to force a vote on paying in Deficit Recovery Contributions into pensions and partially reversing the 1 April pension cuts that would be helpful. But even the most supportive local statement would not enable branches to reach an agreement – the changes have to go through the USS JNC!

More days and more branches – the Second Wave is on!

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

The motions passed by the HE Special Conference on Friday have now been published. https://www.ucu.org.uk/hesc_Dec19

The mood of the conference was buoyant after eight days of successful strike action by 60 branches. Delegates were overwhelmingly in favour of planning a further wave of strike action next term. A proposal to debate a motion calling for divorcing the USS dispute from the Four Fights was soundly defeated.

Conference debated several proposals for numbers of strike days and dates for the Second Wave, finally endorsing a proposal from the University of Liverpool for 14 days of action in February and March.

The constitutional position is that only the Higher Education Committee has the power to call industrial action and it doesn’t meet until 30th January. But as a delegate meeting, Sector Conference takes precedence and the HEC should act on the motions passed. As the two Co-Vice Chairs of the HEC, we will be determined to ensure that this is what happens.

Escalation

Twelve branches have already begun to reballot, with reballots of the rest of the branches which got over 40% opening on 7th January. This could mean up to 50 more branches joining the action representing a total of 81% of the union’s HE membership, 98% of those in USS branches.

This is exactly the escalation we need. We must leave the employers in no doubt that we mean business by putting them under more pressure than they are able to bear. We do this by upping both the number of strike days and the number of strikers in the Second Wave.

The task now is not to let the mood and the momentum of our dispute slip before we can take strike action again. We need to twin branches which have already taken action with reballoting branches to help them get over the line. We need to hold meetings of activists to share the lessons of successful action so far. Both of us will work to ensure that reballoting branches get the GTVO support they need and we are happy to be contacted to facilitate this support, whether from fellow grassroots activists, regional offices or at national level.

This is a strategy that can win these disputes. Now let’s put it into action.

Jo McNeill, Chair UCU Left and Vice Chair HEC (pc) jomcneill22@gmail.com
Mark Abel, Secretary UCU Left and Vice Chair HEC (pc) markabel24@gmail.com

National or local? How to build fighting unions after the Trade Union Bill

by Sean Vernell (UCU NEC and Vice Chair of FEC) and Tom Hickey (Brighton, ex-UCU NEC)
End the Gender Pay Gap - protest in London, HE strike 2016

With the Trade Union Bill about to become an Act of Parliament, the organised labour movement has been weakened. This was an unnecessary setback. No serious opposition to the Bill was mounted by the TUC. Just contrast the TUC’s campaign with the level of opposition put up by the CGT in France to the Hollande Governments’ new labour legislation.

A lobby of parliament, and an online ‘we love unions’ campaign, never got close to the level of resistance that was necessary to defeat this offensive, the most draconian trade-union law since the 1980s or to defend jobs, conditions, equality and services.

The Tory law limits our ability to organise, most importantly introducing new ballot thresholds that will make organising lawful national action very difficult for many big public sector unions.

This attack comes at a time when British workers’ wages have been frozen for the longest period in over 70 years. On every barometer, working people’s lives in the workplace have significantly deteriorated since the economic crash in 2008. As Marx explained, ‘the tyranny of the market leads to the tyranny in the factory’. In the drive to outdo their competitors, employers increase the pressure on their workers to work harder and faster for less. Spiralling workloads, bullying managers, longer hours and insecure contracts are the norm for millions of workers in Britain today. With this worsening of conditions, workers’ physical and mental health has also deteriorated.

With this being the everyday experience of millions in the ‘modern’ workplace environment the need for a well-organised, militant trade unionism has never been greater.

With the lowest level of strike days “lost” since records began, trade unions in Britain look increasing irrelevant – at least, on the surface. The response of the leaders of the trade unions has been to retreat from taking any national action, and unions are increasingly leaving the national battlefield. Our leaders are encouraging local disputes to clock up ‘wins’ as an alternative to national action, and in an attempt to make unions relevant.

There are still over six million workers in trade unions, however, which are approximately a quarter of the total workforce, and there are hundreds of thousands of union reps. At a local level (as in the Durham TAs), trade unionists are continuing to engage in courageous action to defend jobs and services.

What is frustrating about the inability of our leaders to take up the fight in defence of working people’s conditions is that the employers are not confident and cohesive – they are divided, cautious and detached. The vote to leave the European Union has sent employers into a tail spin of rage and confusion. Their continued indulgence in yachts, luxury cars and multiple homes, which has meant that even Theresa May has had meekly to attempt to curb boardroom pay, has led workers to despise and thoroughly distrust the employing class.

In this context rather than going on the offensive and leading a national fight against the employers the trade union leaders are retreating into local disputes. If British trade unionism is to be successful at recruiting the next generation of workers then it will need a strategy that goes beyond fighting localised battles. We need a national strategy that matches the government and employers’ national offensive against working people.

The re-election of Jeremy Corbyn as the leader of the Labour Party undoubtedly gives the unions an increased and positive profile. But we cannot wait until 2020 before we start to develop and implement a national strategy to rebuild union strength.

We need national action more than ever. From Trump to May to the potential of a Nazis President in France we need more than ever a trade union movement that can launch national strike action. We need a trade unionism that is equally aggressive at fighting racism as it is in defending workers’ collective rights and conditions of service; one that is as engaged in addressing gender inequality or precarious contracts as it is committed to pay increases and defending national pay rates.

Circumstances can change very quickly. As quickly as old established political dynasties can evaporate, new movements, based upon the self-activity of working people, can appear. This article argues that we need to make a shift to taking regional initiatives whilst at the same time maintaining the pressure on our leaders to lead a national fight against the increasing attacks on working people.

I’m all right Jack…

For most union leaderships at the moment the emphasis is building up local union strength by encouraging local battles. The argument that is usually put forward is that the union is not in a position to sustain national action due to members’ lack of enthusiasm for strike action, or structural weakness in the sector, or lack of organisational strength, or the aggressive use of the law by the employers. The consequence of this, the argument continues, is that we need to rebuild local union organisation by encouraging branches to take action over issues about which members have immediate concern. It is in this manner, they argue, that we will be able to rebuild the sectional workplace strength that can deliver and sustain national action.

It is important to stress that many union activists across the movement have been doing this for many years. This is precisely what has enabled them to build relatively strong workplace organisation. It has been the inability of the trade union leaders to generalise this experience across the whole of the areas they organise that has led them to be unable to build and sustained national strike action.

However, this approach is not a new one. It is based upon the way the British trade unions were built in the 1950/60s which was accurately portrayed, albeit mockingly, in the 1950s Peter Sellers’ film I’m All Right Jack.

This was a period in which the economic boom of the 1950s-1960s allowed workers to organise pay and conditions of service on a sectional level. Workers in new industries, such as the enlarged car plants, successfully organised wage increases through local industrial action, and often only through the threat of action. Stewards organised networks of activists that cut across industry to keep each other informed about the situation in each of their particular plants. Faced with a booming economy and full order books, employers were unwilling to face down their workers’ demands out of fear of lagging behind their competitors. When one group of workers won their dispute, the next would pop up to leapfrog on the back of that success; then another group would follow suit creating what the press called ‘wage spiral’.

The workers on the shop floor would often joke, with some irony, that to win your dispute it was necessary to get out of the door before your officials arrived!

The Wilson government in 1968 launched an enquiry called the Donavan Report which looked into the rise of the ‘wild cat’ strike, and at the ‘politically motivated men’ that were behind the rise of such successful action. The Commission recommended legal constraints on unions, in order to back up governmental wage controls. This led to new union legislation. Titled In Place of Strife, the proposed anti-union law was introduced by Barbara Castle. Magnificent unofficial strike action, involving some 600,000 workers, was organised by the Liaison Committee for the Defence of Trade Unions. It defeated the proposed Bill.

Twenty years of ‘do it yourself reformism’, based on sectional strength, had developed well-organised networks of workers across industries. These networks were able to deliver unofficial national action. The victory at Saltley gates coking plant in 1972 demonstrated the strength of these networks to inflict serious defeats on the employers at a national level.

In an excellent interview with the NUM leader in the New Left Review in 1975, Scargill describes how he spoke at a Birmingham District Committee of the AEUW (the engineering union) calling on engineers across the city to down tools and march on the coking plant to shut it down. On the third day they did. Fifteen thousand workers walked out unofficially, and joined miners at the picket lines, and brushed the police aside to shut the plant.

It was in this period, and as a consequence of the strength of the unofficial networks and regional structures, that national barging was conceded by employers’ organisations and the Government, and welcomed by the trade union leaders. National bargaining was brought in to head off rank and file activists from developing effective collective bargaining at a workplace level. Today, when no such rank and file networks exist, the employers try to move away from national bargaining, and attempt to push through deals at a local level where our side is weaker. That is why we need to campaign hard to defend what is left of national bargaining in every industry, and not to allow our trade union leaders to walk away from this arena of battle.

Unlike the 1950 and 1960s, though, we are not in an economic boom. The employers are more cautious about their industries’ futures, and workers are not confident to walk out unofficially in any industry. What prevents us from taking unofficial action is not the fear of unemployment (unemployment levels are low) but the lack of organisation that can provide us with the confidence that the action necessary to win will be possible.

This is why, in this situation, it makes a big difference to workers’ confidence to fight if their leaderships are also seen to express their anger, and to provide a credible national strategy for action that has a chance of winning

Finding a way out of the bramble bush

The 1950-60s section-by-section approach to rebuilding union strength, whilst important, cannot be the model we looked to rebuild our strength today.

We all understand the difficulties of achieving the kind of big votes for action that will now be legally necessary. Given the cynicism many members feel as a result of the lacklustre attempts of our leaderships to oppose the government and employers, this is hardly surprising. The likelihood of getting national action off the ground through an official ballot, when the law demands a fifty percent turnout for action to be lawful, is small at the moment.

That does not mean that activists should no longer continue to try to get official national action off the ground. Many unions’ campaigns to get the vote out in such national ballots in the past have been incredibly passive and unimaginative. In those circumstances, members do not have any sense that the leadership of their union has the stomach for a fight. Why participate in a ballot in those circumstances?

Nevertheless, if we are to restore the possibility of national action, and be able to mount some pressure in support of national negotiations, or to defend the continuation of national bargaining and existing national agreements, then we need a national strategy to rebuild this capacity.

But we cannot rely on this alone. Where possible we need to encourage unions to put in local claims over pay and conditions, over local patterns of gender discrimination, and over abusive contracts of employment. Where possible, these need to be organised as part of a region-wide campaign where the union puts its national resources into supporting the action to be taken.

In the Higher Education Sector, for example, where the HE and Research Bill is being rushed through Parliament, and is designed to end the existence of public universities, and where the UCU’s national leadership has just thrown away the possibility of a national fight on pay, gender discrimination and casualisation, we need university branches to group together at a local level to pursue pay, gender pay equality, and anti-causuliastion campaigns. Five or six of the better organised university branches need to coordinate their local actions, and to offer a lead to other university branches in their regions.

For such a strategy to work, to have the ability to give confidence to the less well-organised sections, then the national union would need to coordinate solidarity from other branches, and other regions, and with other unions.

What such a strategy doesn’t mean is different universities taking individual action over local issues, which are seen as separate local disputes that have nothing to do with each other. If this version of localised action takes place there is no guarantee, even where university branches are successful in achieving their local aims, that the ‘win’ translates into raising the level of confidence of the less well-organised branches.

Learning from our history

We cannot base a strategy for rebuilding union strength through twenty years of isolated local disputes. The I’m All Right Jack approach cannot be the model for rebuilding union strength in this period.

History does not simply progress through gradual incremental change. There are breaks – great leaps forward. We need to factor this into our understanding of how organised labour can revive its ability to successfully bring about real change that so many working people desire.

Indeed it’s not only a question of identifying the appropriate industrial strategy. Rebuilding trade union confidence and strength is also about recognising the pivotal political issues of the moment that impact on trade union organisation. For us, today, that is unquestionably the rise of racism, the re-emergence of reactionary populism in politics, and the real threat of fascism.

Axel Persson, a French rail worker, speaking at the Unite the Resistance Conference in November described the challenges that his members face. He spoke about the attempt by the Socialist government in France to introduce new labour laws attacking collective bargaining. He also described the context in which they were fighting; the continual and frightening rise of the Nazi Front Nationale led by Marie Le Pen. This is not the first time that the French working class has faced such a threat.

We have historical precedent. In 1934, the French fascists attempted a coup d’etat. A mass demonstration was called by a number of fascist leagues in Paris – the most notable was the 60,000-strong manifestation by Action Français. The workers’ movement had not been particularly active before this point. The movement united and confronted the fascist demonstrators backed up by thousands of workers taking strike action. The movement stopped French fascism in its tracks.

The political radicalisation that developed around this fight against fascism raised the confidence and organisation of organised labour in France. In 1936, this radicalisation led to the victory of a left-wing Popular Front government, and a general strike involving millions of workers. These strikes ensured that the left-wing Government immediately introduced significant reforms which included a shortening of the working day, and regular paid holidays.

French workers in 1936 enjoying their paid holidays, by Henri Cartier-Bresson for Communist Party magazine Regards
French workers in 1936 enjoying their paid holidays (by Henri Cartier-Bresson for Communist Party magazine Regards)

Hope: does history repeat itself?

No, … not at all but it can act as a guide.

The rebuilding of trade union organisation that can deliver real change will take a mixture of local and national action – both, not one or the other; it will involve the union responding as vigorously to the political threats to members as it does to the economic threats to their conditions of service.

The situation can be transformed overnight by workers taking action over issues that we least aspect. In 2010, the anger and revulsion felt amongst education workers, when witnessing their sons and daughters being attacked by the police whilst demonstrating against university fees, could have resulted in a series of large-scale walk-outs. Thankfully, and despite the terrible injuries inflected on some, and only by luck, none of our students were killed. Had one of them been killed, walkouts across the country in every university, college, and in many other workplaces, could have transformed union organisation.

The Brexit campaign shows that some workers can direct their anger against migrants and refugees if there is no alternative explanation for economic decline. The issue for the trade union movement should not be concern at a lack of anger, rage or radicalism amongst working people or young people. The central issue for the trade union movement is passivity. The more inactive union members are in campaigning to defend their living standards, the more their confidence will be sapped. It is this passivity that allows right-wing demagogues to offer false hopes as a way out of our current political impoverishment.

We live in an era where all the old political certainties have dissolved. It is not a given that what replaces the old political order will be progressive. To ensure that it does takes conscious intervention in the world we live in based on the values of solidarity and collectivity with a coherent alternative to competition and marketisation.

HESC Calling Motion

Motion to call a Higher Education Sector Conference to debate UCU’s HE industrial strategy

Under Rule 16.11, branches from 20 Higher Education institutions must pass this motion to require UCU to convene a HESC. Please use the wording below, especially the wording highlighted. Send all motions passed to UCU HQ c/o Paul Bridge, Head of HE, pbridge@ucu.org.uk.

Motion

This UCU Branch notes

  • the end of the HE pay round 2016 with a 1.1% pay offer and proposals that branches negotiate locally to reduce casualisation and the gender pay gap;
  • the passing into law of the Trade Union Act 2016, imposing a 50% turnout on trades disputes, making national industrial action much more difficult unless we can mobilize members to vote;
  • the developing context of an HE and Research Bill and tuition fee market intended to set universities against each other, that is likely to lead to employers holding down wages to expand, and imposing job losses and casualisation;
  • the fact that in addition to pay scales, pensions are nationally determined and cannot be defended branch-by-branch.

This UCU Branch believes that UCU urgently needs a new industrial action strategy, one which combines the building of local organization and nationally coordinated local disputes with a revised and renewed commitment to the preservation of national bargaining.

This UCU Branch therefore resolves to call a Special Higher Education Sector Conference under Rule 16.11 to debate UCU’s industrial strategy in Higher Education.

It encourages other branches to adopt a similar resolution with this call for a Special HE Sector Conference.