Tag: JEP

Posted on

JEP reports… What Next?

After more than ten meetings and careful consideration of the state of the USS pension scheme’s finances, the USS Joint Expert Panel (JEP) has concluded that the way the scheme has been valued to-date could be much improved.

In diplomatic language, the JEP confirms what a wide range of independent critics of USS valuations, including UCU and their actuaries First Actuarial, last year argued.

The JEP comments that the much-challenged ‘Test 1’ had “assumed too much weight in determining the valuation” and call for a re-evaluation of the sponsor covenant. The report’s authors say that “greater weight should be given to the unique features and strengths of the higher education sector” — echoing what many of us have been saying throughout. Continue reading “JEP reports… What Next?”

Posted on

Higher Education Committee (HEC) report of meeting 29th June 2018

 

UCU Congress 2018 Voting

Pay

The successful consultative pay ballot of members demonstrated 82% rejection on a 48% turnout and 65% for extended strike action. HEC voted to initiate an industrial action ballot from August through September ending in early October. A pay campaign over pay casualisation, pay inequality and workloads has the potential to galvanise the membership across both pre- and post-92 universities. This is a record turnout for an e-consultation on pay for the union. The strength of feeling over these issues can be gauged by the report that only one branch in the whole of the UK (a very small branch in a university where UCU does not have recognition agreement) voted to accept the offer.

While real ballots result in higher turnouts, and despite such a high vote in the e-consultation, there is a need to avoid complacency and instead work to ensure branches mobilise around the Get the Vote Out Campaign. Debate at HEC ensured that the ballot will not start until the end of August and continue into October with escalating and sustained strike action in November unless there is a major improvement in the pay offer being made. Pay briefing meetings in the devolved nations and regions with a Special HE Sector Conference in September are also being planned.

Pensions

UCU has agreed to timetable a Special HESC when the JEP reports, which will be empowered to take the dispute forwards. It is possible that not a lot will happen over the summer. And in practice the Special HESC can vote to reinstate a proper dispute committee (see section on democracy below), composed proportionate to branch size and with voting and decision-making capacities, at that time. The latest statement from the JEP can be found here.

Casualisation

A motion on casualised pension rights was discussed by HEC. The discussion reflected the increasing profile of casualised issues within UCU.  The success of the USS dispute particularly helped to raise the wider issues of marketisation, equalities, and casualisation and to galvanise members on picket lines and in teach outs. An obvious disparity highlighted by the USS fight is that many casualised members and lower paid permanent members cannot access pension rights or cannot afford to pay for pensions.  Added to this their contributions are often recorded inaccurately or there are gaps. They often work in two or more institutions across the sectors and can rarely afford to retire. Yet they stood in solidarity with their permanent colleagues fighting for a different kind of higher education system.

Now casualised members are calling for union wide solidarity and a resolve from their UCU brothers and sisters to fight for pension rights for workers on all types of contracts in both sectors. This motion sought to get this issue on the table and for a union wide conversation to be had on pension rights for casualised workers. Though it was agreed that welfare benefits are also an important issue we resolved to focus on pension rights. HEC agreed to ask the Education committee to table a speaker on casualisation and pensions at the Cradle to Grave conference; that there would be a meeting held  ACC would discuss pension provision across HE and that we would do some work, with resources, to enable UCU to provide specialist guidance to branches. This was supported by the whole HEC and passed unanimously.

Now for the less good parts of the HEC

Motions not discussed

A number of important motions were not discussed due to running out of time:

  1. Business School workloads, partly motivated by a tragic death due to overwork
  2. Practical proposals for implementing a sector conference motion on military and industrial research: there is increasing pressure to get research funding and concerns by many members about ethical issues.
  3. Victimisation of striking members in the USS dispute; one of the remitted motions from the recent sector conference and there is great concern by the branch. UCU has transformed.  We cannot allow victimisation.
  4. Resisting the far right and supporting Black and ethnic minority students, motivated by a Black member pointing out the serious discrimination experienced by Black PhD students.
  5. UUK visit to Egypt, motivated by discussion on the activists’ list and concern that links with other countries need to be ethical and UUK did nothing when Guilio Regeni was tortured and murdered.
  6. Funding UCU casualised workers to attend a joint union training and funding a banner and placards for a joint union anti-casualisation march. This is motivated by the experiences of casualised workers and would be important in supporting our pay campaign and making other unions aware of the particular experiences of casualised workers in HE and FE.

Papers

Important papers on precarious work and workload were presented, but there was no time for discussion.  Equally important papers on the rate for the job and how sector conference motions will be implemented were not even presented.

Improved organisation of meetings

Both HEC and NEC are experiencing serious problems in getting through the agenda.  Members’ motions regularly fall of the agenda.  As indicated above, these are often vitally important issues which are brought by NEC members, often in response to concerns from branches.  They are therefore part of how elected members are accountable and respond to grassroots concerns.  There are views that this is deliberate.  Whether or not this is the case, it is of the utmost importance to ensure this does not happen in the future.  Positive changes could include moving members’ motions much earlier in the agenda, limiting the number of speakers on an issue (on a for and against basis, as at Congress, and possibly also neither) and providing a written list of the items motions are assigned to rather than spend half an hour discussing this.

UCU Democracy

Another frustrating day saw the dead weight of the majority HEC members around the so-called ‘Independent Broad Left’ (IBL) and bureaucracy trying to overturn Higher Education Sector Conference (HESC) decisions on transparency and democracy. The right wing of the HEC (IBL) decided that the HESC motion which called for the setting up of a national strike/dispute committee with representatives elected on the same basis as the HESC formula (so retaining proportionality to branch size) really meant that HESC delegates should elect a subset of their number as the dispute committee.

The entire motion was written because of defects of Branch Consultation Meetings which had no standing in the union rules, and no voting powers. These defects were made explicit for the entire union to see on March 23rd 2018, when infamously no vote was taken on putting the UUK offer to members. As a result members are still arguing about what different branches’ positions were on that day.

The solution, enshrined in motion HE13 (copied in the Appendix below), was a voting assembly of members proportionate to branch size. This is the same method for electing delegates to the Higher Education Sector Conference, which is enshrined in rules. The idea was to duplicate that structure, but eliminate some of the bureaucractic encumberances.

The IBL voted against this and argued that “composed of” did not mean “composed of all”. The IBL did this because the last two HESCs have voted overwhelmingly for motions that the IBL do not approve of. Members voted for transparency and accountability of the JEP, but also of the union’s structures. They argued for more democracy not less.

Appendix

HE13  Composite: USS dispute: national dispute committee – University College London, Goldsmiths University of London. 

HESC notes:

  1. the reaction of USS branches to the March 12 ‘agreement’ demonstrated that members want a resolution which protects Defined Benefit pensions now and in the future
  2. concerns from many branches and members about the processes concerning the consultative ballot on the USS offer of 23rd March
  3. the lack of transparency about the role of UCU negotiators in the USS negotiations and the lack of opportunities to hold union representatives to account
  4. members feel disempowered nationally, compared to the high level of ownership they feel in relation to the dispute locally
  5. while some aspects of negotiations are confidential, to maintain a sense of ownership of the dispute among the membership and to maintain members’ resolve to take industrial action, members must know how negotiations are progressing.

HESC resolves to establish a national USS dispute committee composed of HESC delegates (or substitutes) from USS branches, to which national negotiators and UCU Independent Expert Panel members will report. This committee will meet at regular intervals until the dispute is officially terminated and will give a representative steer to the dispute for the current valuation round, including during any suspension or re-ballot.

Posted on

USS: Keep Up the Pressure

#UCUtransformed meeting (1 of 1)

USS: Keep Up the Pressure

Don’t give the JEP wriggle-room to impose cuts. Don’t let UCU leaders grab defeat from the jaws of victory

Today’s Special Higher Education Sector Conference represents a watershed moment for UCU in a dispute that has transformed our union. Nearly half of all USS branches passed calling motions for today’s conference in order to hold our leadership to account. Why did the USS dispute end the way it did? How do we prepare to restart it if the current settlement reached unravels?

But first we have to note the success we have achieved to date. The USS strike was caused by the employers and USS seeking to drive through the marketisation of HE by ripping up of the USS covenant and shifting future pension risk onto employees. They wanted to abolish the principle of mutual sharing of pension risk, which individual VCs and Finance Managers perceive as an important ‘competitive restriction’ to the breakup of a collective HE sector.

That attempt has been defeated by our strike action. The USS covenant remains one of the major impediments to runaway privatisation and fragmentation of HE. Universities will continue to be limited in their ability to raise debt on their balance sheets. The greatest legacy of our strike is likely to be the protection of a relatively unified HE sector, at the very least, impeding the rise of the market for university education in the UK.

#UCUTransformed

Everyone in the union also knows about the transformation of UCU, even if the IBL-controlled NEC and General Secretary don’t welcome the vibrancy of the union that comes with it. In the USS pension scheme, we have not simply protected our benefits until April 2019 but, with USS resisting any further changes until April 2020, our benefits (but not our contributions) will probably be protected for two years at least. Similarly, the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) and the employers are fully aware that any final settlement must be ‘equivalent’ to our existing pension. The infamous March 19 ACAS ‘deal’, with a salary cap of £42K with CPI inflation limited to 2.5% is far from that.

The major lesson of all of this is that escalating, sustained national strike action succeeds because members can be mobilised to defend their pensions as part of a wider fight for equality and education.

The battle we face

While the Defined Contribution scheme is now formally withdrawn, other ‘risk-sharing options’ can come back in other forms. Meanwhile USS are insisting that if we want our Defined Benefit pension scheme to remain we will have to pay large increases in contributions: 3.7% for us and 6.7% for our employers.

We could have got much more and won this strike completely. Instead we now have a JEP, whose outcome is ill-defined, with USS and UUK still seeking to bring in cost increases or cuts to benefits through the back door.

USS and UUK are now seeking to ensure discussions are behind closed doors and remain confidential. JEP members have signed non-disclosure agreements and the UCU USS negotiators are going to be asked to do the same. Let us be clear: confidentiality is not to protect commercial secrets it’s a method to allow the JEP to concoct a further dreadful settlement as a fait accompli. We’ve been here before, and members aren’t willing to accept it. It is no accident that so many of today’s motions cover the issue of transparency.

During the strikes, USS’s secrecy has worked in our favour – members have learned not to trust USS apparatchiks and their press releases about the so-called ‘deficit’. But now members reasonably expect the JEP to represent a new era of transparency and accountability for USS decision-making. If they are disappointed, it should be despite the efforts of UCU representatives. And it should be a further reason to strike in the Autumn to defend USS if this proves necessary.

Commentary on motions

Most of the motions are positive and should be supported. For example Motion 16 seeks to increase accessibility and maintenance of benefits to casualised staff. There are a number of motions on the transparency of the JEP and to support the opportunity for members to make submissions to it. This reflects a groundswell towards the presumption of transparency. Motion 15 calls for the CEO of USS Bill Galvin to resign.

Some motions are more problematic. Motion 10 should be taken in parts. Asking for a breakdown of the vote is to provide ammunition to the employers. Motion 1 should be opposed and Motion 12 supported instead. While the idea behind Motion 1 is fair, Sector Conference in May voted for regular reporting to a national dispute committee constituted from HESC delegations from USS branches, which Motion 12 seeks to refine. Motion 19 weakens recent Congress policy on status quo so is unhelpful.

Finally there are motions on the role of post-92 reps and members in the USS dispute. There is a ‘convention’, the premise of which is that reps do not vote on disputes they would not be lawfully balloted for in an industrial action ballot. So the convention is important, and it is Right retired members that have ignored it in the past. That said, there is a strong moral case for staff with a stake in the scheme to have some say, especially casualised and hourly paid staff who may be compelled to move between pre and post 92 sectors.

Motion 14 from Brighton should be supported, but motion 13 just overturning the convention should be opposed. As written, this would permit FE branches with a single ex-university staff member to vote! Nationally-elected NEC officers (including from FE) would be entitled to vote. This motion should be opposed.

Congress Motions 10 and 11

The elephant in the room is the failure of Congress to discuss motions 10 and 11, on no-confidence and censure of the General Secretary. With UCU JEP members signing NDAs and pressure on SWG representatives to do likewise, some of the motions we discuss risk being undermined by secret negotiations. Accountability is an essential principle for UCU to be able to lead members out on strike in the Autumn if this proves necessary.

We need a democratic and transparent union not just because democracy and transparency are essential qualities in themselves, but because a leadership that does not maintain the trust of members cannot lead.

 

Open Meeting for delegates – called by UCU Left

Join the debate – where next for the USS dispute – how do we keep up the pressure?

Thursday 11:30am, Kings House Conference Centre, Seminar Room 5