HEC votes for a ballot – and a campaign to save the sector

Aberdeen UCU victory

The fight is on to save Higher Education.

UCU’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) met on Thursday 12 December to consider what the union should do in the light of the financial crisis hitting our sector.

Tens of thousands of members face losing their jobs. Last year the union had no UK-wide campaign. Branches were left to fight alone. With the financial situation getting worse, and a limited window of opportunity to influence the Labour Government, we cannot afford to wait.

HEC voted for

  • a carefully structured ballot campaign over pay, to begin as soon as possible,
  • linked to a political campaign in defence of the sector,
  • on a timeline that would permit the union to call action before the end of the spring term.

Alongside the ballot and GTVO activity would be a campaign to raise the union’s emergency demands to save jobs, courses and our sector. It should include a conference to discuss the union’s demands. UCU has already agreed to focus on practical interventions that a Labour Government could make – to reinstate the block grant, for the government to cover or cancel the TPS contribution increase, and to reverse the hostile environment visa changes currently putting off overseas students from applying to university in the UK. We need to popularise these calls and debate them with politicians and ministers.

HEC also repeated the call made by Congress and the NEC for a major national demo to defend post-16 education.

We need to be imaginative and ambitious. In 2016-17, lobbying organised by The Convention for Higher Education, a loose coalition of UCU activists, academics and bodies including the Council for the Defence of British Universities, managed to force concessions from the Conservative Government in their Higher Education and Research Act.

The plan is for a joined-up strategy fighting for pay and jobs that can mobilise members to speak up about the crisis in Higher Education and put pressure on Labour to intervene. Our members are the best advocates for the sector. If this campaign develops successfully, we can also impact on Labour’s forthcoming HE funding review.

Branches facing redundancies and cuts were in the forefront of HEC’s minds. This strategy does two things: it brings our whole union together, and it puts pressure on Government to pay up for HE. If branches are fighting job losses they want to know that the whole union is behind them, and we all need to mobilise to insist Labour addresses the funding crisis of the sector.

HEC also voted to escalate procedures for branches facing redundancies to ballot for industrial action over jobs (see resolution 2 below).

The HEC meeting ended in messages of solidarity to branches facing job losses, and to UNITE UCU.

No-one should fight alone.

Resolutions from HEC meeting 12 December 2024 (including amendments)

1. Building industrial action ballot alongside a political campaign to defend HE

HEC notes the consultative ballot rejecting the pay offer and in favour of IA.

HEC resolves to

  1. Immediately organise an IA ballot for a ‘fully-funded pay rise’ of 5.5% (2023-24 claim) linked to a political campaign for a fully-funded sector calling for emergency measures to save jobs, courses and the sector.
  2. Run the IA ballot, HEC meetings etc., on a timeline permitting members to take UK-wide term-time strike action before the Easter break in most universities.
  3. Recommend that the National Demonstration to Defend Post 16 education as decided at UCU Congress is called for a Saturday in February 2025 in order to support the ballot
  4. Send out detailed briefing notes and organise regional GTVO workshops.
  5. Call a conference to defend HE in early February promoting and debating UCU’s proposals. Organise regional lobbies and mass lobby of Parliament with the post-16 demonstration.
  6. Consult members during the ballot on types of action through regional/devolved nations meetings and a branch delegate meeting during the ballot. Hold HEC in final week of ballot to plan action in anticipation of the result.

2. Responding to the Employers’ Offensive in the context of HE Crisis and Pay Dispute

This HEC notes

  1. The HE employers’ offensive and the broken university funding model.
  2. Long IA balloting-and-notification periods (TUA2016) and short windows for CR consultation (30 or 45 days, TULRCA1992) making timely ballot authorisation vital.
  3. That branches should not have to fight on their own but that several branch that have taken or threatened industrial action have made gains or mitigated losses.

This HEC resolves to

  1. Update branch officers weekly with a list of redundancy programmes by HEIs including VRs and CRs, and have a dedicated campaigning webpage.
  2. Weekly anti-cuts meeting open to all branches.
  3. Training on opposing redundancies via industrial action.
  4. Hold a national demonstrations in early February in Wales, Scotland, England and NI and protests at MP’s surgeries in constituencies with threatened universities.
  5. Shorten current ballot authorisation timelines, without requirement for consultative ballots.
  6. Make every branch taking industrial action against redundancies a local dispute of national significance.
  7. The large-scale redundancy programs and restructurings occurring in HE include a significant but varying silent redundancy of casualised workers across the sector. HEC resolves that the numbers of casualised work losses and ‘redundancies’ be added to the present count of redundancies to enable us to comprehensively assess the true scale of job losses across the sector and to inform our IA campaign with members.

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.

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

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.

The Cost Of Living Crisis is Biting Now – Escalate to Win

Lobby of UCEA employers during 30 November national demonstration.

#NoCapitulation

The General Secretary has followed up the video she released last week, in which she questioned the HEC’s decisions on industrial action, with a proposal of her own. In a glossy document, she sets out a timetable for limited strike action, a reballot and possible marking assessment boycott.

The General Secretary’s proposal

Having declared last week that a marking and assessment boycott would be organised for January, it is not included in this latest plan.

Worse, as an alternative to the indefinite action favoured by HEC, for the rest of our ballot mandate she proposes a ‘strategy’ of sporadic two- and three-day strikes in February and March.

The document claims this is a ‘professional’ strategy which is based on the ‘successful management of the RMT and CWU disputes.’ But those disputes have not broken through.

If this were agreed, it would squander the mandate for industrial action in 150 universities that we celebrated with much fanfare in October. Counting the three days we have already taken, Jo Grady is proposing a total of just 13 days across the entire six month period covered by the ballot, but in an on-off manner that loses momentum and the employers can easily manage as they have demonstrated since 2019.

This is nothing like the ‘shutting down of campuses’ that the General Secretary promised. It is not even an escalation.

It is a green light for the employers to sit tight and ride out the action, just as they did last year and just as employers and government are doing in the post, rail and NHS disputes.

Why did HEC vote for indefinite action?

The reason HEC voted for an early marking boycott and indefinite strike action was because we need to try and win the dispute early, ideally without having to reballot.

Going all-out in a sustained way with indefinite action run by the grassroots of the union means a hard-hitting shutdown of campus early in term that can win the dispute and limit the impact on students.

Not only have the post and rail disputes demonstrated that ‘playing the long game’ does not deliver results, but the rhythm of the academic year demands that we take action at every point where all institutions are teaching.

The negotiations are coming to a head now, and the time to escalate is now.

The reason why the employers were planning to table an early settlement on pay is that the period December to April is when universities know their tuition fee income and finally allocate their budgets for the year. If staff want a share of that budget, they need to apply industrial pressure over this period.

On USS, we have a real opportunity to recover members’ benefits. Two of our negotiators have outlined a credible proposal for reversing the theft of USS members’ benefits on 1st April 2023. But there is a short window for putting any such proposal into action.

We cannot afford to risk the momentum we built up by wasting two months of a six month window without taking action. That’s why a January marking boycott is important. But it must be followed up with meaningful strike action in order to defend members. The GS’s document spells out that there are seven weeks during February and March during which all universities are teaching. Calling an indefinite strike in February threatens the employers with up to 42 days of strike action which would shut down the campuses and take out Semester 2.

Democracy is not an added extra

There is a marked difference between the resources being put behind the communication of the General Secretary’s proposal compared to the HEC plan. HEC’s decisions were kept secret for more than a month by UCU, despite having been taken by elected lay members following democratic debate based on input from branches.

January’s Branch Delegate Meeting is being set up on the basis of a straight choice between the two proposals. In her determination to get the BDM to endorse it, the GS is incorrectly describing her proposed strategy as ‘escalating action from February through to April.’ But it does not escalate, and the last strike date she proposes is actually 22nd March. If she is successful in persuading the BDM, the pressure will be on HEC to reverse the decisions it took in November.

Branches should not rely on these questions. They should organise meetings for the BDM and express their views through motions. This is the tried and tested democratic process used in the trade union movement. Then we must demand that those views are discussed and debated at the BDM. In October HEC voted for BDMs to hear motions from branches, but this motion was ignored.

Democracy is not an added extra. Strike action of this scale needs an elected national strike committee that can coordinate between branches and can decide whether to pause or resume action.

Of course we all want coordination with other unions, and of course we have to take issues of hardship seriously. But coordination shouldn’t be used as a reason for individual unions to hold back action. While we need to raise solidarity across the movement, the best way to deal with the threat of hardship is to use the mandate we worked so hard for to win this dispute.

The General Secretary says that indefinite action has not been used by the ‘big battalions’ of the movement. That is true – but both CWU and RMT are now being forced to escalate their strikes because the employers are digging in and counter attacking. By contrast, an indefinite strike won barristers a hefty 15% pay rise.

Members have to take democratic control of this dispute, both at the BDM and in branches but also by the establishment of local and national strike committees to assess and develop action and involve the mass of members.

We need a proper debate in our union about the next steps in our dispute, not surveys with leading questions without a proper explanation of the merits and disadvantages of proposals.

We face the biggest attack on our living standards for generations.

We can’t just revert to the same old tired plan. We have to fight to win – and that means escalating as soon as possible.


UCU Left Open Meeting

Fighting the HE disputes
What strategy do we need and how should we decide it?

Wednesday 4th January, 7pm

The General Secretary has proposed an alternative to the strategy passed by the Higher Education Committee on November 3rd. Instead of a January marking and assessment boycott followed by an indefinite strike, she advocates ten days of strike action spread through February and March.

Ahead of the Branch Delegate Meeting, join this Q&A to find out why UCU Left members of HEC voted for a MAB and indefinite action, and why we need union democracy to win these disputes.

Time to get organised to win the HE ballot!

UCU members will need to get organised to win the ballots in Higher Education. After the UCU Rising campaign on Wednesday 10th August, it’s all hands on deck to deliver the hard-hitting, ‘transformative’ campaign promised by UCU HQ.

We are in the middle of a huge fight over pay across every sector across the UK, from education and transport to communications. People are not falling for the lie that wage increases cause inflation. The government stood by and allowed oil giants to hype fuel costs, triggering price increases across the economy. Headline average inflation of more than 11% understates the impact on ordinary people, with up to 50% increases in supermarket prices for vegetables and staples.

RMT leaders Mick Lynch and Eddie Dempsey have become overnight celebrities for speaking the plain truth: workers have no choice but to fight for a pay increase that keeps up with inflation. Cuts in pay for skilled workers reverberate across the economy. If salaries fall, without workers’ spending, jobs and pay in service sectors will be trashed. The RMT and CWU are leading the fight, and millions can see it. 

But other unions need to organise to bring workers out on strike. Indeed, we cannot afford to ignore threats to the right to strike by Conservative Party leadership candidates. The Tories are gambling on taking on all the trade unions at the same time – something that even Margaret Thatcher never dared do. 

Alongside the other HE trade unions, UNISON, GMB, EIS and UNITE, UCU has rejected the paltry 3% pay offer from the HE employers. All bar one have declared a dispute, and UNISON has already begun to ballot for action in the autumn. 

Against RPI, this ‘increase’ is equivalent to permanently slashing pay by almost 3 grade points, or half a pay grade. We can’t afford to accept this.

Following robust campaigns and ballots, elsewhere workers have been winning higher increases. Leading the way is UNITE. Among other successes, UNITE was able to raise airport workers’ pay by 21% at Gatwick and 10% at Glasgow. In FE, UCU has won an uplift of £2,668 and a £500 one-off payment at Hugh Baird College in Liverpool after threatening strike action. So far some 35 FE branches have live mandates for industrial action after being offered increases around the 2.5% mark.

A series of unions have won ballots and are already taking action, including the RMT on rail and underground, train drivers in ASLEF, and the CWU communication workers. Even without a union, Amazon workers are staging wildcat walkouts over pay. Other unions, including the NEU schoolteachers, and UNISON in HE have announced ballots in the autumn. 

This is the context for the launch of the union’s ‘UCU Rising’ campaign. The UCU leadership has accepted something that union activists have been telling them for years: you have to campaign ahead of a ballot in order to win it. You also have to lead from the front to give members the confidence that you are serious. 

We have exceeded a 50% turnout in aggregated ballots in the past. In 2005, just before UCU was formed, General Secretaries Sally Hunt and Paul Mackney toured union branches to convince members and reps that their respective national unions wanted to win the ballot. The result was a turnout of around 54% in each union.

Similarly, the 2017-18 USS ballot in pre-92 reached a turnout of 56% overall. The key ingredient was a political campaign among members that mobilised reps and activists to win the argument that now was the time to fight – and vote.

So the fora and webinars with Jo Grady announced by UCU to launch the dispute are welcome. We need more than leaflets and posters when members are mainly working online. We need to create impetus over the summer even if many are on leave. The union needs to set the clear expectation that we intend to win this ballot.

One might think that given the scale of the attacks and this wider groundswell and enthusiasm for unions like the RMT, winning a ballot in HE would be straightforward. But there are underlying concerns among members. 

Strategy

First, there are unresolved questions about industrial strategy. Members need to know the union is serious about taking the kind of action required to force up offers over pay. 

Last year the union called strike action on dates which had limited impact on the employers, and did not increase pay offers at a national table. In some cases strikes were in Reading Weeks or out of term-time, meaning that no leverage was placed on the employers’ ability to access their primary source of income, students.

On the other hand, branches were able to deploy marking boycotts extremely effectively, but with a local impact. Organising on a rank and file basis, with no real support from the centre, union members learned they had real leverage over their employers, and displayed true grit in standing up to employers’ pay deduction threats. One after the next, the employers negotiated local agreements to end the action. But strong action in a minority of branches was insufficient to shift the employers nationally. 

It is clear that the UCU leadership expected the marking and assessment boycott campaign to fail, and understated its success because they stood aside. We all know its limitations. But we cannot ignore the fact that it exposed the weakness of the employers who annually threatened 100% pay deductions since 2006. With the exception of Queen Mary University of London, the employers did not impose 100% pay deductions: only at Goldsmiths and the RCA were any deductions for boycotts made.

A marking boycott is not a panacea, and we cannot afford to wait until critical marking periods next year to fight over pay. We will need to win a second autumn ballot in any case. But the lesson is clear: if we are prepared to take hard-hitting industrial action we can win. We need to apply this lesson to our strike action strategy.

Organisation

The second issue concerns our own organisation: we will need a serious effort to drive up the turnout.

The ballot will be aggregated across all employers, over seven weeks. 

The last time UCU ran an aggregated ballot in HE over pay, ending in February 2019, the turnout (41%) was an almost replica of the previous disaggregated turnout (average 42%). Then in the autumn of 2019, a return to disaggregated ballot and a combined ballot envelope (USS, pay) pushed up turnout to an average of 49%, and 57 branches were able to take action. In the last year, average turnouts were at, or just below, 50%. This is too close to call.

As we noted above, the last time we beat the 50% turnout by a comfortable margin across pre- and post-92 was in 2005-6, just before the merger. We know what we need to do: campaign across the entire union to increase participation.

Along with pay, the USS dispute is also clearly winnable. The changes railroaded through on 1 April cannot be justified. USS is taking ‘deficit recovery contributions’ amounting to one fifth of all payments into the scheme (over half a billion pounds a year) when their own monitoring assessment of the projected deficit says these contributions are no longer required. This is theft on a grand scale, and these payments should be paid into member benefits and the cuts reversed. 

Next steps

We need to rally members to get behind this campaign now. 

We can expect to get a clear timeline this week, so branch officers and reps know what they need to do when. The campaign should start now, well before ballot envelopes hit doormats and pigeon holes. 

There are a range of tasks to be worked through from ‘GTVO preparation’ to organising rallies to launch the ballot. Activists are asking what they can do to help. We should treat every member as a potential activist, asking them to call meetings in departments timed for when the ballot begins.

Members are extremely angry. They need to know that the union is serious about winning these parallel disputes. It is never more true to say that we are in the fight of our lives! 

It is time to get organised.

HEC report 1 July 2022

HEC unites around a programme to rebuild the disputes

The Higher Education Committee met on Friday to discuss the state of the industrial action campaigns over Four Fights and USS. It was the first opportunity for HEC to meet since the HE Sector Conference and a Branch Delegate Meeting.

After some debate, HEC voted overwhelmingly (with only 6 votes against) to support a strategy involving updating the grounds of dispute, triggering dispute procedures, and building a serious campaign for action in the Autumn term, with a conjoined ballot if the employers do not move. 

HEC had been asked to address a complex picture. At Sector Conference on June 2 delegates had voted for motions calling for two long aggregated ballots over both disputes, one over the summer from early June (i.e. immediately) intended to provide a mandate for action in the Autumn term (HE6), and one from October to January for a mandate into June (HE7). These motions were agreed by Conference to be entirely compatible and if both were successful would put the union in a position to call action over these disputes at strategically key times over the academic year.

However Motion HE6 was not implemented and instead a Branch Delegate Meeting was called on Monday prior to HEC. Delegates were asked a series of questions that were only circulated the previous Wednesday. HE officers had no input into these questions, some of which directly contradicted the position of Sector Conference.

It had also been intimated to members that voting for a summer ballot would face legal challenges, and unsurprisingly that meant that the proposal for an already-delayed summer ballot was supported only by a minority, even though it had been supported by three sector conference votes. (This legal advice was never given to BDM delegates, HEC or HE officers.)

HEC was presented with the results of this consultation. The process was obviously democratically flawed, but HEC took the view that given the need to win an aggregated ballot it was essential to be mindful of the view of members.

Meanwhile, other trade unions have been gearing up to take action over pay and the Cost of Living crisis. With 3% likely to be imposed in August, and inflation at 11%, UNISON has said that they will ballot HE members over the 2022-23 pay claim over the summer from the end of July. The school teaching unions NEU and NASUWT intend to ballot in the early autumn.

Planning the disputes

HEC voted to establish updated grounds of dispute over Four Fights and USS and thereby avoid any risk of legal challenge.

HEC voted for a first ballot in early autumn which would permit UCU members to take action alongside UNISON and schoolteachers. There must be a campaign of action, led by the General Secretary, to build this ballot.

HEC also agreed to run a second ballot to end in early 2023 to ensure a marking and assessment boycott mandate into the exam period. Branches have been learning from the boycott campaign this year and a much bigger marking boycott may turn into a reality.

Making sure boycotting branches win

HEC also voted to call on UCU to actively and publicly support those branches currently engaged in a marking boycott right now.

HEC was told that Queen Mary UCU members are facing the threat of losing 42 days’ pay over two months. It is essential that the whole union rallies around.

Branches still in boycott include Queen Mary, RCA, Bournemouth and Goldsmiths.

HEC noted “the effectiveness of locally-organised marking and assessment boycotts, backed up by twinning campaigns to obtain USS statements and local demands under the Four Fights umbrella and defy pay docking — despite UCEA calling for 100% deductions since 2006.”

HEC made it clear that it is strategically imperative to ensure these disputes win and are seen to win.

HEC demanded that these disputes are prioritised internally within UCU and publicly, with publicity emphasising that UCU nationally stands behind branches and members facing pay-docking. As part of this the General Secretary was asked to make a declaration of unequivocal support for boycotting branches and to call on the whole union and wider trade union movement to offer solidarity.

Beyond this, boycotting branches must be consulted about next steps, including financial support for local hardship funds and potential legal action.

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)

 

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

Lobby of Woburn House
Lobbying UCEA HQ in December

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.

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.
  4. 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

Let’s push on to victory

London College of Fashion Dundee Picket
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!