Tag: #UCUTransformed

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Escalate to win the pay inequalities and pension fights

 

 

 

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 five issues we are fighting on are inextricably linked. We need to escalate to win on all of them.

We are in a fight to defend the future of Higher Education from the effects of marketisation. The Four Fights pay and equality campaign is central to that fight and it’s crucial for all of us that we win it.

Download and get this motion passed in your branch.

The threat to the USS pension is serious. It could mean the death of a pension worth the name in the pre-92 universities. But as round two in the USS fight was brewing, we realised that we could not afford to fight on pensions alone. The Four Fights campaign on pay, equality, casualisation and workload is a necessary compliment to the pension fight, for several crucial reasons.

1.Pensions are nothing other than deferred pay, pay that employers and employees agree to hold back until we need it when our working lives are over. If we don’t halt the ten-year erosion or our pay, any victory on pensions is partial at best.

2. It’s not much use defending the pension scheme if large numbers of our colleagues are effectively excluded from it because they are in insecure employment. Combatting casualisation is essential to ensuring a new generation of entrants to the scheme and guaranteeing its future health.

3. If we’re fighting over what is fair and right, we can’t afford to ignore inequality. Our pensions are better than most, but they don’t look so good from the perspective of women whose careers have stalled through maternity breaks or of BAME colleagues who have been passed over for promotion.

4. Excessive workloads which threaten our health and sometimes our lives are the product of the huge numbers of redundancies seen in the sector over the last few years. We face a Hobson’s choice: you can survive to claim a full pension or you can keep your mental health, not both.

Unity

But the final reason that the Four Fights is necessary is the most important of all. It is about unity. Unity is our chief weapon – unity across the sector and unity across our union.

With the help of the anti-union laws, our employers try to divide us from each other and limit our resistance. Round one of the USS fight was a game-changer for our union, but it only involved members in pre-92 institutions. Post-92 members are not allowed to be in dispute over USS, but we are not bystanders. We all know that attacks on TPS pensions will intensify if they succeed in wrecking USS.

Levels of casualisation are mostly lower in the post-92s than in the research-intensive universities, but the cancer of precarious contracts is an issue for all of us. Inequality is a scourge across the whole sector, while workloads are rising to unmanageable levels everywhere. Pay unites us all.

That’s why the decisions taken by Sector Conferences and the HEC to wage the Four Fights simultaneously with the pension fight was correct. The law dictates that they are two separate deputes, but it can’t stop us fighting them together.

We have made an excellent start. Eight days of strikes in 60 institutions represents an impressive demonstration of our intent. Some branches are in one dispute, some in two, but we have refused to separate our fights because to do so would play into the hands of those who want to use marketisation to fragment our sector.

Escalation

Now the crucial task is to escalate the action. The reballots in 36 more branches are absolutely central to a Second Wave. The employers will be hoping that Labour’s election defeat has sapped our morale and we fail to bring more members into the fight. But we always knew that we would have to escalate whoever was in Downing Street. Where possible we should follow the lead of Cambridge who have twinned with Anglia Ruskin to help them get the vote out. Kent can twin with Canterbury Christ Church, Leeds with Leeds Beckett and Leeds Trinity and so on.

Escalation is also about upping the number of days of action in the Second Wave. December’s Sector Conference voted for 14 days of USS strikes in February and March. The HEC due to take place on January 30th must now endorse that decision and call the same days for the Four Fights dispute.

Now is not the time for hesitation or cold feet. Linking the issues and uniting members in escalating action is the way to win.

 

Jo McNeill, University of Liverpool and Mark Abel, University of Brighton, Co-Vice Chairs of HEC

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VOTE YES FOR BETTER PAY IN FE – VOTE YES FOR STRIKE ACTION

Leaflet: FE for a united pay fightback

All employers have now been sent notification declaring a dispute and announcing an industrial ballot.  The ballot will open on 30 August and close on 19 October.

Whilst it is a busy time of year for us all we need to get our branches up and running and organising a Get The Vote Out (GTVO) campaign to maximise the turn out.

Click here to see some excellent videos of FE members arguing the case for a pay rise.

This is a national ballot organise on a disaggregated basis (ie college by college). Click here a list of all the colleges that will be balloted

This year’s campaign follows from the successful campaign pursed by 12 FE colleges who struck over pay and conditions. These colleges proved that not only can we reach the new government ballot thresholds but we can also convince members to take sustained strike action. The vast majority of these branches succeeded in winning better pay and conditions.

WHY WE NEED YOU TO VOTE YES TO STRIKE ACTION OVER PAY:

If you want better pay at your college it is important that you vote. We need 50% of eligible UCU members at your college to vote before UCU can take strike action to fight for better pay where you work.

After a decade of below inflation pay raises staff in FE are more than 25% poorer. It’s worse in colleges where increases haven’t been paid.  No other public sector staff have suffered worse pay cuts.

No-one thinks that pay in FE is fair. The Association of Colleges (AoC) agrees that pay in FE is too low. School teachers earn £7,000 a year more for doing the same work as lecturers. Staff recruitment and retention in colleges are at crisis levels. This is a fight for FE’s survival; for staff and students.

The AoC response to the unions’ claim is to say they want to recommend a significant pay increase for all FE staff but cannot unless government gives colleges the cash to do it.

Warm words about what the AoC want to do won’t feed families or pay rent. Meanwhile the most recent figures show one third of FE CEOs/principals were awarded a pay rise of 10% or more.

As the public sector cap is lifted and school teachers and others are offered above inflation pay increases FE will be left behind unless we fight for better pay in FE.

We need the AoC and colleges to pay staff some respect, not play for time. FE Staff have waited long enough and the pay crisis is too serious to ignore. Colleges must act on pay now.

The only way to get better pay in FE is for FE to FIGHTBACK

VOTE YES FOR BETTER PAY IN FE – VOTE YES FOR STRIKE ACTION

 

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Build the HE Pay Dispute

Get the Vote Out: Unite the sectors, reverse the pay decline – and make the pre-92 employers pay for USS

UCU Pay, Equality and Workloads Ballot — 30 August to 19 October

 

Following the extraordinary End the Gender Pay Gap - protest in London, HE strike 2016USS dispute, our union now has an opportunity to unite the HE sector over pay. If activists get behind this fight in the way that we did around USS in Pre-92 we can build the union and show that we are a force to be reckoned with across both parts of the sector.

It may be old fashioned for some, but activists should be clear: our strikes are part of a class struggle over the future of Higher Education, and our members – and non-members around us, who joined to participate in it – recognise this basic fact. A recent survey of branches involved in the USS dispute found that those with the strongest left leadership that took the firmest position against retreat, were also the branches whose membership grew the most – in some cases by over 50% in three months.

A proper national pay fight would be unfinished business for the new young and older members, from PhD students to young administrators, researchers and teaching fellows, who joined UCU in their tens of thousands during the USS dispute. Close to the breadline and a long way from their pension, they staffed our picket lines from Day 1. A pay fight would also address the gender pay gap and the bitterness created by horrendous workloads which were highlighted in the USS strikes. Now is the time to take up their fight – over pay, casualisation, inequality and workload – and show that UCU is the union they deserve.

In Pre-92, with the USS pension debate closeted in the JEP over the summer, starting a pay campaign might appear a diversion. It is the opposite. If we take this opportunity seriously, a strong Get the Vote Out campaign over pay can do two things. It will make clear we expect the employers to pay any increased contributions to USS (rising to 3.7% by April 2020, i.e. a pay cut). It will be a dress rehearsal for Round 2 of USS campaign in the Autumn term should the JEP fail to move the position of the USS ‘deficit’.

In post-92 it can halt the crisis emerging over jobs and workloads arising from the market for student fees. There is a jobs massacre concentrated in Post-92 (London Met, Man Met, Westminster…) but also spreading to Pre-92 (Manchester, Liverpool…). Brexit looms over the market madness that sees superb Post-92 courses unfilled and lecturers sacked, while students flock to the Pre-92 down the road. This market madness means any grace is temporary, and no job is safe. The need for a pay fight that can unite the sector on our terms cannot be understated.

We must stand together, staff and students, to defend Higher Education as a public good, with staff paid properly, and pensions that won’t mean poverty in retirement.

Doorstep arguments for pay

  • We need to catch up. Our pay has fallen by some 14% against RPI since August 2008 – the last time we had a proper pay increase. Against CPI, which takes no account of housing costs – as if university staff did not pay rent or mortgages! – we have had a pay cut well over 10%. This is equivalent to working for free for more than a month. For the lowest paid, this scale of pay cut is the difference between making ends meet and living on credit and food banks.
  • We need to keep up. The present pay offer of 2% (with a slightly larger increase for the very lowest paid) represents a pay cut of between 0.2% and 1.2% against the ONS projections of inflation for August (CPI and RPI respectively).
  • In Pre-92, if USS cost-sharing is imposed, members of that scheme will be on a steep and costly slope to paying more. We will pay 0.8% more this April, rising to 2.4% in October 2019, and with 3.7% being paid from April 2020 onwards. A ‘mere’ 0.2% pay cut against CPI will be a 4% cut. Only if we fight over pay can we make the employers pay for their actions.
  • The employers can afford to pay up. For thirty years until 2008, universities paid ‘cost of living’ increases roughly coinciding with inflation. They recorded tiny surpluses – around £150m pa in total. After the government introduced £9K student fees, sector surpluses shot up, to the current £1-2bn pa. Using HESA figures for 2016/17, £1.1bn split equally between 420,000 staff is about £2.5K each. £2bn brings our pay back to 2008 levels. The money is there to meet the pay claim of 7.5% in full.
  • Not fighting over pay encourages market madness. The employers are spending their surpluses on speculative expansion in competition with each other. We are seeing the outcome of this speculation in the current crisis in post-92. Forcing them to pay staff properly would help curb this speculation – it would help us defend HE against the market madness.
  • Every vote counts. Whichever way members intend to vote, it is essential that every member participates. The Tories’ anti-democratic anti-union laws mean that 50% of members must vote for the ballot to have a legal effect. Even if members intend to vote No, make sure they vote.

Get the Vote Out, Starting Now

We need a ‘GTVO’ campaign in every branch to start as soon as possible. Start with a GTVO organising meeting for reps and members who want to get involved. Go through the arguments with members and plan a strategy. Ask members to focus on reminding colleagues in their own department. Ask members to inform the branch when they vote and keep an accurate list of who is still to vote. The main reason members don’t vote is simply because they forget to vote. So keep reminding them with regular communications. If they have lost their ballot paper they can ask for another one.

Get posters up everywhere across the college, and draft targeted messages to members – at least one a week reminding members to vote. Some teaching staff will get ballot papers sent to their department address, and may not pick them up until before the start of term. But they can vote earlier, if they ask for a replacement ballot paper sent to their home address.

Organise a branch meeting at the end of September at the start of the Autumn term, to prepare a Stage 2 mass campaign. Organise meetings in departments and buildings ensuring that members in off-site institutes are able to attend.

The vote closes on 19 October, which means paper ballots should be in the post by 16 October to be safe.

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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.

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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