The UK-wide ballot on pay and redundancies was announced this week. Ballot papers will go out on 20 October. All five trade unions are in dispute, and, in an unprecedented step, the unions are coordinating their ballots.
This dispute is about far more than pay. At stake are our jobs, our national agreements on workload, teaching and research, and the future of Higher Education itself.
Employers are pushing through job cuts and course closures at an unprecedented rate — roughly 1,000 jobs a month are disappearing, many hidden in ‘non-contract renewals’ or dismissals without redundancy payments.
HEC and our negotiators have been clear. We need to fight on a UK-wide basis to put HE on the political map. But if we were to only fight on pay, we would risk abandoning members whose jobs, courses and disciplines are under immediate threat.
The dispute that all the unions have signed up to with the employers is on the following grounds:
- A pay uplift that is at least RPI + 3.5% or £2,500, whichever higher, on all pay points;
- The protection of national agreements relating to terms and conditions of employment, including the 2004 framework agreement, the Post-92 contract for Post-92 institutions, and HE2000;
- A national agreement to avoid redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the sector.
We need to fight for a fully-funded sector, we need to fight for a Higher Education Sector that is meaningful and relevant to the lives of millions, we need to defend our members’ standards of living, and we need to fight to defend jobs in the here and now.
There is money for the sector. But Government funding is increasingly coming with strings, like the Government’s ‘Defence Universities Alliance’ (sic) announced this week. Meanwhile, UKRI research funders like the NIHR and MRC are cutting research centres. The UCU’s failure to do anything other than private lobbying of MPs has shut union members out of the national debate.
We need to win this ballot to put our members back in the driving seat in the national debate about what universities are for in the 21st Century.
Pay
We have seen our pay cut by nearly a third since 2008. The impact of the imposed pay “offer” of 1.4% is to cut pay in real terms by 3% this year. This will reduce the value of pay by the equivalent of 11 calendar days (or 1.5 weeks) just this year alone. We are being required to work for free, for 1.5 weeks each year for life.
UCU members, such as research assistants starting out, increasingly can’t afford to pay their rent. Part-time teaching staff are relying on other jobs to survive. And many of our support staff colleagues are just about surviving on little more than the minimum wage. It is no wonder that all five unions are outraged.
Agreements
The employers are attacking jobs and driving up workloads of all those who remain. That requires a full-frontal assault on the English and Scottish national agreements in post-92 universities. We are also seeing attacks on the Pay Framework Agreement of 2003. The employers organisation, UCEA, refuses to call on its own members to abide by agreements that it signed up to.
Defending jobs
The third demand is for a new national agreement to defend jobs. This will need developing, but it has at least two aspects:
- Redundancy avoidance. Two years ago, many employers rushed to make redundancies. Students voted with their feet. Cutting jobs does not increase income but risks a vicious cycle. University managements should spend reserves to defend jobs, renegotiate loans, and call on Government to invest in Higher Education properly.
- Minimum standards. A brief survey of universities where redundancies are being considered right now reveals a wide range of different policies and standards. We should demand high standards of process and fairness, longer and meaningful consultation processes, proper redeployment support, better protection and enhanced redundancy pay.
In some cases, university redundancy consultation standards are so low they are a national scandal. In many universities last year, managers dismissed precarious staff by announcing that courses would be closed. But where staff have more than 2 years’ service this would be automatically unfair at an employment tribunal. That fact does not appear to have even registered with HR departments across the UK!
At Dundee and Newcastle, because members went on strike to defend jobs, and the branches refused to stand by and let casualised members be sacked, the union branches successfully reversed these redundancies. We need a UK-wide campaign against so-called ‘hidden redundancies’ as part of our campaign.
The next few weeks is an important opportunity for our union to organise to flesh out the kinds of demands that we need to see in such an agreement. Taking action together on a UK-wide basis makes it harder for employers to attack jobs
It is important to understand the employers’ behaviour over the past few years. When we in UCU took strike action and marking boycotts, the employers did not try to make mass redundancies. The turning point was the unnecessary defeat imposed on the 2023 campaign by the General Secretary and her faction of the leadership. Members who had bravely held the MAB action on over the summer in the face of 100% or 50% pay deduction threats found themselves waited out by employers who knew the union would not be able to keep a legal mandate to continue the boycott by the start of the next term.
It is no accident that this defeat was a green light for employer offensives on jobs in branch after branch. Demobilised and angry, union activists went from having to sustain tough indefinite action to employers who saw their chance to ‘restructure’ by making mass redundancies. Many members have lost their jobs and swathes of expertise and educational provision have been lost.
At the latest count, before the term has even started, thirty-three union branches are currently in local disputes, mostly against job losses. Edinburgh has been out all week.
At Newcastle, a major threat of redundancies was withdrawn after 44 days of strike action. Dundee was also immensely successful in stopping redundancies by striking and lobbying the Scottish Parliament. But of course those branches’ wins will not be permanent if the employers are allowed to regroup and hit back. Other brave campaigns at Cardiff, Sheffield, Liverpool Hope and Liverpool branches have also scored significant wins through strike action, benefiting from the wins at Dundee and Newcastle.
Employers are increasingly finding there are other costs to not resolving disputes. Many have found student recruitment nosedive after cuts. Newcastle was forced to pay £2.4m in compensation to students. For every win, there are setbacks, but these battles show that members will fight — and can win — when there is a clear strategy.
But we cannot challenge the cuts by fighting branch by branch. A UK-wide dispute, backed by multiple unions taking action together, is the only way to match the scale of the crisis.
There does need to be a serious campaign to explain what kind of industrial action can be impactful and the difference of multiple unions in Higher Education striking together can have. We also need a democratic debate over how to run the dispute, where the decisions of members are respected.
Density and member engagement are strongest in those branches that have opposed redundancies with serious industrial action. Seeking a UK-wide agreement over job losses with UCEA is a new idea to members – there needs to be a campaign that makes this real.
That work should start now. This is not just about pay. The stakes for Higher Education are too high. The lessons of the branch wins is that the membership will respond valiantly if there is a clear strategy that aligns with their most pressing concerns.