I am writing as the chair of the national Recruitment, Organising ad Campaigns Committee (ROCC) in a personal capacity as I have some concerns about an imbalance in information coming from UCU Head Office to inform debate for the meetings you will be having in the run up to the Branch Delegates meeting on Tuesday 10th January. In the absence if any information having been circulated to every member by UCU about the rationale behind the HEC decision in early November as to why we voted for all out action in February, I would be really grateful if you could distribute it to all UCU members in order to inform the discussion.
As we return to campus after the winter break UCU members face some very big decisions.
We are now faced with a choice of how to take our present disputes forward, and the General Secretary’s planned strategy has been circulated widely.
However the decision of the Higher Education Committee (HEC) to propose indefinite action has certainly not been given such prominence. There has been implied criticism from the General Secretary that the HEC’s decision was made behind closed doors and didn’t reflect the ideas of members.
It’s important to restate that the decisions of the HEC were embargoed for weeks by head office on ‘legal’ grounds – that have still not been made clear, and were not kept under wraps by HEC members.
A statement by the elected National Negotiators has also been withheld.
Higher Education Committees members like myself have urged the General Secretary and head office time and time again to allow the decision made by HEC to be debated by branches in the weeks that followed the meeting. As it is stands, many branches will not have time to discuss any proposals ahead of the all important BDM.
So why did the HEC vote to support indefinite action? The answer is simple.
Many activists have been increasingly clear that the employers have waited out fixed periods of strike action in the last few years.
What we need to do in order to make progress with our demands is stop playing by the old ‘business as usual rules’ and actually start to fight to win – to do exactly what Jo Grady claimed she wanted to do – to ‘shut down the campuses’ in semester two, alongside a marking and assessment boycott (MAB).
This would put the maximum pressure on the employers without dragging the dispute out into the summer.
A significant number of UCU branches discussed and voted for indefinite and/or escalating strikes alongside MAB, and escalating strikes and MAB were clearly backed in members surveys and the BDM.
Of course all of us will fight to make any action named as effective as possible. But if we are honest with ourselves we know that blocks of five days, without a MAB, are simply not going to be enough to move the employers.
Unions like the RMT and CWU have fought heroically but it’s clear with the government in the wings their employers are going to sit out brief periods of action, and the same goes for ours. That’s why the CWU and RMT have seriously escalated their action and why even the Royal College of Nurses is talking about doing the same.
Instead of allowing the union to appear split in front of the employers (as reported by the Times Higher Education Supplement – THES) Jo Grady could have built on our successful action in November by leading the debate on how best to take the disputes forward.
Instead we get her ‘plan’ at the end of term and no serious ability for members to discuss and debate. Plus, we are in danger of losing the momentum we built up in November.
Now the BDM will hear only two options for a way forward, the General Secretary’s plan (which is less action than the employers rode out last year) without branches being able to put motions or alternatives if they wanted to.
The General Secretary continually dragged her feet in naming action in the last academic year. In fact she argued at one stage that we shouldn’t fight at all this academic year!
But our members are suffering now and the cost of living crisis shows no signs of easing.
It’s good that head office have done their homework this time around to find out exactly when the term dates are in every institution. They have identified seven clear weeks where strikes could hit the employers but are proposing action for just ten days within this ballot mandate and abandoning an early marking and assessment boycott.
Effectively, at the most generous assessment, we are putting off any attempt to bring the dispute to a head until the summer term, and unfortunately on previous experience, who knows if the General Secretary would be prepared to push the fight all the way even then?
The GS tells us that indefinite strikes are just for the private sector (and small groups of workers). It’s worth noting that thousands of barristers in the Criminal Bar Association recently took all-out action and won a 15% pay rise. But the main point is that massive escalation is necessary because the employers in every sector are only responding when strikes really hurt – a five day strike on the railways straight after action over Xmas has clearly pushed the rail bosses.
None of us want to be here. All of us would like the employers to realise that we deserve decent pay and conditions, and to listen to the overwhelming arguments regarding the health of the USS pensions scheme.
Talk of indefinite action can sound frightening. But it’s about the employers not being given the option of waiting us out and picking their time to go on the offensive by threatening redundancies or 100% pay docking at a time when it’s difficult for us to take collective strike action in response as teaching will have come to an end in most institutions.
The problem is that the reasoned cases being put forward by health workers, postal workers, firefighters and the rest are simply being ignored in order to make sure we all pay the price for the economic crisis gripping the country.
All the unions that have been taking action from postal workers to nurses in the RCN are being forced to escalate. We should learn the lesson and escalate now while our mandate is fresh and other workers are in the fight who we can co-ordinate with.
The decision of the HEC to call for indefinite action wasn’t a back room coup by ‘factions’. It was a reasoned response by activists from different political backgrounds to a problem we’ve all been trying to grapple with. Despite several request, the option for all out action wasn’t even allowed to be put to the last BDM.
The rules have changed, we have to fight to win. We have to take seriously issues of hardship – reaching out for solidarity from across the movement, building up branch hardship funds – but the best way to avoid protracted hardship is to force the employers to the table quickly.
And we’ve got to trust our members to make the decisions. Any extended action, whether a series of five days a month strikes or indefinite action, has to involve serous debates amongst branches and have a democratic expression.
That means that either the BDMs have to be democratised or we need an elected national strike committee as a matter of urgency. There are serious decisions that have to be made on a regular basis in conjunction with our members. Videos by the General Secretary are not a replacement for this.
We can win this dispute and continue to grow as a union in the process. But we have to realise the rules of the game have changed and we are going to need to throw everything at our employers in order to defend our members, our students and the future of higher education.
There are two meetings in the next couple of days to discuss the way forward ahead of the BDM I would encourage colleagues to attend:
Tonight
UCU Left meeting: For action that can win – shut down the campuses! Wednesday 4th January, 7pm
Zoom registration:
Contributors include:
Maria Chondrogianni, Vice Chair HEC & Mational INCHES Negotiator;
Deepa Driver, Vice Chair HEC & National INCHES and USS Negotiator;
Saira Weiner, NEC & Chair of Recruitment, Organisation and Campaigns Committee.
and
Tomorrow
Hosted by the UCU Solidarity Movement
The Big Debate
Thursday 5 January 2023, 7pm
Register: bit.ly/PreBDM2023
An urgent debate has opened up in our union about the kind of action we need in the Higher Education disputes.
The UCU has called a branch delegates meeting (BDM) on 10 January. This will be an important meeting as branches will be asked to give their opinion on different options for action in the new year, including indefinite action as voted for by the union’s Higher Education Committee in November and a different plan put forward by the General Secretary Jo Grady.
Activists and members need an opportunity in advance of this meeting to ask questions, raise concerns and discuss what strategy we need to win the disputes. Join the debate.
In addition the following articles on the issue of all our action are well worth reading
A Guide For Reps: Questions Resulting From the General Secretary’s Video
https://bit.ly/GuideForReps
For action that can win – shut down the campuses!
https://uculeft.org/for-action-that-can-win-shut-down-the-campuses/
How to Stop a University: The Case for Indefinite Strike Action
https://notesfrombelow.org/article/how-stop-university
In solidarity
Saira Weiner, branch secretary, LJMU UCU
NEC Rep for NW Region
Chair of ROCC
ljmucu.wordpress.com 
Leave a comment