By Left Horizons reporters
By ending up with their own staff balloting for strike action, the leadership of the University and College Union is enormously complicating the struggle of university and colleges lecturers – UCU members – for decent pay and conditions.
There is a huge degree of discontent among UCU members at the present time, with staff in several universities passing votes of no confidence in the General Secretary, Jo Grady. The marking and assessment boycott last term made little impact on recalcitrant employers, but it lost UCU members a lot of money.
Although the long-running dispute over pensions is seemingly won and a reevaluation of the scheme will take place, this will only benefit members who work in pre-1992 universities. The reversal in the higher pension payments will thereby supplement what is a poor pay offer. But for UCU members in post-92 universities, the pay offer from employers, with some minor additions, amounts to a cut in living standards alongside the rate of inflation.
A further five days of strike action were due to take place in the five days from September 25, but that strike may not now go ahead. With members having lost money and an element of “ballot fatigue” setting in – this is the third national ballot in a relatively short time – it is likely that UCU members will vote, reluctantly, to accept the poor pay offer on the table and prepare themselves for a wages battle in the future.
But what is complicating the whole picture – and unnecessarily, given the resources of the union – are the poor labour practices used by the UCU itself towards its own staff. Relations between staff, who are overwhelmingly members of Unite LE127 branch, and the UCU Senior Management Team, which includes the General Secretary, have reached an all-time low and staff are balloting to strike.
UCU Senior Management ignoring Congress decision
The issue involves the employment of two organisers to work on postgraduate researchers’ (PGR) rights. Post graduate students are a group of university employees who are often forgotten, but they some of the worst conditions and terms of employment of any UCU members, their jobs being very precarious and low-paid.
The two UCU organisers were specifically employed to service this section of workers and to be the spearhead of the ’PGRs as Staff’ campaign, which has been very successful.
But here is the issue: the two were given full-time contracts for 22 months, a period deliberately chosen to be just shy of two years, when their statutory employment rights, like redundancy payments, would have kicked in. A resolution was passed overwhelmingly at the recent Congress of the UCU, noting the success of the PGR campaign and calling for it to be expanded, including confirming the organisers onto permanent contracts.
Two fifths cuts in hours and wages
But although Congress decisions are supposed to be binding, the union senior managers have refused to do this. Instead, they have offered the two organisers 0.6 permanent contracts, in other words cutting their pay and hours by 40%. If this were to happen to successful lecturers, the UCU would be up in arms about it.
Relations between the UCU branch of Unite and the union management is very tense. The LE127 branch used to be dominated by Regional Officials, who were seen as a ‘moderating’ influence. But the branch has more recently become dominated by staff on lower grades. As a result of the new-found militancy of LE127, the UCU senior management have broken the single union recognition agreement with Unite by recognising the GMB union for Regional Officials.
UCU organisers believe the whole dispute is unnecessary, given that the union easily has sufficient funds to follow the instructions of congress and employ the two PGR staff on a permanent basis. These two workers have only accepted the 0.6 contracts “under duress”, but their union branch is balloting for industrial action to have them employed on their old terms and conditions, but permanently.
There are nearly two hundred members of the Unite branch, including regional and national UCU staff and although the result of the ballot will be not known for a couple of weeks, there is an expectation that there will be a big majority for strike action.
“As a staff union, we are acting to protect the jobs of our members”, a spokesperson for Unite LE127 branch told the Times Higher Education Supplement. “Our decision to speak publicly about this, and to ballot for industrial action, is one we do not take lightly. It is a last resort.”
