On Budget Day, in Trafalgar Square, the UCU general secretary Jo Grady declared in front of 40,000 workers fighting for a pay rise, better working conditions and dignity:

“We have made a breakthrough. 35% was stolen from our pensions. UCU members have won it back. An end to zero-hour contracts in universities from August onwards, won by our members. A pay deal backed by movement on workload, precarious work, and inequality, all delivered by strike action and winning national ballots.”

Two days later, UCU members were lobbying the Higher Education Committee to reject the deal, and the HEC eventually decided that the so-called deal wasn’t even good enough to be put to members (thus agreeing with UNISON in HE).

What is going on? This is a summary of the UCU Left’s analysis of the deal that was put to members through an e-ballot between Wednesday and Friday last week, and KCL UCU delegates’ own report of the Branch Delegates Meeting and reconstruction of the HEC discussion.

Members have rightly pointed out that the e-ballot conflated two disputes, on pay and conditions (the so-called “Four Fights”) and on the USS pension scheme.

USS seems to be the bigger “win”. So let’s start with USS.

There has indeed been some movement on USS. Under pressure from sustained industrial action, and in the face of new financial circumstances and a revised valuation, UUK has agreed to look again at the valuation methodology, and to consult its member universities on a restoration of benefits. Yet to describe this as ‘a win’ is misleading.

1. UUK has expressed an intention to restore benefits by April 2024 but has not committed to so doing, and its member institutions have to agree to this policy before it is enacted;
2. UUK has agreed to seek an improved risk-management mechanism in the light of the open and long-term nature of the scheme, but has made no commitment to the preservation of benefits or to restraint on contribution increases should the scheme experience future adverse valuations; and
3. UUK has agreed to explore the options and costs of restoring the benefits that will have been lost to members of the scheme between April 2022 and April 2024 but has made no commitment to such restoration – this will depend on costs, and will be subject to veto by the universities belonging to the scheme.

All experienced trade union negotiators would argue that a condition of settling the dispute should be guarantees on benefits and contributions, and on the restoration of losses, and that these guarantees should be underpinned by the prior agreement of UUK’s member universities.

What about the Four Fights?

If UCU members in pre-92 universities have not won their pension back (yet), what about pay and conditions? Have UCU members really won “a pay deal backed by movement on workload, precarious work, and inequality”, including “an end to zero-hour contracts in universities from August onwards”, as the General Secretary proclaimed?

Let’s see what’s been agreed. The joint unions’ claim was for a pay settlement in excess of inflation (which is currently over 13%, so a 15% pay rise), a solution to pay inequality, an end to precarious contracts, and a national agreement that would end excessive workloads.

Pay

1.   UCEA has made no move to meet the demand for an award that both covers inflation and restores some of the losses over the last decade and a half. They have already unilaterally imposed what amounts to a 15% pay cut for this and next year.
2.   The proposed agreement to reconsider the single pay spine with the focus on ending pay compression on a no detriment basis potentially paves the way for even more pay inequality: a reduction in the number of salary points could slow down progress up the pay spine.

Casualization

1. UCEA has made a commitment to negotiate over precarious contracts next year (not this year) and to identify ‘concrete steps which employers are able to implement locally.’
2. It has also committed to recommend to its member universities ‘action on zero-hours contracts’. With a further caveat: a) contract types are for individual institutions to determine, and b) that there are reasons for having indefinite contracts with minimal hours.
3. UCEA will negotiate with the UCU over the recommendations to be made to their member universities but will come to no mandatory national agreement. Thus, the outcome will be dependent on the negotiations and/or industrial action that is organized at a local level by individual UCU branches.

Pay inequalities

1. There has been no national agreement to eliminate these pay inequalities, one that is mandatory on UCEA’s member universities.
2. UCEA has agreed to collect and analyze data on pay inequality by gender, ethnicity and disability, and the impact of this inequality on institutions’ employment strategies.
3. The outcome of data collection and recommendation will be dependent on the negotiations and/or industrial action that is organized at a local level by individual UCU branches.

Workloads

1. There is no agreement to overcome the problem of excessive workloads in the sector.
2. There will eventually be UCEA recommendations but the outcome in individual universities will be dependent on the negotiations and/or industrial action that is organized at a local level by individual UCU branches.

To sum up, there has been no binding agreement on any of the campaign’s objectives: headline pay, pay equality, workloads, or precarious contracts. 

The UCEA refrain that it cannot commit its individual member institutions is an admission that it knows that there are many that will do no more than acknowledge the existence of UCEA’s recommendations. For the first time in UCU’s history, our self-elected negotiators have agreed to include in the declared intentions caveats that allow unmanageable workloads where local circumstances dictate, and that openly proclaim the existence of objective local circumstances that would justify precarious or low-hours contracts.

What could be the consequences of this deal if UCU members accepted it?

It has long been the wish of the managements in many HE institutions either to break away from national bargaining, or for national bargaining to be ended. Though this would incur some additional HR costs for the management of their institutions, it would also enable them to recruit on the basis of regional or local conditions, to create their own pay scales, and to determine institution-specific conditions of service. The recommendation of the General Secretary to accept this so-called offer is either in ignorance of, or in unintentional collusion with, the drive to end national bargaining de facto.

In sum, there was no ‘offer’, just an imposed pay cut and the promise, without any binding commitments by the employers, of three working parties.

Democratic process

There is also something to say about process. Last week (during the Budget Day march), UCU HQ sent a badly formulated and misleading e-ballot (with a link to a 19-page document) to push members to vote yes to balloting members on this so-called offer. This was done without consulting the national negotiators and the HEC (as per UCU rules).

Last Thursday, the Branch Delegates Meeting strongly rejected the question as formulated in the e-ballot. 56% of delegates rejected and only 38% said yes to the e-ballot question (non-weighted).

Then after having refused to separate the question into two at the beginning, Jon Hegerty and Justine Mercer decided that they should separate the question and vote again (some branches abstained because they hadn’t consulted members on the separate questions).

Two things to note:

1. Every branch delegate who spoke criticized the way things are communicated and the poor quality of the survey, which was misleading members
2. UCU HQ have not shared the weighted results of the first vote. Why? Because it showed that branches overwhelmingly reject the UCU leadership’s strategy.

It’s true that a two-thirds majority of members who voted (about 30% of members) and a 52% majority of branches supported sending the so-called proposal to members for consultation.

At the HEC, however, the leadership said that they would not allow negotiators to comment on the ‘offer’ and HEC to decide on whether to recommend to reject or accept. This contradicts UCU policy decided at the sovereign body of Congress. Jo Grady said that since members don’t know about this policy, HQ would just ignore it. 

Given the content of the so-called offer and the continuing undermining of democratic rules and procedures on the part of the UCU leadership, it was the right decision on the part of the HEC to refuse to abdicate their power and not to allow HQ to send the so-called offer to members with the recommendation to accept.

 

What now?

We need to continue with our strike action to tell the employers: revise and resubmit! The focus now is on:

• making the last three days of strike action a success,
• pushing UCEA to make a proper offer,
• doubling our efforts to get the vote our in the reballot,
• starting to organize a marking and assessment boycott beginning in April
• creating or strengthening branch strike committees and passing motions to hold our leadership to account and take back control over our disputes.

In solidarity,

KCL UCU Executive

21 March 2023