Author: Sean

Ten Reasons to Vote YES

1. It is a vote against pay and job cuts

A YES vote strengthens the hand of your elected negotiators and your union in the face of a set of employers making massive cuts in pay and jobs.

Over the last two years, in the absence of a national ballot mandate, university employers have imposed real-terms pay cuts and made mass redundancies across the sector. 

The government has sat on its hands. It has let the market rip, setting university against university, course against course and colleague against colleague. The latest White Paper continues with more of the same, increasing home student fees and targeting overseas students.

If you don’t vote, or vote NO, you are voting for the status quo, i.e. ever-decreasing real-terms pay and working conditions, together with ever-increasing casualisation, insecurity, redundancies, and, thereby, growing workloads for those who remain in employment.

2. We need a UK-wide mandate to stand together

Local fights have been strong. 

Notably, Dundee UCU’s strike action and wider campaign caused the Scottish Parliament to bail out the university and prevent 632 job losses (around a third of staff) last year. 

But we cannot stop a generalised attack on our sector by behaving as if local attacks are just a series of exceptions, and Dundee University management has now returned with the same job cut demand.

We need a UK-wide agreement to stop redundancies.

3. Staff pay has been falling as a proportion of expenditure

There is money in the sector. But it is not going to staff.

The government’s Higher Education Statistics Agency website reveals a dramatic fall in the proportion of university budgets spent on staff costs. 

Plotting staff costs reported to HESA as a proportion of expenditure yields the following graph.

Either way, there is money in the sector to increase pay and save jobs.

4. Pay is falling sharply in real terms

As a result of below-inflation pay offers, pay rates (the value of each scale point in spending money) are now some 30% lower than 2008. 

But the cut in rates of pay has become sharpest over the last four years. Since 2021, against RPI, staff on points 26 and above – the majority of UCU members – have had their pay cut by 15%. See Figure 2.

We are witnessing the steepest fall in the value of university staff pay in post-war Britain.

The Cost of Living Crisis is ongoing.

A 15% cut in pay is equivalent to working 55 calendar days a year (nearly two months) for the university for free, this year, and every year into the future. See Figure 3 below.

Pay cuts are pension cuts. So if our pay is cut by a third, our pension contributions are cut accordingly, and so is our pension in retirement.

Were the joint union demand on pay met, it would begin to turn this around, reducing the four-year pay cut to ‘only’ 9.5% in the worst case. For the lowest paid, it would return them to where they were four years ago.

An alternative way of visualising pay cuts is in terms of unpaid calendar days. This is the number of days a year the employer is not paying you, in 2021 money. 

This year’s pay cut translates into a 3% cut against RPI, equivalent to 1 scale point on all grades, or requiring staff to work for the employer for free for 1.5 weeks for the rest of your employment. 

With inflation expected to remain high, the imposed pay rate of 1.4% in Higher Education is far worse than in any other public sector comparable profession. For example, school teachers have been offered 4%, and in August it was reported that average pay increases are 4.7% excluding bonuses.

5. It is not “jobs vs. pay” – the employers are cutting both

This cut in pay has not stopped redundancies. We are not seeing savings spent on new jobs! 

We are seeing escalating cuts in pay and mass redundancies in our sector. 

UUK claim publicly “the sector” is in crisis. 

Some universities are definitely struggling – and UCU says that should lead to targeted intervention from government(s). But Figure 1 shows this is only part of the picture.

Where is the money going? 

• Many universities are investing heavily in speculative ventures, such as overseas campuses, while making job losses.
• New expansion over the last two years includes Leicester De Montfort in Dubai, Newcastle in Malaysia, and Sheffield Hallam in London.
• Although rising borrowing costs may be a factor, official HESA data shows the biggest rise is in “other operating expenses”, which have jumped up by 50% in the last two years.

Universities are still splashing the cash – just not on staff.

This is not a question of “jobs vs. pay”. The employers are cutting both.

6. We need a UK-wide agreement on redundancies

This is why UCU is calling for ‘a national agreement to avoid redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines.’ 

Whereas the detail of this is subject to negotiation, there are at least three clear steps the employers could agree to:

1. a moratorium on redundancies for a set period of time,
2. a nationally-agreed set of minimum standards of consultation when redundancies are made, in particular covering precariously-employed (‘casualised’) staff, and
3. a joint demand to government to address genuine financial crises, including bailouts of universities in deficit and to make progressive changes to the funding system.

It seems obvious that a combination of all three is needed, starting with a halt to redundancy programmes.

7. We need to stop #HiddenRedundancies

Escalating attacks on permanent jobs have been accompanied by an assault on precariously-employed posts, especially where staff are employed in teaching. These jobs have had many titles over the years, commonly called ‘HPLs’ (hourly-paid lecturers), ‘Associate Lecturers’, or ‘Visiting Lecturers’. These posts have one thing in common: the employer thinks they can dismiss them without notice when student numbers fall. And they often do exactly the same work as a lecturer with a permanent contract.

UCU refers to the redundancies of these ‘casualised’ staff as ‘hidden redundancies’. Commonly, employers fail to treat such staff lawfully, either because they select them unfairly for redundancy, or fail to consult them or the union at all. Often it arises by simply ‘failing to offer’ new work at the start of term, and then ‘offering them 0FTE’ or dismissing them. When the sector was expanding, such treatment was potentially unlawful bad practice (anyone with 2 years’ service can claim unfair dismissal and breach of contract). But this practice has escalated as employers have made redundancies of other staff. Partly because of this cavalier treatment, exact numbers are difficult to obtain, but they could be as high as 10,000 a year.

In the 2019-20 strike, UCU managed to get ‘casualisation’ onto the national bargaining agenda with UCEA for the first time. This was a major step forward. In some universities, like UCL and Open University, branches were able to use the UK-wide strikes to improve conditions. But the employers are not negotiating improvements, and are slashing jobs instead.

It is essential for staff with permanent contracts to defend colleagues in insecure positions. In 2022, Roehampton University sacked permanent staff and replaced them with fixed-term staff to teach out  courses. If we don’t fight to secure the casualised, we allow the employer to casualise the secure. The employer will divide and conquer.

When we stand together we can win. Two days into Dundee UCU’s strike, the employer was forced to reinstate insecure staff it had summarily dismissed. Newcastle UCU demanded no redundancies of casualised staff as part of their strike, and won.

A national agreement to avoid redundancies must not exclude casualised staff. We have to make opposition to #HiddenRedundancies a central part of our campaign. First we need to win the ballot, and that means reaching out to casualised members everywhere.

8. We need to defend existing national agreements

Across the sector we are seeing serious attempts to undermine UK-wide agreements. 

These have accelerated with the employer’s “crisis narrative” and are often combined with threats to jobs. Recent attacks include

• Downgrading: Introduction of staff on Ac1 to work as lecturers, course leaders on Ac2, etc. 
• Workload: Attempts to compel staff to teach in the summer 
• Pensions: Outsourcing all staff and place them outside their pension schemes
• Core terms: Threats to stop the principle of automatic incremental progression (undermining the Pay Framework Agreement)

Although these attacks are driven locally, once one university succeeds in doing this, the precedent becomes a threat to others. 

UCU is saying enough is enough!

9. We stand with our sister trade unions

UCU is not challenging these attacks alone. 

UCU is balloting alongside UNITE and UNISON branches, who are also in dispute with UCEA over pay. They share the same concerns over redundancies and national agreements. We are joined by our sister union, EIS, in Scotland.

We know that we are stronger together. If we all get over the ballot threshold we can speak with one voice to stand up for our sector. 

So we call on every member to help us win the ballot.

10. We have not decided what action we will take – but we will do so democratically

This ballot asks questions on Strike Action and ASOS but does not specify the particular action UCU might ask its members to take. 

So members have reasonably asked, OK, but what action is planned? What is the strategy?

This is a very important question. We refuse to be put in the same position as in the 2023 MAB, when a slim majority of the UCU HEC failed to call the reballot mandated by Sector Conference, allowing the employers to wait out the action.

But of course, there are many different forms of action that could be undertaken.

In the first place, we should say to members, that any strategy has to be flexible depending on changing circumstances. But we should discuss options.

For example, the action we might take may depend on whether the other trade unions are successful in their ballots. If all of the unions are successful in getting a mandate, the unions could call on all trade union members to strike together and shut down the whole sector. Such a strike will no longer be seen as a ‘lecturers’ strike’, but a Higher Education shutdown.

During the campaign, we should debate what actions we think we should take. Ultimately this is always a question of what members are prepared to do.

Whatever we decide, we need to run the action democratically so that every participant has a say.

We may wish to escalate or step down at certain points. The crucial question is not just what we decide to do but also who gets to decide?

The UCU Solidarity Movement is thoroughly committed to the view that we need to have the maximum democratic accountability throughout any action we decide to take.

That is why we have organised open rank and file meetings of union members every week for the last five years since Covid lockdown (excepting Xmas)! We practice what we preach.

We think the best way for any union to be held accountable to its members is through mass direct member involvement and control, not just by passing motions. In 2018, UCU members in pre-92 universities demonstrated this principle when they reversed a sell-out of the USS dispute. 

Democracy is essential.

Watch: UCU reps in dispute on their strikes and the national ballot