WTF is going on in UK higher ed, strikes edition (again)

for confused non-Brits wondering why everyone is yelling

Last week, I wasn’t on strike because I was at a conference in Canada, but thousands of faculty and staff at 150 UK universities were. UK staff (note: “staff” in UK higher ed encompasses faculty, postdocs, PhD students, librarians, research admin staff…) have been on strike on and off since 2018, so you can imagine my surprise when my plane touched down and I saw a million texts in our union group chat. Long story short, the national union had called a vote on proposals in our dispute. Well, kind of. A bit. I’ll get to that in a moment.

In amongst trying to figure out WTF was going on while barely awake in a different time zone, members overwhelmingly voted “yes” in…whatever the vote was. And then the Higher Education Committee, the elected union body that actually decides what we do in any dispute, decided to instead vote “no.” Hell has spewed forth past the brimstone gates, and there is currently a lot of sludge oozing about on the internet, spitting sparks at anyone who gets too close.

I spent too much conference time attempting to make sense of it all, mostly for my own sake (as the national comms team keeps saying, this is “my” union), and now I am jetlagged and still trying to make sense of it, but I appreciate this is likely especially confusing for folks who don’t work in the UK but who have expressed solidarity as we’ve fought for fair pay and working conditions. So, without further ado: what may be going the fuck on in UK higher ed, (another) strikes edition. For any UCU members reading this, I am a union member, unaffiliated with any faction, who just wants a damn pay raise.

I don’t know about the “and proud” part, but, yes.

Can you quickly bring me up to speed on the disputes?

Sure thing. If you want a longer version, I wrote that here.

Short version: back in January, the University and College Union (UCU), the national union that represents most research and teaching staff at UK universities, called 18 days of strike action in February and March. The first several of these went ahead before union leadership unilaterally called a pause in late February to make space for further negotiations with employers.

So what happened last week?

On Wednesday, March 15, UCU announced that enough progress had been made in negotiations to ask for members’ input. Members were informed of where offers stood on both our pay and pension disputes via an hour-long podcast and transcript (more on that comms strategy in a minute) and were then asked to vote in a single-question poll. The question offered a yes/no option on whether members supported pausing the strikes for purposes of the national union consulting membership more broadly on the proposed offers.

Members had two days to vote—both of which, I should point out, were strike days, during which many people were not checking their work emails because that’s how strikes work. Over those two days, many branches held emergency “WTF” meetings. On Friday evening, UCU announced that 36,000 members had voted with “over two thirds” having voted “yes.” They did not provide more specific numbers. The UCU Twitter did publish specific numbers from the branch delegate meeting, though they either deleted them or I am incapable of successfully scrolling back through their feed. In short, though, branch delegates got asked two separate questions—do you want to consult on the proposals/do you want to continue strike action—and voted yes on both.

At the end of the day, though, the Higher Education Committee (HEC) decision is what stands, and they decided not to pause strike action—but also not to consult with members on the proposals.

That’s a lot to have happen in two days. Frustration at the short timeline aside, why are people mad?

This is complicated, but most folks are mad at one (or more) of three entities:

1. the national leadership

2. the HEC

3. whoever designed that goddamn poll

I am mad at two of three, just to put my cards on the table. Leadership, who may have also designed that goddamn poll, has alternated between being deliberately obfuscating and incredibly patronizing. HEC, in my view, did the best they could to judge the tenor of members’ feelings in the face of polling data that was impossible to interpret.

Let’s start with number 3. As any marginally competent social scientist will tell you, UCU’s poll was double-barreled. It asked two questions in one: do members want to be consulted on the proposals, and do they want to pause the strikes.¹ For many people, the answers to these two questions were completely different, especially given that many members felt negatively about the last strike pause (which was decided unilaterally). They were for me. For others, the proposals on pay and pensions (more on those in a minute) were not good enough, and so no consultation was necessary—back on the pickets, no change. The bottom line is that there was no way to know simply by looking at the poll results. UCU wrote a question that could have reasonably been interpreted, and was in fact interpreted by many people discussing it online, in multiple ways. Put differently, the fact that two-thirds of members voted “yes” doesn’t mean anything because there’s no way of knowing what they actually thought they were voting “yes” on.

You may see discussion online about the “undemocratic” nature of HEC’s decision in light of the poll results—after all, membership did technically vote “yes” two to one. But this critique misses the point entirely, because we don’t know what people voted “yes” on. We also don’t know whether mostly scabbing members voted, though this seems probable given who is checking their emails on a strike day. Regardless, just in case you think this is pie-in-the-sky academic methodology talk, i.e., maybe everyone did interpret the question in the same way, results from the branch delegate meeting where the question was in fact disaggregated show different opinions on both parts. It may be worth pointing out that the question was only disaggregated after the initial result at the meeting wasn’t “yes,” but “no.”

There have been a lot of internal communications and reports from HEC members, made available to union membership generally but not for wider public dissemination, that make clear there are a lot of shenanigans here. To sum them up, I’ll just note that I find it very interesting that the spread and number of strike days, along with the character of the offers themselves, are very similar to what the general secretary pushed for back in January and that HEC voted down. Interesting, isn’t it, how we’ve ended up here anyway.

Okay, so people are upset at procedure. But what about the offers? Are they good offers, even if the way that they were presented was bad?

In a word, and contrary to everything put out by the union’s strangely corporate communications strategy so far: no.

I listened to the godsforsaken podcast, because union leadership refused to put out a quick bullet-pointed overview of what employers had proposed. Here are some very brief, hopefully accurate notes based on that listening.

Pensions offer: The basics of this are that employers “intend” to restore the massive cut to pensions on the USS scheme that was pushed through in April 2022, resulting in some members losing up to 40% of their retirement income. The “intention” component is because the scheme is being re-valued. Progress, then, is employers noting that the prior valuation, done at the height of COVID-19, was inaccurate and agreeing to at least let a re-valuation go forward. There are also aspects here of instituting inflation protections, reducing individual contribution amounts, etc.

If agreed to, this offer would be signed off on September, and the cuts would be reversed in April 2024 (again, contingent on the results of the new valuation).

I’ll be transparent here: I could not care less about the pension discussion. I know it matters to a lot of people, but those who are loudest about it tend to be securely employed, senior, and closer to retirement—all things that mean they actually lost less in the cut than younger, more precariously employed people. I firmly believe that retirement for the non-independently wealthy in my generation is a farce, and no change in the pension scheme will fundamentally undo that fact. Others will point out that relatively large pensions in higher ed make up for low salaries in the UK, but I’ll let you in on a secret: the solution here is not to defer income, but to pay everyone more now.

Moreover, and more importantly for those who do care about the pension discussion, enormous chunks of our sector aren’t part of the pension scheme, including staff on temporary contracts, PhD students, and many people who work at post-92 institutions. (Translation for those outside the UK: these are former polytechnics that became “real” universities in 1992 but are still under-valued in every sense of the word.) The victory cannot only be here, with so many of our comrades left out to dry on the issues that do affect them—like getting paid more now.

Pay offer: Most basically, employers’ current pay offer is a 5–8% pay increase across the board, with the largest increases occurring for those making the least. This is the same offer that was on the table in January, and which membership decided wasn’t good enough, hence the strikes. Employers insist they cannot increase pay any further. Meanwhile Nottingham is building a fifth campus downtown and vice chancellors took home more money last year than ever before. I digress.

The pay offer also includes an end to involuntary zero-hours contracts starting in August 2023. For other kinds of casual contracts—hourly paid contracts, fixed-term contracts, teaching assistantships, PhD pay—the only guarantee is for “further negotiations,” which would conclude by February 2024. A similar timeline has been set for agreeing national guidance for universities on workload management, as well as for negotiations on sector-wide benchmarks and audits surrounding gender, race, and disability pay gaps.

Put simply, the only concrete win here is an end to zero-hours contracts employers cannot claim are voluntary. The pay increase is not nothing, but it still amounts to a pay cut after a real-term fall in pay of 25% since 2009, and it’s under the rate of inflation for the last fiscal year alone. All of the rest is handwaving and hedging. It’s shockingly little to show after five years of on-and-off strike action, though perhaps it’s unsurprising coming out of negotiations where elected union representatives for casualized staff, disabled staff, and BAME staff were excluded from the bargaining table.

What’s next?

Woof, my friend. There is one more day of strike action this week (tomorrow, Wednesday the 22^nd), and in a few weeks we’ll have the results of a reballot seeking to authorize more action. This would most likely take the form of a marking and assessment boycott (read: no grading) at the end of the academic year, though given the chaos at the national level over the past few months, “most likely” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. That’s assuming, of course, that a majority of members vote to continue action, though I think that assumption is reasonable. Despite everything that’s been going on, there’s a sense that stopping now would mean no possible movement from employers on any issue in the future. And so we flail along.

Regardless of what you think about the national union—and I think my opinion is quite clear—regular members are still out on the picket lines, and they will need support when this month’s paychecks are doled out. You can donate to the national fighting fund here, and you can continue to stand behind the folks actually doing the work. I’ve griped a lot about the union’s communications strategy, which on any given day is somewhere between style-no-substance and boneheaded, and especially about the repeated line “this is your union,” which serves to distance leadership from the rank and file. But there is an inkling of truth in that line: the rank and file are the ones fighting this fight. Not securely employed leaders. Not the general secretary, who isn’t even employed in higher ed and has been obstructionist at every turn. Do what you want with the national union. But do, please, support us.

1. Some have pointed out that this is actually three questions, since there are two proposals, one on pensions and one on pay/casualization/etc.