Editorial: Winning the ballot on our terms

In UK Higher Education right now working conditions are bad. Between 2023 and 2025, at least 90 UK HE institutions have undertaken redundancy programmes, resulting in the loss of at least 20,000 jobs. It is urgent now that UCU members serve as a drive to ensure the UK government takes decisive steps to protect the sector, moving away from the market-driven and xenophobic measures that have characterised recent policy. 

Union members are fighting back with at least seventeen live disputes concerning casualisation, workload, and redundancy, and by voting for a precedent-setting mandate to launch a trade dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over sector funding. In this bulletin, we’ve brought together reports from Rank and File members involved in these disputes. We want to get a clearer picture of how the crisis is unfolding on the ground, and where the fight-back is developing. 

In response to the rapid degradation of working conditions, the joint university unions (JNCHES - Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff) have launched a dispute in relation to the current negotiating round on pay and pay-related matters. Members of all university unions are being balloted on whether to take industrial action in support of this dispute, which concerns pay and conditions, and seeks to defend and enforce existing national agreements and prevent redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the sector.

The national agreements referred to in the ballot include the Post-92 Contract, JNCHES Framework Agreements and HE2000. These agreements provided frameworks for fair workloads, for pay-scales that enabled equal pay for equal work and clear progression opportunities, and for the enforcement of the rights of casualised workers. These are rarely being followed, and need updating and strengthening to address the issues we face in the 2020s.

Meanwhile, on redundancies, the claim calls for UCEA to undertake further joint work with the sector unions to avoid redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the sector, and to lobby the government for a sustainable long term funding settlement for the sector.

But Rank and File members of the unions are having complex feelings about this ballot. In branches across the UK members are expressing concern about how the claims of this dispute address the dire state of the sector. There is a sense that this dispute is divorced from the urgency of live local disputes fighting on related issues. There is a worry that the claims do not demand enough from our employers and their representative body. There has also been little collective reflection on industrial strategy, and few opportunities to learn from recent rounds of UCU strikes in the sector.

Instead of retreating from the dispute, now is the time to determine how it unfolds. During the ballot we have the opportunity to shape the current dispute, and get in place both the emergency and long-term restitution and planning needed for a sustainable HE sector with fair and just working conditions. 

To realise this opportunity we need to equip our negotiators to enter dispute negotiations from a position of maximum strength: a robust claim, clear red lines, and mass mobilisation of members committed to industrial action.

There is a recent history of active, successful rank and file organising amongst union members in the sector. An organised rank and file, working within and across their branches, secured wins for USS pension holders in 2018, local agreements on a ‘Corona Contract’ to protect the jobs of casualised staff during COVID lockdowns, and a mandate for a sector-wide dispute with the Secretary of State in 2025. Building on this history, rank and file members have come together to effect the direction of the potential 2025-2026 dispute. 

We have put together a template motion for branches to call on employers and unions to act in the interests of all university workers. 

The motion makes clear members’ red lines in what a sector-wide agreement needs to include if we are to see material improvement to pay and pay related matters: robust, enforceable national demands on job security, workload, and casualisation; nothing short of a full moratorium on redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines pending the achievement of a sustainable long term funding settlement for the sector. 

If in the process of the current dispute UCEA and its members are not able to co-ordinate action to address the sector-wide degradation of pay and conditions, the next step is to take this trade dispute to the person that can, the Secretary of State for Education. For now, we as rank and file members of university unions have a significant opportunity to win the conditions we need.