UCU in ‘difficult position’ over 2 per cent pay offer response

University and College Union (UCU) members are leaving their annual congress with key questions about how to respond to low pay offers and job cuts seemingly still unresolved.

After receiving from employers a final pay offer of 2 per cent, some members were pushing the union to hold another national ballot on industrial action, despite the last two having failed to reach the threshold.

Others advocated for disaggregated ballots to be held, handing more power to stronger branches to take action but potentially risking a more fractured response.

Meanwhile, representatives from Goldsmiths, University of London – one of the institutions worst affected by the current financial crisis – were attempting to reignite plans to take the fight to the secretary of state.

Roger Seifert, emeritus professor of industrial relations at the University of Wolverhampton, said the UCU was in a “difficult” position over how to respond to the pay offer after its unsuccessful national ballot last year, which received a turnout of only 39 per cent – far below the minimum 50 per cent required by law.

Employers have defended the offer as being at the limits of sector affordability, given the number of institutions facing financial difficulty.

But Seifert said the offer “will cause a backlash from UCU members and other staff – worsening morale, highlighting the gap between vice-chancellors’ pay and others, and weakening recruitment and retention”.

“The UCU is in a difficult situation – there is a substantial minority (maybe 40 per cent) of members in favour of a single-issue fightback on pay,” Seifert continued.

Noting that the “UCU is not united behind its general secretary”, he said there is a “real variation across regions and institutions in terms of UCU strength and militancy”.

The motion presented by Goldsmiths at the meet-up in Harrogate called on the union to reignite plans to “open a dispute with the Secretary of State for Education over HE funding” that was agreed upon at least year’s conference, after little progress was made.

Another motion submitted by London Metropolitan University and the London regional HE committee also passed, which called for the union “to move urgently towards national industrial action, including a ballot where appropriate, to ensure that the fight against redundancies and job losses is taken up across the sector”.

Seifert argued that the motion to initiate a dispute with the secretary of state “has no legs” and “has been tried before with no luck”. “[It] distracts from the core business of collective bargaining over pay, and can become bogged down in legal issues on the nature of a lawful dispute.”

But Joe Newman, co-chair at Goldsmith’s UCU branch, disagreed that last year’s ballot should deter the union from pursuing further action, arguing that a national campaign over the sector’s finances could prove more popular than a battle over pay.

He said the dispute might have lacked enthusiasm last time because it “felt like trying to do the same thing again and get the same result”.

“Branches that were in dispute knew at a local level that ‘of course, we deserve better pay’, but in the list of priorities, obviously, retaining your job is the first one. Pushing for better pay conditions comes from that, but you’ve got to have a job to push for better pay and conditions,” he said.

There has been a “deepening of the crisis” since the last national ballot – with 13,000 jobs cut in the past year alone – and Newman argued that the Employment Rights Act, which came into effect this year, strengthens the case for national action because it means that unions maintain their industrial action mandate for a full year, rather than six months, after a ballot.

“If we do not have national action over the funding model, this is only going to get worse,” he said.

“If we cannot launch, or the union refuses to launch, a national dispute despite being voted on at two congresses, then we are just going to see more local disputes, more redundancies and more bitter fights that are going to disrupt another academic year of teaching.”

A UCU spokesperson said: “Our sector is under attack, and UCU delegates have come together to decide how we fight back. We leave congress more committed than ever to organise to protect jobs, and the very future of post-16 education.”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com