The UCU higher-education sector can win a mandate to strike now with determined mobilisation

The UCU ballots in the higher-education sector over pay, pensions and conditions are entering their final phase with the leadership urging members to post their ballots by this Friday (14 Oct) to ensure delivery by 21 Oct. The stakes are high with the prospect of a national strike across all universities in the UK. If we fail to meet the threshold of 50% then we face the prospect of a 3% rise, meaning effectively a 7% pay cut, as well as acceptance of the daylight robbery that took place last year on our pensions. The workload, gender inequality and casualisation issues will remain unresolved.

It is imperative therefore that we use these last few days to rustle up as many voters as we can. Every vote in every institution will count towards the overall total. Every ‘yes’ vote for action will increase the fear at the heart of university management that they will be faced with industrial action on an unprecedented scale.

If we get the result, then we need to strike hard and the sooner the better. Waiting till next year will demoralise and demobilise activists who have built up a head of steam during the campaign to get the vote out. The branch-level networks built during this campaign need to be consolidated and expanded. Pausing will not enable that.

Strike action is the winning strategy 

There is also an argument that the killer weapon in our arsenal is the marking boycott, so all energies should be put into that. However, just focussing on a marking boycott alone is an untried strategy. It is the combination of marking boycotts with strike action, or the threat of strike action, that delivered at Liverpool University, seeing off management’s redundancy campaign. It was also this combination that worked in a number of branches over the summer this year. It was strike action that ensured we retained our guaranteed benefit pensions in 2018.

In addition, strike action unifies branches across all job types, academic, research and professional services, whereas marking boycotts rely on a small number of staff holding the line. This can be difficult when faced with rogue managements like we saw at Queen Mary University, London during the summer where 100% of salary was deducted from some staff for a month, until a deal was struck. We need to be ready to move into strike action the moment such threats are made.

Strikes can also galvanise student support. We are already receiving messages of support from students, and the prospect of a lively student movement, linked to the cost-of-living crisis more generally, is higher this year than in previous years.

If we strike, we will be joining thousands of others, including our colleagues in FE, as well as potentially postal workers, rail workers, teachers and nurses, in what could be the largest strike wave this country has seen since the early 1970s.

We have a few days left to scoop up every vote we can and deliver the biggest blow possible to university managements across the UK. This is just round one, and if we get the vote we need, then we must ensure prompt, effective action that can win.