UCU Congress saw victories for the left, but we must be ready to defend them against counterattack, argue Counterfire members in UCU

Delegates from UCU branches across the UK met last weekend in Glasgow for a three-day congress at a critical time for the union. Disputes in both higher and further education were high up the agenda. In fact, there were major questions of union democracy and strategy at stake.

Sandwiched between two days of Congress, where issues affecting the whole union are discussed, were separate one-day conferences for higher-education (HE) and further-education (FE) members, which discussed strategy for disputes in those areas.

A major faultline has emerged in the union between two visions of how to take the union forward. The view associated with the General Secretary (GS) Jo Grady, and the centre and right of the union, emphasises union density as a precondition for industrial action. The view associated with the left of the union emphasises building the union through involving members and in particular through action.

Background problems

This year’s Congress took place in the shadow of the HE disputes surrounding the USS pension scheme, on the one hand, and the so-called Four Fights (pay, workload, equalities, and precarity).

Before Congress, a majority in the union voted in an e-ballot to accept a pause in the action over the USS pension, after promises that, next year, pending a valuation, pension levels will be restored to the levels of last April.

But a dispute rumbles on in relation to the Four Fights and has entered a critical stage. Members rejected an offer which included another sub-inflation pay offer in the context of the worst cost-of-living crisis in generations, as well as terms of reference on the other three fights which are widely deemed inferior to an offer made in 2020.

Consequently, the HE sector is now in its first national Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) since the union’s victorious one in 2006. Even though this action is uneven across institutions and the sector as a whole, it has put real pressure on employers and their ‘degree factory’.

Many institutions are imposing punitive 100% pay deductions on those participating, and introducing mitigation strategies that threaten the academic integrity of degrees, like introducing Covid-era blanket measures to award marks for unmarked work or graduating students with no degree classifications.

Yet Congress met amid real anger about the way that the dispute has been run by the GS. Grady has consistently undermined or ignored decisions reached democratically by the union’s constitutional decision-making structures, from branches to the Higher Education Committee (HEC). Her allies have consistently argued that density in the sector is only one third and limits what we can expect to achieve.

Thus, branch delegate meetings called to inform HEC decisions were systematically undermined by the provision of simultaneous e-questionnaires with leading questions designed to get particular results, namely, demobilisation of the dispute. Most egregiously, the last-minute pause in industrial action communicated on a Friday night by the GS in March 2023 sowed division among activists. It was implemented with no recourse to the democratic structures of the union like the HEC and so last-minute that it left many floundering to prepare classes for the Monday.

The pause in action was followed by negotiations through ACAS that sidelined most of the elected negotiators and produced a deal on the Four Fights that the membership then roundly rejected, but which, to the annoyance of many, the GS tried to pass off as a historic win in a live broadcast.

The left ascendant

It was heartening therefore to see that Congress this year saw a number of significant victories for the left and the rank and file of the union, who challenged the GS’s record and strategic vision. In fact, the right in the congress won very little.

The first votes of the first day boded ill for the GS, as members voted to keep censure and no-confidence motions on the order paper. This defied attempts by Grady supporters to present any criticism of the GS as an attack on an employee of the union. As an elected official, Grady has a right to address congress and is not just any employee.

The tone was soon then set as delegates voted through an historic Stop the War motion calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops, for the UK government to stop arming Ukraine, to support protest by Stop the War Coalition and CND, and for a peaceful resolution to the war. A wrecking amendment from Leeds University was roundly defeated. It was most welcome that this motion was put high up the agenda to enable it to be debated and voted on unlike last year. Indeed, UCU is the first national union to take this position.

Congress also voted for important motions on Palestine, reaffirming UCU’s support for the boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign on Israel and against the conflation of antisemitism with legitimate criticism of Israel.

Democracy

While at times contested, these motions passed without much fanfare, even if delegates could be heard complaining that the chairing of the debates was not always impartial. But the tone and content of the discussion surrounding the motions of censure and no confidence in Grady were markedly different.

Despite this, it soon became clear that there was little substance to the GS’s defence. It was largely based on procedural claims that it was somehow unacceptable to criticise an employee of the union because of ‘legal risks’ for UCU as an employer. When Grady herself addressed Congress, raising her voice throughout her fifteen-minute long response (the cases for were limited to three minutes), she blamed the intransigence of the employers for lack of progress with the dispute. And though she briefly admitted mistakes had been made under her leadership, she avoided specifying what they were or what, if anything, she would do differently.

The performance was not enough to prevent her censure, but just about sufficed to prevent her being no-confidenced. This was a bad result for Grady, as a similar attempt failed on both counts last year at an HE Special Conference. Worse, FE speakers criticised Grady as much as HE ones.

Fightback

There were also several important motions passed on removing the cap on fighting fund payments for all members experiencing deductions (some punitively set at 100%) for participating in MAB, on forming strike committees, and on re-balloting over the summer in the HE disputes. The HE conference voted to set up a national strike committee but unfortunately this proposal was defeated at the full Congress. Solidarity with branches facing punitive deductions and a motion in favour of returning the student cap on admissions were passed. Delegates even passed a motion entitled ‘Kick capitalism out of HE’.

There was a strong feeling expressed in both the Congress and HE conference that the union’s use of electronic consultations which have cut across the democratic structures in place under the rules to consider forms of strike action, should cease. Strong support was given to branches such as Brighton, where management are using redundancies to attempt to break the union and where students are occupying the vice chancellor’s office in support of staff.

In addition to that, the FE sector conference backed plans to formally ballot around 150 FE colleges in the autumn in pursuit of the 2023/24 pay claim. This will be on a disaggregated basis and follows a recent e-ballot in which 87% of FE members voted for action on a 51% turnout.

Delegates also voted to call a national demonstration outside the Department for Education on one of the initial days of strike action, and to move to an aggregated ballot in January 2024 should our demands on pay and for a nationally binding agreement for FE not be met.

There was opposition to these proposals from the right who argued that they risked undermining the autonomy of branches to negotiate with their employers locally. Nevertheless, the motion was carried, highlighting that many delegates clearly understand both how the fragmentation of FE has led to a race to the bottom, and that there is an urgent need to go over the heads of both our employers and their negotiating body – the Association of Colleges – to directly press central government for more funding.

Oppression and contradictions

There was significant attention to questions of equality and struggles against oppression at Congress, including an overwhelmingly supported motion from the Black members standing committee, which noted that black critical voices have been marginalised in EDI (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion) discourse. EDI has been weaponised in industrial disputes and has depoliticised anti-racism, so resources need to be provided for branch reps to challenge the co-option of EDI in institutions.

However, accompanying and complicating this overall picture is an identity-politics approach that limits discussions around concrete strategy and tactics about how actually to achieve liberation. There was a paucity of discussion about how best to support both trans rights and women’s rights, and how counterposing these rights within the trade-union movement undermines both struggles. A motion worthy of further debate was in fact passed, calling for the creation of safe routes of entry and exit into sex work, even though it was clear from the discussion that the main driver of entry into sex work was financial poverty, not choice.

On the last day of Congress, the GS accused delegates of ‘misogynistic tropes’ in their criticism of her though there was no evidence of this. In reality, there were no instances of delegates using sexist, racist, homophobic or transphobic language. This weaponising of oppression can be unintentionally detrimental to the rights of the oppressed because it sows seeds of cynicism and anger.

The need for strategy

Despite the pitfalls, Congress felt like a step forward after several missteps that endangered the dispute. It was the first in-person congress following the pandemic, and it made a huge difference and was a fantastic experience on so many levels. There were a lot of first-time delegates and branches with young delegations which have been transformed in the current wave of action.

While the agenda was overly packed, it was now possible to challenge the chair, gauge the sense in the room, meet people, have real discussion and debate, and engage people on issues of wider importance. Fringe meetings were often fantastic. The Stop the War fringe meeting had fifty delegates at it and the Solidarity Movement meeting around sixty.

As we move on from Congress and back to our workplaces, there will be a need to translate the motions passed into policy. But there will also be a need to resist attempts by the GS to undermine them. The promise she’s already made to try to overturn the Ukraine motion passed at Congress at the next meeting of the NEC is a travesty and yet another example of the undemocratic tactics for which she was in fact censured.

We must therefore do all we can to defend the democratic decision-making of our union and the decisions made at Congress in order to shift the running of the dispute as much as possible away from the GS and into the hands of ordinary members, including setting up strike committees to lead future industrial action. Rather than allowing employers to sit us out, we must combine the MAB with mass public pressure to shame institutions imposing deductions on participating staff and awarding dodgy degrees to students.

We must also target strikes in a creative manner to affect graduations and to help us carve out time to get the vote out over the summer to show employers that we are serious. We must redouble efforts to get a mandate in FE and combine both struggles with those of other trade unions. We need to ensure that no one is left behind and that employers trying to impose harsh cuts on workforces and to victimise trade unionists, as at Brighton, are made to step back.

We must ensure students are on our side as their right to a quality education is placed under attack, at the same time as the financing of higher education is ever more imposed as a burden on generations of future students. As education as a whole comes under attack, we must defend it as a public good for the many, not the few.

SAVE BRIGHTON UNIVERSITY. STOP MASS REDUNDENCIES.
MARCH AND RALLY, 11AM, SATURDAY 10 JUNE, THE LEVEL.