Counterfire UCU members respond to the HE redundancy crisis with a model branch motion to start a unified fightback

Universities across the UK are preparing to make savage cuts in jobs and programmes. The Guardian announced last week that: ‘Nearly one in four leading UK universities are slashing staff numbers and cutting budgets, with up to 10,000 redundancies or job losses.’

This is despite the fact that the sector as a whole made billions of pounds of profit in ‘happier’ times: surpluses that have been spent on senior salaries and new buildings rather than preparing for more challenging circumstances.

Massive redundancies have been announced at universities including Cardiff, Newcastle, Durham, Dundee and the University of East Anglia, with the last two recently announcing successful ballots for strike action to resist the jobs assault. As a spokesperson for Cardiff UCU told Counterfire, the plan to cut some 400 jobs, including in nursing, music and modern languages, is both ‘cruel and callous’.

The proposed cuts come as a result of a disastrous and unsuccessful attempt in the last fifteen years to introduce a market into Higher Education and have been exacerbated by the dramatic decline in overseas students on which some universities are especially dependent. 

Staff and students would be forgiven for thinking that their unions, particularly university staff organised in the University and College Union (UCU), would be mobilising to support branches under attack and, crucially, to organise a national campaign to defend university education. Sadly, however, UCU’s ‘Reclaim Higher Education’ campaign page doesn’t appear to have been updated since last summer and fails to mention the latest attacks on Higher Education. 

It is vital that branches are not left to fight alone and that all campus unions organise together to resist the decimation of our universities. An organising assembly and national march is one way to bring people together and to prepare for the coordinated action that will be necessary fully to confront university management and the government, which is refusing to act in defence of staff and students.

We urge branches and student unions to download and pass this model motion so that we can come together to resist this assault on universities.