Higher education in crisis – what now for UCU?

As universities around Britain declare large scale cuts and redundancies, UCU member Grant Buttars unpicks the crisis and the union response.

Higher education (HE) is in crisis, not just a small crisis but one on a scale I’ve not seen in my 23 years of working in the sector, with mass redundancies across multiple institutions being proposed and no progress on the pay and conditions issues we’ve been in struggle over. What has been our union’s response? It seems to be caught in the headlights, echoing the employers’ narrative about affordability and leaving branches on the frontline of the fightback doing so individually.

The nature of the crisis

Pay erosion over the last decade has reduced what we take home by 30 per cent. The value of our work has not decreased by 30 per cent, just what HE bosses have determined to pay us for it. Now they think the same work can be delivered by fewer staff. We are not fighting for a pay rise as much as pay restoration.

In May 2024, noting the wave of attacks on jobs, terms and conditions and educational provision in a growing number of institutions, the union’s Special HE Sector Conference (SHESC) committed ‘to develop a strategy which includes returning to UK-wide action in academic year 2024-25’. This has never been implemented.The same conference passed another motion which resolved to, ‘negotiate a sector-wide moratorium on job cuts and subject/course closures’. This has also not happened.

Since then, the threats to jobs have only increased, as has the need for national action to resist them. Multiple branches are now in dispute over redundancies, with many having already received strong mandates for action. Some have already announced or, like Dundee and Brunel branches, are already taking strike action.

QMUL UCU branch has been keeping a valuable and ever-growing list of all the redundancies, restructures, reorganisations, and closures taking place across the sector. At the time of writing, 89 institutions are listed.

December’s Higher Education Committee (HEC)

In December 2024, HEC agreed, through a motion I supported, that the UCU would ballot, if a timeline could be realised, to achieve national, term-time strike action before the Easter break in most universities. This would use the strong rejection of the employers’ offer on pay as the legal basis for a dispute but the dispute in reality would encompass pay, conditions and job security. Alongside it would be a political campaign, targeting the government to properly fund the sector.

This was not without challenges. The turnaround time was tight, putting it at risk from bureaucratic inertia or even outright obstruction so the window to do it would be lost. However, weighed against the risks of no sector-wide fightback and leaving branches fighting alone, it was worth trying and it passed by a slim majority.

The first step in determining whether it was possible was for the HE Officers (the President, the Vice President HE and the two Vice-Chairs of HEC) to determine and decide, specifically whether the indicative timeline, or something close to it, could be achieved. Yet, before they had even met, an alarmist email was sent to all members, regarding the decision. It stated:

HEC has agreed that a statutory industrial action ballot in furtherance of a 5.5% pay rise will be held in order to enable UK-wide term-time strike action to take place in early April 2025 if the thresholds are met. An industrial action ballot campaign is expected to begin in late January 2025, and the voting window is expected to open in late February 2025. Please look out for details in early January. Work on a wider campaign to call for a publicly funded HE sector had already begun prior to the HEC meeting and will run separately to the industrial ballot from early 2025. 

This preempted the work and decision of HE Officers and, by omission, misrepresented the totality of what we had decided to do. The shenanigans had begun.

UCU Left were first to respond and provide a corrective to the official comms. I quickly co-authored a blog post to provide further analysis/perspective on the situation. Useful as these were, they did not have the reach of official comms which were then silent on the topic, leaving many members bemused or worried. I was not party to the Officers’ discussions, nor were they reported to HEC at the time. But the ballot (as voted for) was never called, nor can it be called now on anything close to its intended timeline.

What were members meant to make of this? What did it say particularly to the branches at the forefront of redundancy threats about the union’s commitment to fight? 

Negotiating with the employers (UCEA)

With the original ballot no longer possible and with negotiations over the 2025/2026 national pay claim about to open, the rationale around taking action around the 2024/2025 claim diminished. However, these negotiations are the established fora where all HE trade unions and employers meet formally. This is therefore where we can formally make demands of our employers as a whole.

We now needed our union negotiators to put jobs – that is, redundancy avoidance – on the table at these negotiations for 2025/2026, in addition to pay & conditions. Some will claim we can’t do this because redundancies are a local issue. The same was said previously of casualisation, workload and equality. The Four Fights campaign which ran from 2020-2023 was established precisely as a strategy to include all these related aspects of the HE onslaught and in recognition that we are strongest when we fight collectively. 

The February HEC

To this end, I co-authored and proposed a motion at HEC which included a resolution to put emergency job-protection measures into the joint unions claim. A further resolution called for us to be as ballot-ready as we can be, with a Branch Delegate Meeting and Special HEC taking the final decision on calling any ballot. Our need to deploy this will be informed by what line the employers take in the negotiations. The motion also called for Days of Action, coordinated to best support the branches in dispute. Finally, it calls for all the remaining decisions from December which can still be implemented to be implemented as part of an integrated industrial-political strategy.

In the end we had four motions on industrial action to consider. In addition to ‘mine’, we first had one from UCU Commons which wanted us to abandon any idea of industrial action and instead fight for a better sector by unspecified means. I have never seen a motion with so little detail but with such far-reaching consequences. It had to be voted down and was by a comfortable margin.

UCU Left members tabled two motions. One was simply an attempt to reposition the December decision regarding the ballot onto a new timeline, the other did similar but also called for redundancy avoidance to be on the table and action into the 2025/6 academic year.

The question before us was this: how can we get back to sector-wide action to defend our sector in the shortest possible time? In considering this we needed to take account of what happened in December and since, anticipating the obstacles and determining which ones we can push through and which ones we would be better trying to side-step.

The motion that was solely about the ballot was likely to suffer the same fate as the ballot elements of the December motion. This is not a comment on the intentions behind the motion, just a recognition of how the union bureaucracy functions. On the basis that it was unachievable, and because it would have had consequences for later votes, I voted against.

The motion I had co-authored and the remaining UCU Left one had a lot in common and I agreed with much of the latter. I even sent in an amendment to broaden its scope to make it more applicable in devolved nations. However, one of its ballot clauses also risked a rerun of the December situation. On that basis I couldn’t support it but, because I agreed with much of the rest, I abstained. These were tactical questions, not political differences.

There is also the question of where we are in the negotiation process. We need to be able to strengthen our negotiators’ hands, not tie them. Being able to threaten a ballot and strike action if the employers do not respond favourably is quite different from presenting it as a foregone conclusion. However, it would delay the earliest date of any action, but not by a huge amount and not in relation to key points of leverage in the annual calendar.

In the meantime we must not sit on our hands. Branches moving towards and taking action need coordinated support. This is important both in its own right and in terms of mobilising members to be ballot-ready. The political campaign also does not need to wait and should begin immediately, not in a tepid, top-down way but again through mobilising members through demonstrations, lobbies and similar.

As in December, there has been an email sent to members which is partial and, as a consequence, misleading. A statement has since been released by 15 members of HEC. Members still need to be told officially the whole of what was decided as a matter of urgency and the decisions made need to be enacted in the same manner.

Unity in action

So, what next? Is there going to be further disconnect between decision-making and implementation? Undoubtedly. We cannot simply hope for things to be better. The only counterbalance we have is a mobilised and engaged membership.

Since the end of the Marking and Assessment boycott, and as a consequence of how that ended, our members have been demobilised and much less engaged. Abstract slogans such as ‘Bank and Build’ and ‘Build to Win’ have done nothing to counter that. A union builds through action, not abstract initiatives.

Employers are on the offensive. Their marketised model of HEC is failing and they want us to pay for it. They are coming for us on multiple fronts and we must stand together to resist. We cannot disconnect redundancies from casualisation – our precarious colleagues are already losing their jobs. We cannot disconnect redundancies from workload – we are at breaking point. We cannot disconnect redundancies from equalities – we know the most marginalised will be hit hardest. We cannot disconnect redundancies from pay – choosing between jobs and pay is a false one which will only benefit the employers.

My closing words are not mine but those of a good comrade and wise counsel.

There has never been a more vital need for us to stand up for each other – for everyone in the union to understand that an injury to one, mass redundancies for many, threaten all of us. We are not now talking about fighting for pay [alone] but about doing what unions were formed to do – exerting the leverage we have – which is industrial – to defend the sector.