On 17 February 2023, the University and College Union (UCU) paused their strike action, cancelling two weeks of strikes as a result of “real progress” made in talks with employers.
Dr Jo Grady, the General Secretary of the UCU, said in a video: “To enable the negotiations to be held in the most positive environment possible, the strike action scheduled for the next two weeks will be stood down.
“We now have two weeks of intensive negotiations to turn this progress into a full agreement.”
The union has secured commitments from employers to tackle casualisation and improve pension benefits to pre-cut levels. Negotiations to produce final agreements regarding issues of workload and equality pay gaps are also taking place.
In the same video, Dr Grady announced that “the Employer representatives, The Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA), are currently consulting their members with a recommendation that they give them a mandate to end the use of involuntary zero hour contracts on campus. If that is confirmed, we will have extracted something from our employers right now on one of the worst forms of insecurity.” The UCU says a third of academic staff are on temporary contracts and are paid hourly.
The strikes are not cancelled entirely, as the UCU confirmed that action short of a strike will continue, and that if employers do not deliver on final agreements, strike action will resume. A re-ballot to provide members with a mandate for a further six months of action has been declared.
These negotiations came to pass after historically large numbers of UCU members voted ‘yes’ to strike action in two ballots. One regarding pay and working conditions, and one over cuts to pensions. The UCU secured a national mandate for action across UK universities.
Following this, over 70,000 staff at 150 universities went on strike for three days in November. In January, the UCU announced that more strikes would take place over 18 days between February and March, spanning seven weeks.
The January announcement came after UCEA made the UCU a pay offer worth between 4% and 5%, which the UCU stated was “not enough”.
In January, UCEA Chair, Professor George Boyne said that the UCEA had “made a full and final pay offer that will be financially challenging for the majority of our HE institutions.” He noted that “employers did permit us to accelerate this process and push the pay packet to the sector’s limits.”
However, in February, Dr Grady said: “University bosses hold over £40bn in reserves, but they would rather hoard that money than use just a fraction of it to settle our dispute and bring an end to the unprecedented strike action that is hitting universities. Whilst they earn up to £714k a year, tens of thousands of our members are on insecure contracts, some as short as six weeks, and have seen their pay held down for over a decade.”
Strikes have been ineffective in the past, so what has changed to result in progress in negotiations with employers?
In the video, Dr Grady acknowledged the tens of thousands of UCU members who have taken action. She said: “We have changed the game. You have changed the game.
“Your loyalty, togetherness and solidarity has got us this far […] We said we would change this sector, and that is exactly what we are going to do.”
The unprecedented number of UCU members participating in strikes and forming picket lines, and the initial 18 days of planned action contributed to this development. The planned action was set to be the biggest series of strikes ever to impact UK universities. Over 2.5 million students have been affected by the strikes.
Plans for further strikes and disruption if employers did not engage in negotiations also likely contributed. The solidarity from many students, voicing their frustrations against employers, rather than staff, and joining picket lines has also served as further encouragement to the UCU.
The UCU has served notice on employers for a further day of strike action on the 15th of March, called by the union’s higher education committee. Dr Grady said: “The reason we’ve added this additional date is to focus the employers’ mind as talks come to a conclusion this week […] They need to have on them the maximum amount of pressure.”
Grady expressed that the UCU has “made progress in several key areas on non-pay […] What we now need to do is force the employer to sign off these commitments at Acas, continue to go further than they have gone before, to recognise the depth of feeling that is out there on pay, and improve their pay offer.”
68 universities across the UK will also face a further five days of strikes, unless their demands over pay and working conditions are met, and their pension cuts are revoked.
70,000 members of staff across UK universities are taking action because the current system is not one they feel supported by. If this continues, universities will evidently not be institutions which place education at the forefront. Unacceptable working conditions for staff will cause students’ learning to be severely impacted in the long term so this approach is, therefore, necessary for the UCU to take to resolve their issues, or to at least be in conversation with employers.
Image credits: Cytonn Photography via Unsplash