When do you think the strikes will be?

[JasminaPashmina]

Just that - when do you think the strikes will happen?

Before Christmas by chance?

@Pota2 Although I noted that Jo Grady had time to write a letter to the Guardian slating Suzanne Moore but has been too busy to publicly condemn the anti-Semitic abuse that one of her members is being subjected to

You are being unreasonable. Where will she find a spare half hour to draft a statement of apology, post it and tweet about it? Don't you know that posting pictures of dogs and tweeting about spa breaks takes huge amounts of time. Get your head a wobble.

jasmina you’re right. I apologise. That’s not to mention the time she will need to spend on working out who is currently winning at the lipstick and cute-as-hell game on the picket lines. Because we all know it’s a big game.

I'm really not in the pro-Grady camp and I also think it's inappropriate and divisive that she has taken such a one-sided political stance but even if you don't care about any of that, there are many questions that can be raised about the current strike action. Mike Otsuka is someone who is making a number of very important points on various platforms.

And it's not just Grady. It's UCU Left and various union officers that put me off.

But I've always found the pro-Grady fangirling coming from people with PhDs rather cringeworthy and I'm grateful for the opportunity to have a little moan about it here. I'm sure someone will write a tremendous paper about the aesthetics of middle-class public sector union organising in the Age of Brexit at some point in the near future. Looking forward to it.

I agree the pro-Grady fangirling is quite cringe-worthy.

It smacks of a popular girl being elected for school council rather when it should be a group of intelligent, critical professionals coming together to support a union leader who is capable, competent, professional and trustworthy.

As I said up-thread, I'm all in favour of leaders of various ilk being human. I think this is especially important for women to push back against the stale/pale/male model of corporate competence. But there has to be substance behind that person which I just don't see from Grady.

I have really enjoyed Mike Otsuka's Twitter over the last few months (thanks to whoever directed us there way back in this thread), and I feel like I've learnt lots. I am glad people are speaking out.

Yes, Mike’s Twitter is great, as is that of Alex Douglas. Both of them cop a lot of hate though.

Agree with the popular girl at school analogy. The problem is she had no management experience, went into a massively complex and important management role and now seems to think that the best way to handle it is to act like a 12-year old and ignore or slag off the people who call you out on it. In hindsight the best candidate was probably Matt Waddup. Jo McNeill had union experience but is part of the scary SWP faction and supported a known sexual abuser (but refuses to offer any support for women who express even mildly GC views).

Interestingly I just saw Jo Grady tweeted that union membership had increased by 1300 this year. I know so many people who have left so I am a little surprised. Would be interesting if someone made a Freedom of Information request about membership. Would also be interesting to see what category those new members fall into. Eg are they phd students, while permanent staff are leaving?

I think the UCU has no qualms about playing fast and loose with facts so maybe the 1300 is not a net increase taking into account those leaving.

In my university around 5% of academic staff have reported taking at least one strike day in the current round. As one would expect, the percentage is higher in social sciences and humanities, and lower in STEM subjects. In my faculty (STEM) the strike is barely noticeable.

Yay Matt Waddup, I voted for him. Yes, I know, the male candidate. But we’d be in a different place right now.

Qwertysci, 5% seems really low. Are these numbers from management?

I was really surprised last year that people (academics no less!) seemed so ready to dismiss experience and expertise when choosing a new GS. I get all the talk about "new blood", about being "member-run", about reverse ageism preventing younger academics and activists from getting to positions of responsibility but I thought Jo Grady was so woefully underprepared for the role and frankly I don't think I've been proven wrong so far. If she claimed (as I think one of you said a couple of pages back) that her role as a lecturer had prepared her to juggle and prioritize different things... well, then I don't see what advantage this would give her over any other member of UCU, I'm sure we're all used to juggling different things. At the time there was a blog post about how some aspects of her manifesto were poorly informed or not really well thought-through: michael4hec.wordpress.com/2019/04/17/something-must-be-done-but-what/

The 5% is based on the numbers who reported being on strike.

Of course this doesn't preclude people being on strike & not actually reporting it, so as to have no pay deductions. Nor does it preclude people working from home, indicating to their colleagues they are striking, but not declaring themselves as on strike.

Yes, qwertsci, I think this happens a lot. Plenty of colleagues who don't go on campus because they don't have to teach and/or can work from home and don't want to 'undermine' the strike but I do sometimes question whether they should really be feeling all warm and fuzzy inside because of it. Maybe better to honestly admit that it's not nice being called 'scab' behind your back. Tricky, this.

The picket lines I have seen have been very sparse indeed so the 5% figure doesn’t surprise me.

arid I also can’t believe how many intelligent people took leave of their senses and thought that lack of experience was actually a good thing. At the Cambridge hustings, a member asked the candidates how they would deal with managing and running a large union. Jo McNeil gave a sneery answer that the woman who asked the question was a member of the independent broad left (which Jo McN classes as right wing). She then said she had no obligation to answer the question. Jo Grady said that it was no biggie because there are staff at the UCU and then said that her lecturing and juggling teaching and marking or whatever gave her experience. I think Matt was the only one to answer it in a sensible way.

Oh well, last week next week. Will be interesting to see what employers do. Seeing as the strike mandate runs out soon, I wonder if they will bother making another offer given that they haven’t done so so far. And if they don’t and they mandate runs out, i wonder if UCU will push for an immediate further ballot on strikes or whether they will hold off for a bit.

Completely different question: will the likely loss of income for universities due to the coronavirus influence negotiations? Not exactly a great time to enter into costly commitments from the employers’ perspective?

Hadn’t thought about the coronavirus issue. But like you say maybe they will take the view that they don’t want to tie themselves to financial commitment when there are other uncertainties.

Just saw this too:
uculeft.org/2020/03/negotiators-statement/

Seems the negotiatiors aren’t too happy about the GS recommending an offer that hasn’t even been made yet. God this whole thing is a joke.

More dissatisfaction

notesfrombelow.org/article/sell-out-under-way

Someone has also made the point that the pay deal Jo Grady is pushing for now of 1.2% higher than the offer will totally screw over the post-92 unis who went on strike. They will be worse off from striking because the marginal increase will not cover the wages they have lost. Shameful.

I suppose she needs some sort of positive result from all this and senses that the strike is not going well? Why else would you announce that 1300 new members have joined without saying whether this is a net increase? As I said before, I can’t remember a time when members openly announced that they were leaving in protest against a) Grady’s attacks on GC academics and b) the strike. I think, though I was not in the union then, the last time there was such discontent may have been during the debate on BDS.

I think the BDS stuff was before my time, so i have never seen this level of division before. It does smack of desperation to tweet about surges in membership because I have seen so many tweet that they are leaving or on the verge of leaving. I suspect that if a deal is not forthcoming next week that there will be another load of people who will cut their losses.

It also seems really odd to write to the membership about an offer that hasn’t even been made. People were behaving as if it was an actual offer, calling it evidence that the strikes were working! If they’re now prepared to accept 8.4% interim contributions then they’ve just called 22 days of strikes when they could have accepted 9.1% in September, which would have left USS members better off in the long run.

I think there are huge problems in academia about how spending is prioritised but I think the simplistic argument that VCs are sitting on millions in reserves is false. It wasn’t long ago that we were told some universities have called in administrators. Even large established places like Cardiff and Reading have posted losses. I think any ‘win’ on pensions will lead to tightening in other areas, which is why I as a USS member do not have an issue with a slightly higher contribution rate.

Also, I have lots of friends in the private sector whose employers pay 3% into their DC pensions so that does put it into perspective for me. Pensions are a future asset and always a risk so the idea that you can have no detriment forever and keep paying 8% when your employer then has to pay close to 30% isn’t very tenable.

The e-mails from Jo Grady to the membership this week did smack on desperation. Apparently the big "win" on Monday was that students from all over the country expressed their support for the strike in a letter (hint: it was sabbatical officers from student unions who signed the letter, and I doubt they consulted with their membership), then on Wednesday it was a leaked minute from a Russell group university. Then on Thursday it was the "offer" e-mail, which I think it was carefully worded to imply that this was an offer coming from the employers (I only realized this was not the case after the e-mail was discussed here and I gave it a second read). Honestly I think they know it's not going well and so these things are presented as big wins.

Completely different question: will the likely loss of income for universities due to the coronavirus influence negotiations?

Many universities completely rely on international (mostly Chinese) students to break even or make a surplus. At masters level typically less than 10% of students on a course might be from the UK. The shutdown of schools, universities and English testing centres in China means that many won't be able to complete the entry requirements in time for the start of the next academic year. Numbers of international students are likely to be down significantly. Half of Russell Group universities are already operating at a deficit this year so this is a huge and worrying uncertainty.

Some union members at times seem quite out of touch with reality. They repeat over and over again that there is plenty of money. But undergraduate fees are frozen while costs in real terms escalate every year. Cost of living rises + annual increments already add 5+% to staff costs every year while the undergraduate fee income remains roughly static (unless student numbers get increased without compensating expenditure on extra staff).

Yes the student thing was ludicrous. I think most students are actually getting pretty pissed off with the whole thing. They have legitimate grievances but are told that they should shut up and respect the strike. There are some loud voices and like you say, they often come from sabbatical officers, who aren’t directly affected.
I keep hearing that the strikes are working but I heard that in Nov/Dec last year where the ‘victory’ was the USS negotiators writing a letter to UUK (which wasn’t particularly well-written) on day 7 of the strike. I don’t see it working at all to be honest. All this ‘they’re meeting with us now and it’s only because of the strike’ is nonsense. Of course they’re meeting with you. They’d be pretty stupid not to. The point is that if those meetings are not producing anything of substance other than some glib assurances, they are pointless. If you’re calling a 22 day strike and getting a meeting is seen as a victory then you need more effective leadership and better negotiators.

If there is no offer next week, I hope people stop pussy-footing around and demand some answers from the leadership. I am also interested in how the negotiators are selected because the ones on the 4 fights all seem to be in the UCU Left faction and in favour of an eternal strike. I suspect their intransigence could have something to do with the lack of progress too.

I agree qwertysci I don’t think things are nearly as healthy as is being presented by UCU. Some places are sitting on money, eg some Oxbridge colleges, but many others aren’t and it can take something like this coronavirus outbreak to tip them into the red.

It’s an almost childlike naivety from many UCU members. Their line is conditions are bad because money is spent on buildings - we don’t care about buildings (although it’s clear that poorly maintained buildings would affect student recruitment). Also, universities have millions in reserves and could easily meet all the demands but they just don’t want to (again, only true for a small number of places). Finally, USS is lying about a deficit and the pension scheme can carry on forever without any change in contributions (seems unrealistic given volatility of the market, long life-expectancies and increases in members of the scheme).

I agree about the student issue. I have a really really illuminating chat with one of my dissertation students yesterday about the strike. Her reflections were that the die-hard left-leaning students are loving it because they're out on the picket lines, singing protest songs, discussing workers' rights, and reading Marx. She said that these students are, though, seeing this very visible participation in/support of the strikes as a way of hobnobbing with lecturers which they believe will benefit them in the long-run.

For others, though, she said that they're all generally really pissed off. While communication of disruption has been good (i.e. letting students know which classes are cancelled), the communication about why classes are cancelled is pretty terrible and students aren't sure what lecturers are striking about. She said most of the students are baffled that academics (who are paid well, have huge autonomy/flexibility, have good conditions) think their pay and conditions are bad.

On the other hand, she said it was good to have time away from classes to work on dissertations but without supervisors around, many students are getting a big bogged down (i.e. they're working well on their dissertations but they're not sure if what they're doing is right).

This woman is third year so was hit by the 2018 strikes in her first year and has now been hit by the Nov/Dec 2019 and the Feb/March 2020 strikes in her third year. Her cohort are really pissed off at the consistent disruption and are planning to make this clear in the NSS.

I know I probably should've towed the party line but I actually completely agreed with everything that she said.

Why should you have towed the party line, Jasmina?

I don't think you need to tow any party line, Jasmina. I agree with your student and I also agree with her assessment that the performative socialists are using this as a networking opportunity. I see it all the time on twitter where they make some grand statement about how they're standing for us all, which then gets retweeted with some gushing comment by a permanently employed 'socialist/activist' academic (who probably costed in a 9-month teaching cover post rather than a 12-month one in his/her latest grant application to leave enough money to be able to attend that conference in Rio de Janeiro that everyone's going to).

The worst hit by the strikes will be the students, the precarious staff and those at post-92s.

A union isn’t a political party - is it?