I agree that the research is where the real impact could be made re union action. If the UCU members collectively boycotted the REF for instance, I think the universities would listen pretty sharpish. However, nobody would do that. People are (understandably) invested in their own reputation and prestige. While they might agree to lose 8 days pay and then work like crazy afterwards to make up the lost time, I am pretty certain that very few would want to take any action that impacts on their reputation for research. And as you say, the timescale is so long. Nobody would care for instance if your ability to produce publications was damaged by the 2018 strikes and these ones. You’d be expected to do it regardless.
I also think refusing to apply for funding would be effective but again I doubt anyone will do it. Getting funding provides teaching and admin buy-out precisely because there are precarious workers. So, if we improve conditions and end precarity, the people who bring in funding can no longer expect to be bought out and, instead, research projects will have to be worked around other duties, which will impact on the speed at which they are completed. I know several people on the picket line who directly rely on precarious workers for their projects and they would be fucked if precarity was actually ended because they would need to do the teaching and admin that they have now farmed out to fixed term early career teaching-fellows who themselves can’t get their own research done due to the burden. They’re making the right noises about wanting ‘a better university for all of us’ but, in reality, many of them are pretty happy with how it is at the moment, I think. Once the people who enable them to do their research unencumbered get rights, their own working conditions will need to change.
Maybe I’m bitter because I don’t have teaching buy-out. I am research-active but haven’t managed to pull in huge grants so far. But it means I also know I am pulling my weight rather than relying on those less fortunate than me to do the work and in turn preventing them from having success because they’re too busy doing the work that I should have been doing. I know I’m not, unlike a colleague, recruiting 2 PhDs for my funded project because they’re cheaper than post-docs but that the chances of those PhDs actually having a permanent academic career is minimal, given the state of the job-market.
Someone from my dept is writing heartfelt 20-part threads about how she wants all academics to have her smooth route to professorship and that this should be a vision for us all. Mate, they can’t all become profs. It’s like capitalism- not everyone can be rich or the system wouldn’t work. She’s not taught for about 5 years, meaning her load is carried by teaching fellows. Maybe if she wasn’t bought out, those TFs could have research allocation too and their careers wouldn’t stall. Plus she says she only joined the UCU a couple of months ago so I wonder where her solidarity was before that and what sparked this magical awakening that maybe things weren’t all good in the academe.