When do you think the strikes will be?

[JasminaPashmina]

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

Before Christmas by chance?

NovemberDays yes, quite. How can we end precarity or reduce its harmful effects if the university uses its resource on pension contributions. I think the position of UCU Left is that UUK and USS are just lying and that the scheme is definitely sustainable in its current form. I am not so sure that is true as what I have read suggests that there is a deficit that needs to be plugged. We can’t blindly go on thinking everything can stay the same because the worst case scenario is that the whole scheme becomes unsustainable. If the universities are forced to make higher contributions to plug a gap, you can bet your bottom dollar that they will want to recoup those costs from somewhere by taking them from money spent on staff and resources.

Precarious workers often don’t have pensions or have lower pensions. Therefore by taking a ‘no detriment forever’ stance, the UCU left actually risks fucking over precarious workers even more because they will be affected if the employer has higher outgoings.

Agree with comments about the ineffective timing of the strike. Many places had stopped teaching already and the low number of contact hours and high number of independent study hours means that the impact won’t be felt greatly by soc science and humanities students. Not to forget the marvellous programme of teach-outs for those interested.

There needs to be a serious rethinking of strategy from the UCU. Unless a decent offer comes in next week, these strikes will have been an expensive waste of time and will have led to a big reduction in the salary bill for the universities. Thankfully my institution is spreading the cost but many are taking it all out of the January pay which will be horrendous. If the union announces more strikes in the new year, it will cripple people and if they adopt the intransigent position being proposed at the conference on 6 December, the strikes will be utterly pointless. How the fuck can any reasonable thinking person think that they will agree to no detriment beyond the valuation when nobody knows what the valuation will say? Jesus.

While I see possible solutions to the precarity of teaching staff, I’ve been thinking about precarity for contract researchers. I know very well how miserable it is to work on three and five year contracts, never knowing for sure where the next job can be. But what’s the UCU demanding here? As it is, my current institution offers redeployment to people whose contract is ending, but they cannot offer a permanent contract as the work isn’t there. It’d simply be a case of making people redundant at the end of a grant. The only solution I can see is to end competitive grants and give long-term awards to research groups. But that’s not likely to happen, nor is it in the gift of universities, and anyway, would concentrate money in a smaller number of universities than today, which is far from ideal.

Has anyoneseen this? twitter.com/ucuedinburgh/status/1201863742214098947

Oh my goodness, aridapricot. I am sitting here questioning again why I am in a union with leaders like this, who take delight in bullying others and suppressing academic freedom. I am trying not to think about the fact that I have lost salary for these idiots. I take some small comfort from the fact that they are well and truly ratioed by the comments, including by at least one other branch. I hope the teach-out in question is well-attended. If I was at Edinburgh, I would want to attend it.

Okay, I am thinking that my New Years resolution will be to quit the freaking UCU. I need to get over the fear that is preventing me from doing this (I keep thinking 'what if...') but the post above about alternative unions was heartening so I hope I can be brave.

impostersyndrome yeah, I am not 100% sure what they are demanding either and I suspect that they don't know themselves. It's all well and good to say 'end precarity' but, as you point out, jobs that come from specific funding are necessarily time-limited. The university can't employ them permanently under the current model because their work is tied to an externally funded project rather than being based on teaching or admin. I am not sure the UCU have thought through how it all hangs together. In any event, it's certainly not something that can be satisfactorily resolved in the short-term through this strike action.

Talk about shooting yourself in the foot. If your strategy for industrial action is to demonstrate that academics are adherents of extremist positions, unwilling to uphold the law on academic freedom, and engaged in bullying of the very people they are claiming to be on strike for ("gender" pay gap, though we know it's sex-based), then that UCU tweet has done the job perfectly.

I hope the press pick this up, I really do. The UCU should be ashamed of itself. I think there is already limited support for the strikes from the public and this is simply going to erode any limited sympathy that was already there.

Who the fuck runs that Edinburgh account? I can see from the comments that the account has previously been involved in bullying another member of the branch. How can this be possible from a trade union. They’re supposed to fight that sort of shit surely.

I am beyond angry.

The President of Edinburgh UCU is a particularly vicious misogynist who has relentlessly bullied at least one female member of the branch. They have ramped up the rhetoric and bullying to such an extent that a research seminar on the teaching of gender in schools has had to be cancelled because of fears for the safety of female speakers. That's a separate event to the one mentioned in the Twitter thread.

In other words, Edinburgh UCU is directly involved in creating an atmosphere on campus where women cannot speak for fear of violence. They were also responsible for ramping up the temperature prior to the event at which Julie Bindel was assaulted.

The person who said in that UCU thread that trade unions are historically no friend of women is correct.

Oh yeah, looked him up and he seems absolutely awful. So depressing that things have become like this.

Very depressing. The very opposite of academic freedom.

Re the teach outs- I think it's a way to avoid striking unis getting battered in the NSS. The institution I worked st during the last strike got hammered when the NSS came round.

It's unpaid work no matter which way you look at it, and content students ultimately support the best interests of those we have issue with.

bakedbeanz yes but that then entirely defeats the strike action. If we’re keeping the students happy, where’s the pressure on the universities coming from? They’re the ones who care about NSS. This time around they have suffered very little detriment plus have saved a load of money on staff salaries.

I am totally convinced that the 8 days block was a big mistake. The Bradford factor that HR depts use to monitor staff absence is very clear that many short absences are far more disruptive to the employer than one long one. The universities can easily ride out a block like this at the end of the semester while still keeping the students happy. If they had broken the strike up into 4 weeks of disruptions with two days each week, then maybe there would have been more impact. This was a tactical own goal by the union, evidenced by the fact that there is still no sign of an offer from the employers. I am curious as to what they will propose next by way of action but big blocks are a really bad idea. Sadly, by going about it this way, they have exhausted many people’s future capacity to strike.

And the pension issue hinges on a valuation taking place in 2020, so why strike now when it’s likely that any agreement will be subject to the upcoming valuation (no employer will reasonably agree to anything that stretches beyond the valuation and isn’t reviewed in light of it) and the valuation may lead to even further action if we’re not happy with the outcome?

Final day today. Am striking and then tomorrow it’s back to work to deal with eleven million emails. Really pissed off with this group of totalitarian misogynists for leading us into this misguided action that will hurt the people we’re supposed to be fighting for.

As for ASOS afterward, given the approaching REF deadline, I would be very surprised if research-active staff will be working strictly to contract even if they say they will on twitter. Nope, I think it will be business as usual to try to get as strong a profile as possible. Everyone said this stuff at the 2018 strikes and nothing changed after the strikes ended.

What will happen with ASOS will be probably that external examiners will withdraw their labour, as they did previously, leaving those of us convening large courses with a massive headache to resolve.

I find the working to contract thing difficult to support - as a single parent with little external support, I can only work my contracted hours and this affects my promotion chances and research outputs. If everyone worked to contract anyway, there would be more of a level playing field. To me, it simply highlights existing inequalities. My union sends out all these messages about what are you doing with your extra time? Em, making sure my children are fed, clean clothes, at dentists/doctors/homework done, house clean and so on, same as usual.

I say my union - I am not actually a member at the moment, although I probably should rejoin.

@Pota2 at the end of the 2018 strikes I believed that people would start working to contract and stick to it, and that this would lead to sustained change in academia. Now I see how pathetically naive I was. If anything, I saw the opposite - not just business as usual, but lower-level managers and convenors (such as HoD, etc.), who in my view should protect their colleagues' time, being keener than ever on piling form over form over form, and task over task over task which of course has to be done in your own time. This time around, I'm considering refusing going to meetings where I have limited input anyway and making it clear that I'm working to contract when rejecting the invitation. Or resisting peer pressure from my colleagues to engage in lots of spoon-feeding and hand-holding with the students, which affects me disproportionately because of the administrative roles I hold.

I think this was the least disruptive strike ever! I did strike some days but many of my colleagues went on campus and said that it looked like business as usual across most buildings. So, no mass striking and no major effect on the students, and no offer or different stance taken by the employers. As someone else said, this has worn out everyone's capacity to strike- it has me, I'm not prepared to go out again in the forseeable future.

I also wish there was more transparency and honesty from UCU on how successful the strike has been and what has been achieved. I get the sense that not much, and very minor "wins" (like the letter mentioned in this thread asking for resignations) are presented as unquestionable victories. I do understand that any signs of weakness or division will likely be exploited by employers, but if UCU don't want to communicate openly on Twitter or their website they could do so through e-mails (we've had a few, but not that many and all in the same victorious tone "we're on track to win") or private forums. I see branches on Twitter saying "Look at how large and healthy our pickets look! This will teach them!" and then you look at the photo and it's maybe 4 or 5 people - respect to the individuals involved, of course, but to pretend that this will scare management into capitulating is disingenous. At my own university, plenty of students were crossing the picket line, presumably to attend classes.

@Pota2 I think I've agreed with everything you've said so far! I think people happily taking part in these teach outs are undermining the point of the strikes.

Agree about the lack of transparency. That letter calling for the chairman's resignation could have been written long before the strikes even started. How is that even remotely a sign of a victory? Why is nobody calling the union out on this? There has been very little information given about the negotiations, what the tactics are, what the UCU will compromise on and what the best way forward is. I totally agree that this can be done by email in case they don't want to show their hand.

I also get the sense that there has been little disruption. Hardly any students complaining about it. I don't think this is just because they are in favour of the staff striking. I think they are in favour of the strikes because they have limited impact on them (they know that the missed topics will be taken off the exam paper for instance). People are bending over backwards to get them onside, which defeats the purpose of causing disruption.

And I do think it is good that the leadership have been on the picket lines, but I wonder whether this was maybe prioritised at the expense of proper focus on the negotiations. The vice president at least is part of the negotiating team and wrote the letter calling for the resignation. If she is spending all her time travelling round the country, how are the negotiations progressing. Progress is so crucial here. It's not about selfies on the picket lines and talking about how much we hate our employer - it's about finding a viable way forward. People have to eat and we cannot afford another prolonged round of strike action. It has to take us somewhere.

The Edinburgh thing was the final nail in the coffin for me as regards the UCU's attitude. I can't afford to take part in more strike action and the union's complete lack of tactics means that I am losing money for nothing and, even if a settlement is made in the next few weeks on pensions, it will only realistically last until the next JEP valuation. I find it abhorrent that a union representing workers is actively taking part in bullying female workers. I know I am not the only one who feels like this. Many many people feel the same but are too frightened to say so because of the attitude of the UCU.

Thanks, bakedbeanzontoast!

@Pota2 will you stand for UCU the executive? I’d vote for you in a shot!

Hahaha Dolorabelle I wish! If I was open about my thoughts, I’d probably be placed in the ducking stool by the current UCU exec for my problematic views (ie my totally radical opinion that feminists should be allowed to carry out academic research without the threat of death, violence or loss of employment).

There would be a LOT of us on that ducking stool with you.

I was discussing this with a friend at another university just the other day. She’s about to do a basic standard lecture to her students on Feminism as part of a cultural theory course. She’s anxious about it.

Who’s have thought this is where we’d be in 2019? It’s appalling

I am currently hovering over the button to end my UCU membership after more than 25 years. This strike has been pointless, there seems to be no new negotiation going on, because, presumably the strike is not affecting the universities at all because it is poorly timed. I am disillusioned with the nonsense coming from my branch (no prizes for guessing). Is there any reason to stay?