Anyone else not striking?

[goingpearshaped]

I am not in UCU so not striking. Anyone else? I can sense the divide already between those striking and those not in our dept, I really hate this. Agh, what a mess all round.

*UCL (elite, RG), numbers eligible to vote:
Nov. 21: 2826
April 22: 2790

Sussex (K. Stock’s former branch):
Nov. 21: 880
April 22: 828

Manchester Met. (ex-poly):
Nov. 21: 909
April 22: 881

Goldsmiths (very progressive):
Nov. 21: 756
April 22: 719

Loughborough (apolitical to right-of-centre):
Nov. 21: 526
April 22: 500*

In several institutions it seems like the drop in membership has assisted in meeting threshold i.e. with similar numbers of votes to last year they are now over 50%.

@ExUCU

I checked some of the branch results to see if UCU membership has dropped since November:

UCL (elite, RG), numbers eligible to vote:
Nov. 21: 2826
April 22: 2790

Sussex (K. Stock’s former branch):
Nov. 21: 880
April 22: 828

Manchester Met. (ex-poly):
Nov. 21: 909
April 22: 881

Goldsmiths (very progressive):
Nov. 21: 756
April 22: 719

Loughborough (apolitical to right-of-centre):
Nov. 21: 526
April 22: 500

Universities somewhat randomly picked, feel free to quibble with my sample.

A drop in membership across all but not devastating. The really interesting data would tell us about the proportion of PhD students among UCU members.

On your last point - would UCU have to respond to an FOI request about the membership split?

In several institutions it seems like the drop in membership has assisted in meeting threshold i.e. with similar numbers of votes to last year they are now over 50%.
Yes, this is a good point. You would think that the ones more likely to resign are also the ones more likely to not vote to avoid reaching the threshold, or to vote no.

Even if one assumes that all the members are academic staff (which is clearly not the case, as many members are PhD students as well as professional staff), looking at the HESA data:

www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/staff/working-in-he#provider

it's clear that the total membership is typically less than 30% of total academic staff numbers and the numbers then voting in favour of strike action are only a small fraction of the numbers of academic staff.

For example, Exeter passed threshold with 386 yes votes. HESA reports 3350 academic staff.

I’d imagine that they would have to respond to an FOI that asked for a breakdown of membership per income category.

Seems like our chat here has made its way onto social media. Whoever you are, anonymous academic, salutations and massive respect!

I’ve never done an FOI but GCAndProud seems correct regarding the right question to ask.

@ExUCU

Seems like our chat here has made its way onto social media. Whoever you are, anonymous academic, salutations and massive respect!

I’ve never done an FOI but GCAndProud seems correct regarding the right question to ask.

I spotted this earlier It's a locked account but one worth following for sure.

I used to follow an account called something like 'Black and British' but its disappeared from my list now. She was absolutely excellent at calling out UCU bullshit as well, especially during the recent strike periods. I hope she's doing okay.

@GCandproud

You might get a handful that get a USS mandate but not a four fights one but I doubt there will be many.

There was one: the Institute of Development Studies. They don't appear to have been balloted for Four Fights. All of the other institutions with a USS mandate also have a Four Fights one.

My university hasn’t met the threshold thank goodness. We are a post 1992 institution and I agree with everything people have said about the contradiction between 4 fights and the pensions.
It definitely feels like Jo Grady looks down on us in the ‘ex polys’ and issues that affect us are the lowest of the union’s priority list. This is in sharp contrast to the radical politics they all pretend to believe in. When 60 members of university catering staff were made redundant at my university the union were calling for all teaching to remain online for a second year. No thought was given to the impact on people who were more vulnerable than them.

24 University's have backed the USS strike.

www.ucu.org.uk/article/12238/Staff-at-24-UK-universities-back-further-strike-action-in-ballot-over-USS-pension-cuts

Interesting exchange here re tactics to convince people to vote (yes). While the tone is overall civilized, I am a bit puzzled as to how voting yes to strikes is seen as the only reasonable option, and how everyone who doesn't agree just needs persuading. Also denial about people not voting for tactical reasons.

twitter.com/TomHainesDoran/status/1513903791204143116

[quote aridapricot]Interesting exchange here re tactics to convince people to vote (yes). While the tone is overall civilized, I am a bit puzzled as to how voting yes to strikes is seen as the only reasonable option, and how everyone who doesn't agree just needs persuading. Also denial about people not voting for tactical reasons.

twitter.com/TomHainesDoran/status/1513903791204143116[/quote]
UCU activists: the reason we did so badly is that it was the Easter holidays and also 3 weeks is a really short time to post a letter.

Loads of members: no, we deliberately didn’t vote because you don’t listen to us and we didn’t want to lose any more money. Oh and we only had 3 weeks during the time you got twice as many mandates.

UCU activists: yeah, it must be the 3 weeks thing. Could also be the postal strikes. If we’d had a few more days, we’d def have done it.

Sorry, not sure where postal strikes came from! I meant postal delays. Lots of branches are convinced that’s the reason they lost.

Oh wow, popcorn out, the shit has well and truly hit the fan now.

So Jo Grady sends out a 40 page report to members where she basically recommends doing nowt (after balloting all the branches and not getting a good result) and then 'coming back really strong' or something, around the time of her re-election in 2023-24, having miraculously grown the membership and mobilised everyone. THEN we will show the employers what's what and they will be quaking in their boots.

Lots of people are furious, as I would be too if someone had spent the past three years dragging me out on strike, causing me to lose loads of money and then publicly saying nah, I don't think this works. Don't get me wrong, I don't think the strike action does work and I didn't think so in 2019 but Jo Grady was the one who was going round all the branches, telling us to vote yes yes yes yes. Now she suddenly, at the crucial point, pulls out. I think as far as leadership goes, that's pretty shite. Oh well, couldn't happen to a nicer person, etc etc.

Her mates in the UCU Commons faction (which she absolutely positively doesn't have ANYTHING to do with by the way, despite the fact that her boyfriend is a founder member as are several of her friends and they were previously called Grady4GS) are jumping around saying it's so 'sensible'. Yeah, maybe if that had come before you called people out on hopeless strikes. Not now. They're also claiming that JG has no decision-making power and is not to blame for this mess, yet in 2018, they (including JG) were saying that everything was Sally Hunt's fault.

I've seen a few people saying they will resign over this and no way would I be inspired to join a union that had had such a disastrous track record. Good luck with building the momentum is all I can say. I feel really sorry for all the precarious workers who were taken in by JG's bullshit.

I just read that email. Blimey. I wonder what happens next...

I just don’t get how she thinks she will grow the membership to such an extent. Sounds like bullshit and fantasy. Apparently her strategy involves targeting non-members too so hopefully people will be brutally honest with why they are not union members.

I have to admit Grady is behaving rather sensibly and even corageously here. She's probably understood that continuing this strategy would mean each strike is less and less successful, and followed by fewer and fewer people, until you end up with just a core of supporters (10% of staff? or even less?) that would strike no matter what. The alternative to this slow burnout is to face the wrath of this core now, but risk losing their support in the interests of pleasing larger numbers. Now, I really do not know how these larger numbers are to be pleased and mobilized. Maybe she expects that the excitement of the new campaign will work in her favour like it did in 2019 - but I don't think it will this time; she's no longer the new kid on the block, the novelty has worn off. To devise a new strategy that it's perhaps less punitive on members' salaries, or at least delivers something for the sacrifices being made? This seems to be the thing to do, but whether she'll pursue it or not i another matter.

Yes, although one wonders why she didn’t deliver this report before calling everyone out on strikes, as the writing was on the wall even before the 19/20 strikes. It might be courageous but it’s also about the worst thing you can do on a tactical level to publicly admit defeat. Then again, there’s probably some grateful people in the branches that hit turnout because they would have taken a horrible financial hit otherwise. Maybe she hopes that people will have forgotten about it by 2023/24.

I do find it funny though that her whole election campaign was about how she’s so different to Sally Hunt and criticising Sally for ‘capitulating’ in the pensions dispute. She was so cocksure at the time and now it turns out she’s done exactly the same.

That's an unexpected move by Grady, perhaps to shore up support for re-election when memories have faded? But at the same time, her legacy so far is poor.

I will be interested to see what the new strategy is. I can't see increasing recruitment being very successful, given UCU's track record to date. Get out the vote isn't working well either. So what next? UUK and UCEA have not moved at all in the face of strikes so I wonder what will move them.

In other news, I saw this quote headlines in the Guardian today (I've not been able to see the whole article) which I find so very hard to believe. It says "Currently, 68% of research-only academics are on fixed-term contracts, as are 44% of teaching-only staff,’ write Vicky Blake and Robyn Orfitelli.". How is this calculated? By including PhD students doing some one-off research assistance or teaching on a one-semester module? Are there that many people in academia whose salary comes purely from a UKRI grant? Maternity covers? Grant buy-outs? I would have more sympathy if I knew how this figure was arrived at but it just doesn't reflect the academia I know.

"Currently, 68% of research-only academics are on fixed-term contracts, as are 44% of teaching-only staff"

I think the problem is that they don't break down different categories. In STEM departments a large number of research only early career academics will indeed be on 2-3 year contracts, associated with research grants. Globally it is expected that researchers obtain postdoctoral experience before getting a permanent post, but 2-3 year research contracts aren't exploitative in the way that e.g. a 2-3 month contract would be.

I'm more surprised that 32% of research only staff are actually permanent -- as very few permanent staff in my university would be research only rather than research and education.

I would imagine that the 44% figure does include ad hoc PhD student teaching, such as peripatetic staff teaching music, adjuncts supervising MSc theses in disciplines such as business studies that have vast numbers of masters students etc.

The Guardian article is here: www.theguardian.com/education/2021/nov/01/higher-educations-casual-approach-to-employment and this in turn links to a UCU report from Oct 2021 (www.ucu.org.uk/media/10899/Precarious-work-in-higher-education-Oct-21/pdf/UCU_precarity-in-HE_Oct21.pdf) and in page 7 it says the figures are taken from HESA.
From that page however the most striking thing is that among those who are on teaching + research contracts, less than 10% are fixed term. Out of all academic staff, those on termporary contracts are 33%, which is not good, but not as dire as Blake and Orfitelli make it to be.
I am also in agreement re the high percentage of permanent staff among research-only. In fact, in the Humanities a research-only permanent position is something unheard of. Unless perhaps you are a complete academic star with tons of experience and can get a university to give you a research only professorship.

I am seeing a few GS-supporters talking about how the union needs to grow massively and then they’re going to come back really strong and scare the employers. Like this one for example: twitter.com/UCUCommons/status/1516688121097768960?s=20&t=8Dcl3-IqETn_jBNUbEeHcA

It just all sounds so idealistic and naive when I think the reality will be that a lot of pissed off people will end up leaving and then UCU will probably do very little to build this huge movement until it’s time for the next round of strikes (by which time the pension reforms will have been in force for over a year already and won’t be reversed). Ah well, at least people get a break from striking i guess.

Some tweets seem to be... kind of delluded?

twitter.com/broseph_stalin/status/1516810116829532172

twitter.com/DavidRo91894516/status/1516730506410401794

Yes, completely deluded. Who the hell is going to sign up for an indefinite strike? Only just under a third of all academics are union members and out of them, only about a third go on strike. So the participation rate is about 10% and probably even lower at this stage when people have already lost thousands in wages. That’s unlikely to change, even if UCU goes on a huge recruitment drive. What would make someone join UCU now? They’ve just suffered a humiliating defeat and someone who has taken part in all the strike days will have lost about 4K with absolutely zero gains. In fact, people are considerably worse off because before the 19-20 strikes, UUK made a pretty reasonable offer, cutting USS contribution rates to 9.1%, which was rejected by UCU (and the GS recommended that rejection) because they wanted it at 8.6%. The 9.1% offer was later withdrawn. On pay, UCEA offered 1.8% in 2019 which was rejected and later withdrawn by UCEA and we finally got a 1.5% increase in 2021 with no backpayments, so would have been better off accepting the 1.8%.

There is also of course the fact that UCU bullies people who have GC views. That’s going to put a hell of a lot of people off joining and will probably make existing members leave. I think if they manage to retain their current membership rates, that would be a miracle. Of course, that will mean they will be in the same position as now when it comes to launching their ‘massive’ 2023 action that will have the employers shaking with fear.

I think the 'indefinite strike' crowd is just Twitter posturing. Who in their right mind would actually do that, given the effectiveness of past strikes? The irony is that to survive months of foregone income you'd have to be independently wealthy or have a wealthy partner.

There's definitely a bit of dissent about the past 3/4 years being voiced on Twitter though. Interesting that Jo Edge is one of the dissenters. Does anyone know what was decided at the meeting yesterday?