UCU strikes - I feel like I've lost the plot?!

[Hardbackwriter]

This is a long rant, sorry!

I left UCU quite a while ago so am just watching from the outside. I'm also PS not academic (I was an academic but changed careers a few years ago), but I have a USS pension and in my institution the understanding is that my grade is UCU if you're a union member.

I have norovirus and so have spent all day feeling sorry for myself on my phone today and I am so just baffled by the UCU stuff. This has further deepened my confusion over it all - I sometimes feel like my idea of what a strike must be off because it seems to be at total odds with everyone around me. Some specific points:

1. to me it is incredibly obvious that you suspend strikes while you're consulting members on a deal if you're doing discontinuous action anyway. You're not going to get a new deal while you're considering this one - the ball is in your court at that point so getting people to strike is just throwing away members' salary for no possible gain. If members reject the deal then you strike again, when it could actually put some pressure on for a new deal. I therefore don't see how coupling together consultation and a pause during consultation is a scam or an attempt to dupe the membership; it's just common sense.
2. I don't understand why if you were negotiating on two fronts simultaneously and the other side put forward an offer on both you would think it's on the table to just take the half you like better but demand more on the other one and keep striking to get it? That is surely rejecting the deal. No one negotiates and then lets the other side have only the bits they like without making any of their own concessions - that's not a negotiation.
3. More fundamentally I feel like I seem to be the only person in my institution who thinks that striking is intended to cause disruption and that's fine but you have to own it. My team keep getting arsey emails about why we're not rearranging everything due to be held on strike days ('do you not know that that's a strike day?'). I'm particularly annoyed about this because a senior academic recently shouted at the most junior member of my team (you know, one of the ones on a pay band too low for anyone in UCU to be on so can be considered irrelevant) and said that she was putting academics in a difficult position deliberately by not rearranging a committee meeting. She doesn't have the power to do that anyway - it was so very full of workers' solidary of them to choose to shout at her rather than the DVC who is the committee chair! - but also, if we rearrange things on strike days aren't we undermining the strike and essentially asking people to do work for free? I think people are trying to avoid having to report that they're striking but how do they think that a strike that your employer literally doesn't know you're doing will have an impact?

Obviously I don't actually think I'm in the wrong here - but am I?! I feel like this is such common sense stuff that I can't get my head around how anyone else understands it so differently but both my work inbox and my Twitter timeline is full of very smart people who clearly do.

I think it's often because they believe that all tradeoffs are artificially created by 'management'. See also: the belief that a VC's salary could magically pay for the rest of the wage bill, presumably in some sort of five fish and two loaves of bread way; 'there are £40bn of reserves in the sector so they could afford this' (and if you suggest that perhaps it isn't likely that Oxford will start sharing its reserves with Canterbury Christ Church then you're a neo-liberal).

I think it was one of the big shocks for me moving from academia to a PS job where I work a lot with senior management members who are very distant to junior academics. Turns out they're people (academics themselves, which always gets forgotten!) who do sometimes make crap decisions but who are working with a genuinely very constrained and pressurizing system. Who would have thought!

Yes and yes.

I also don't like the "big shiny buildings" argument. Actually I think the students deserve a new library, decent labs and demonstration rooms etc. "Big shiny buildings" doesn't always mean papering the VC's office in gold leaf.

I always find the 'shiny buildings' thing hard to square with the 'my working conditions are your learning conditions' thing. I have nothing to do with it professionally but I know the person who runs the timetable and rooms teams at my institution and people may not want shiny new buildings but they - completely understandably and reasonably - object very strongly to teaching in rooms that are badly maintained, unsuitable for the group size etc. The newer buildings on campus are so, so much nicer to be in than the original estate - it's not some sort of mad frippery to want buildings that don't violate modern building standards!

I think the thing you say about stuff being rearranged which makes striking pointless definitely happens.

I’m not in the ucu and nobody in my small dept is so we’re not affected at all. But we work closely with a larger team and some of them have been striking and their stuff is still done by them at a later date. Not teaching, but marking, interviewing, meetings, exam boards, etc.

I mean surely you can’t just say to a student that their essay is never going to be marked? No idea what the unions expectations regarding that is

On a couple of occasions Grady and her pals found this forum took it to mock us on Twitter as "TERFS", "conservatives", etc. I cannot help but notice the irony that it was in here in Mumsnet that we first articulated the criticisms that the hehistheythems are now vociferously voicing.

Yes, I remember that (NC regularly). That was when Jo Grady still used 'Terfblocker' and there was some pretty vicious "mean girls" tweeting from so-called feminists who derided us as old housewives, I recall.

object very strongly to teaching in rooms that are badly maintained, unsuitable for the group size etc. The newer buildings on campus are so, so much nicer to be in than the original estate - it's not some sort of mad frippery to want buildings that don't violate modern building standards!

YES! And at my place, we are very short of large enough lecture theatres. They had to extend the teaching day to 8:30 - 18:30 to accommodate some of the bigger cohorts.

'there are £40bn of reserves in the sector so they could afford this'

Apart from the range of situations of the institutions involved, there is also a fundamental misunderstanding of what reserves are. This is not cash in the bank that can be spent. The reserves include facilities, equipment etc, without which the university could not run.

I'm also totally fucked off. If I could join another union, I would.

There was an interesting article on reserves at WONKHE not long ago: wonkhe.com/blogs/what-is-a-university-surplus/?utm_content=bufferdcdf8&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Does anyone have any idea if a marking strike is still on its way? I've lost track.

As I understand it then it looks very likely that a marking boycott will be called if they get over the threshold in the ballot, which will be announced at 3pm tomorrow. If they don't then UCU can't hold a MAB.

<sigh>

Hasn't the major parts of the four fights been agreed now, and the pension also agreed to go back to last years benefit levels (what were they?) so why the marking boycott? Oh how I wish for an alternative union.

I may be completely wrong - I'm mostly following sporadically on Twitter, though I am particularly professionally interested in/affected by whether there's a MAB. I think that after the HEC's last meeting UCU is putting the four fights offer to members but with the recommendation to reject.

I left the UCU last year after being a member for nearly 20 years.

I'm an academic, and yes there's always too much work to do, but I still feel I am paid an excellent wage for a job with good conditions that's very flexible. I just felt I couldn't strike in good conscience.

Plus, I work hard and I'm nice to people so I think I'm fairly unlikely to get into trouble at work. But if I did, it may well be over my concerns about gender ideology (whilst having nothing against trans people). And they definitely wouldn't support me on that!

Soooo
How does that work, with the MAB presumably now in effect?

They've said they'll give notice for it to start - I think they have to give two weeks so it'll presumably start sometime from 17 April on

My offspring is in final year.
How much more can they take.

Pray they get properly assessed and marked for the hardest degree slog ever.

😔

If it starts this month , that will be a long time without pay when the employers decide to deduct 100% of salary for each day assessments go unmarked.

I think this ballot is just for the mandate to carry out industrial action during the next 6 months, and the decision about what action to take (or not) and when is made by the Higher Education Committee (??). And (after some shenanigans...) there's an ongoing consultation (on pensions and 4 fights separately) to inform that decision. The results of the recent e-consulation suggest that the mass membership are much less enthusiastic about more strikes or a MAB than the activitists. Many may still have voted yes in this ballot though so that e.g. IA is still available as a threat if pension restoration doesn't go to plan.

Apparently the MAB will...

(Correcting myself) this blog by (UCUCommons faction member) Sylvia de Mars says the decision has already been made to start a MAB on April 17th and the GS is going ahead with giving notice to employers today. However whether the MAB actually happens is subject to the outcome of the consultation that's about to start.

HEC wanted people to go on strike from January until all casualisation and marketisation were ended in universities, so I guess by comparison...

Sorry, cross-post! I guess it is 17 April then (though surely the window to give notice today has passed?)

I'm a rookie in all of this, my main concern obviously my young adult in final year of uni.
The ballot was voted on by about 40k members, 70k sent out so approx 30k didn't vote?

82% voted yes

Why would 30k not vote when it affects their pay during the strikes.

Like I say my knowledge is scarce and I'm only finding info here and there.

👍

It only affects your pay if you go on strike - the vast majority of those who didn't vote won't strike.