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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.