Marking & Assessment Boycott

[aridapricot]

So how do you think this will pan out this time? Are you taking part? How do you think things will go in your university/department?
My uni is docking 30% pay. Also in my department (where the spirit tends to be "yes we'll do whatever UCU asks us to do but we'll also go out of our way to cause any inconvenience to students") people are already talking about mitigations... 🙄I am not a UCU member and won't be taking part but I also fear that at some point I will be asked to cover colleague's marking or (even worse) redistribute it (given that I'm HoD).

Our admin staff are regularly in tears at the moment. They are openly saying they won’t help boycotters with anything again. They work phenomenally hard for £25000 and should not have to put up with this shit.

Does anyone else think it would have made more sense to boycott grant bids since that is the system behind fixed term contracts? There are going to be a shit load of redundancies. Our HR lot are already saying that they’ll now issue open-ended contracts and go for redundancy if they need to. Redundancy puts everyone in a discipline at risk, so I am far from convinced this is the right action. I don’t have the answers, but I don’t think UCU does either.

I’ve never understood why it’s so hard for some to grasp the fact that it’s the abuse of fixed term contracts not the contracts themselves that’s been the problem. A one year fixed term maternity cover for example is perfectly legitimate. UCU’s four legs good, two legs bad approach never helps.

Same at my institution. I (HoD) have tried to take over work from our admin people where possible, they are on their knees, and tend to call in sick more often due to exhaustion. The strikers have good intentions plus a right to strike, but I sometimes get the impression it is more about taking action than having an actual effect. (Some of them even took part in some additional strike days to protest against the university's pay deductions associated with the MAB).

I'm doing the same re admin staff. But it's a poor reflection on the university that it isn't putting some of that MAB deduction money towards agency staff to help them, or to lighten their workload with a little slack in the system.

Two sides of the same coin. I'd be glad to strike re admin staff conditions if our unions collaborated.

Does anyone else think it would have made more sense to boycott grant bids since that is the system behind fixed term contracts?

How is this meant to work in STEM subjects - to deliver most STEM research you need a team of postdoctoral researchers + expensive equipment. If you don't have research grants then you can't do very much research.

I’ve never understood why it’s so hard for some to grasp the fact that it’s the abuse of fixed term contracts not the contracts themselves that’s been the problem.

Exactly!

I've employed several post-docs on 3 to 4 year fixed-term contracts, funded by external research grants. If I hadn't sweated blood & tears over writing research grant bids, those jobs would not have existed. And recent PhD graduates would have left academia.

So the system would grind to a halt, which is what's happening now, but differently. I bet if research funding were under threat, we'd be seeing more movement.

I agree with this, but UCU seems to want all fixed term contracts to become open-ended.

ps staff having no progression is ignored. many of them are in ucu and strike in support of the conditions for all, but also those that only impact academics.

shame UCU don't give a shit about their own PS members and colleagues.

becoming wholly disillusioned with UCU. and wonder where this goes next. M&A boycott is the nuclear option - where have they to go next?

Anyone working in a very wide range of roles can be a member of UCU, but this does not mean that UCU is entitled to represent them formally to employers. This means that UCU should not actively seek to recruit many admin staff, and that is could not engage in collective bargaining on their terms and conditions.

Certainly there are many administrators, managers, librarians, IT staff etc whose terms and conditions are tied to academic T&Cs and grades by local arrangement. That's not the case where I work. By agreement with TUC therefore UCU would recommend UNISON and hope to collaborate.

So it's not as straightforward as UCU or its members not caring about admin staff. UCU only has a mandate and agreement to negotiate with universities in behalf of university admin staff who would benefit from current campaigns anyway.

That's my understanding - I've asked and checked but would be genuinely happy to know if I've misunderstood because clear communication is not UCU's forte.

Given how few academics participate in strike action, funding application boycott would just be party time for everyone else.

UCU are generally recognised to represent academic and professional services (or whatever they might be called in various HEIs) staff, and for the purposes of pay they bargain collectively on their behalf. Recognition usually aligns with whatever grade a Lecturer is employed on and above. Staff below those grades (for example clerical and technical) are normally represented by Unison or Unite or GMB (sometimes all 3 have recognition agreements in place). Sadly, in my experience, UCU have been reluctant to work collaboratively with the “non-academic” unions.
A general point - any employee can join any union of their choice, even if that union is not recognised by their employer, and can rely on them for matters such as grievance and discipline.

@Looksgood where i work all staff above a certain level are on academic related conditions of service and as such UCU are our union. they are mandated to support us, many on those grades are members and active at that. this is the case at 5 other university's i am familiar with.

the problem is that ucu nationally does not recognise or value those members in my opinion. never have i felt such a big divide between academics and ps staff.

people won't boycott research applications as
1, they enjoy research. think of language -
relief from teaching, space for research.
2, it will impact their promotion prospects
3, stopping students from graduating is the thing that will really harm institutions. this is why this is the nuclear option - what do they have left?

Academia is global. STEM academics in the UK are not going to withdraw from making funding applications, which would impact on their own research group, their research productivity and their research reputation, for a UK specific dispute. And as pp has said it is well known that only a minority of STEM academics participate in UCU action. Academics would thus feel that participating in a research funding application boycott would damage their own progression, in a way that striking for marking, teaching etc does not.

Thanks @Sunshineboo

Does this not mean that all such staff gain by the (hypothetical, I know) advances in four fights. And pensions?

As a post-92 Teacher's Pension member, I'm aware that my strike days earlier this year helped with admin friends' USS pensions - though at other institutions, obviously.

I am desperately sorry for the trouble to admin staff from this boycott but I don't think it's something senior management could not mitigate. It's also not less (in our place) than trouble to other academic staff.

It comes down, in my case too, to feeling worse about staff who are paid least. It would be great to have proper local collaboration between unions, but I go way beyond my job to plug gaps in admin support and keep pressure off anyway, like many (I suspect especially female) academics.

I would like to see UCU acknowledge all categories of members certainly, but they seem to tweet mostly about cats and foreign policy, so not holding my breath.

Yes, I know academic staff in Unison, for example.

Vast majority of our admin staff are aligned grade E or below, or started that way and remain with Unison. They're actually usually not terrible at local cooperation in our place, though it's lukewarm, as with SU, around this boycott.

Completely agree - I remember when Sally Hunt was leading UCU she openly said that academics were her priority. So other roles were encouraged to join but they were clear they would accept a deal that was bad for professional staff if it helped academics.

Plus part of the UCU issue is they really encouraged PhD students who teach to join the union and clearly they care more about precarious contracts than pensions (which is fair enough) so the 4 fights again failing them as other staff

Having never been on strike in my life, I'm (reluctantly) on the MAB because I have a pivotal assessment role that would undermine my colleagues' action (and their pay deductions) and my department is 70-80% UCU. I can't face the next 2 decades of most of my colleagues considering me a scab.

I really like my colleagues and want to support them, including PSS and people not on the MAB. I really dislike aspects of UCU in a national sense. I am so scared about how we are going to keep going on my reduced wage, and so utterly hopeless :(

Believe me, it's not a barrel of laughs for those of us MAB-bing. Whilst there are loud and extreme voices, the vast majority of us are fed up and really, really pessimistic about anything being achieved but equally don't want to let our colleagues down. I just don't see a way out and it's affecting my mood, my sleep, and our financial stability as a family.

Yes - that's a fair point!

That sounds really shit and stressful - I'm so sorry schnitzel. It's a horrible situation for so many people. I've heard today of PhD candidates sobbing down the phone because their Vivas are to be postponed for 6 months, which actually may make a huge difference to their immediate job prospects. [And that's if UCU don't vote to extend the boycott in the Autumn, which they may well do.] And it's shit for people like you bearing strike deductions and feeling forced into it.

Thank you so much. Hoping not to out myself here but we have as a dept continued to do vivas and reviews for our PhD students. I do, though, feel utterly grim about what the undergrads are going through.

Sorry for the massively self-pitying post. It's been building up for a while!!

If it helps to offload on here, then that's what Mumsnet should be for. I don't think you are being self-pitying anyway - it's a huge sacrifice and I think that's even more difficult if you don't really want to make it in the first place.

It's not self-pity @SchnitzelVonCrummsTum The UCU is a shit show, frankly. I left in January - partly over Profs Stock, Phoenix and Dr Laura Favaro, and partly over the current industrial action which I think is incoherent & contradictory. I'm in the humanities and at a Russell Group & have significant research funding, so I"m not personally at risk, but there are redundancies across my discipline & cognate disciplines, especially at post-92 universities - it will get worse if the "end to precarity" is formalised. Although I know that at the bottom end of the salary scale academics are underpaid, I fear for what might happen to many UK universities if we get the pay rise UCU is going for. I know that is a counsel of despair ...

We're all in an impossible position, not made easier by the general public's disdain for what we do (head over to the Higher Education forum here on MN to see evidence of that!)

Sorry, that wasn't very cheery. But with the MAB, we're all in uncharted territory.

My naive idea is that if UUK and the UCU could work together to stick it up the government, we might get somewhere. The VCs really aren't our enemies, it's this fucking pirate-gang that masquerades as a government at the moment, following 10 years of David Cameron's incompetence. That's the real enemy.