Page 3 | Academic article arguing we should all join UCU because it's the best way to save HE.

DanceAppleGCMum · 2025-02-28T07:50:58+00:00

NC but long-time poster. A friend sent me this article yesterday and we had a good chat about it: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.13200 Knowing there's some very mixed views on UCU on MN, I was wondering what academic MNers made of this article? I'm in a very pro-UCU department so a sensible, critical conversation about UCU isn't possible unfortunately. (Edited to actually add a link)

Original poster

DanceAppleGCMum · 06/03/2025 08:08

@Patterncarmen I tried to be pretty active in the union when I was a member. I didn't run for leadership positions but I attended meetings and spoke up in them. But the branch was controlled by a very vocal group of old buddies who set the agenda and actively worked to undermine and humiliate people who challenged their views. These were views not just about HE, our university, our branch but about all sorts or wider political issues which somehow crept into the purview of the union and it's meetings.
When Jo Grady was going for leadership, the blinkers fell and I saw that actually the whole of UCU was the same - a small number of horrible, bullies setting the priorities for the Union that stretched well beyond UKHE. So I left.

My issue with PhD students being I the Union is that they're students, not staff. Why not let undergraduates in too?
PhD students' contractual engagement with the university is completely different from people who are employed there. It makes no sense for us to share a union - they have a Union already which is focused on student issues.

My other issue that some of my grumbles with UKHE and my employer is actually because of PhD students - too many, poor quality, exploited for fees, inappropriately workloaded. How can we have the conversation about this in/with the union when the people the conversation concerns are sat there?

As to your points about academics struggling to frame their job and employment (rather than vocation). Speak for yourself. This absolutely doesn't represent my experience at all. Being an academic, to me, is just a job. It's a very easy way to pay the bills. Nothing more, nothing less. I appreciate that might not be the case for others

OP posts:

bge · 06/03/2025 10:13

Totally agree @DanceAppleGCMum with all your points. My UCU chapter is one famous for political actions outwith university employment law. If you don’t match their politics 100% there’s no point. I have no interest in this.

I also just see it as a job.

BusyGreenFinch · 06/03/2025 12:45

I'm similar to bge. My local branch has a whole bunch of political positions I really disagree with (I'm politically centrist) and has got themselves into hot water legally several times in recent years. I also have a number of disabilities and protected characteristics that are not currently trendy. So I held my nose and joined the Free Speech Union (I never thought I'd willingly join a group formed by Mr. Young and yet this is how the world works) to at least be there for me if my local UCU branch ever take umbrage with me.

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 13:29

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 00:31

Unions both necessitate and foster increased class consciousness—the recognition that workers and management have fundamentally different interests. This awareness highlights that all parties primarily seek to extract money from the organization, transforming distributional conflicts into explicit confrontations.

From what I can see on this thread, academics struggle with this framing. They view their profession as intrinsically valuable, motivated by education and research rather than primarily by income. This perspective also involves elements of vocational reverence and self-sacrifice (and can of course lead to exploitation). Unionization effectively transforms the institution from being the central identity and purpose for staff into a contested economic marketplace.

And, as academics seem to only be vaguely aware of themselves as "workers," the idea that the PhD students saw themselves as workers and wanted to join UCU came as a bit of a shock. So, the way to deal with the discomfort of seeing their job as economic is to say that PhD students in the UCU are only capable of student politics. Seeing your doctoral student in your union also messes with the very hierarchical nature of academic life and the idea of "paying your dues." It may also be discomfort with the reality that young people have been given a pretty raw deal economically comparied to their older counterparts.

In the UK, this academic mission that academics believe in has already been abandoned. University Vice Chancellors have evolved from senior academics into businesspeople with academic backgrounds (or sometimes not even that). They openly treat universities as profit-seeking enterprises targeting student fees, grants, and commercial ventures. While paying themselves substantial salaries and benefits, they actively suppress non-management compensation, unlike the previously modest salary differences. Some have called this the enshittification of the sector.

The concept of UK universities as mission-driven centers of learning effectively ended approximately 15 years ago, following a gradual decline over the preceding 30+ years. I don't think the larger public sees academe as intrinsically valuable anymore--education is now only seen as relevant when vocational. Education is not important, just the diploma and wage it will provide.

Academics seem to resist acknowledging this reality, finding it easier to criticize unions like UCU than participate meaningfully. Despite imperfections in UCU which I will absolutely acknowledge, unions provide leverage, but only if people participate.

But, well, union participation is often tedious, thankless, and consumes personal time—similar to why even those concerned about political issues rarely take concrete action through campaigning or petitions.

I'll also acknowledge that beyond common concerns about retaliation and membership dues, academic unions face unique challenges. The widely varying workloads and responsibilities across academic positions make standardized representation difficult. Additionally, since unionization benefits some more than others, those who might gain less have little personal incentive to participate.
This ultimately reflects individualism at work in academic settings which I discussed upthread.

I thus think HE in the UK is pretty doomed and will probably implode. Unless there is market demand for a specialism that is industry related, the permanent academic post will go the way of the dodo. Heck, a lot of academics don't even have the job security of primary or secondary school teachers, who last I saw, did get a 5.5% pay rise in September. Junior doctors did, rail company workers did, but not the academics. And that is not just down to UCU (see above). It is an easy cat to kick...

You write as if we’re all dumb and don’t understand what a union is for. We aren’t “struggling” with this “framing”. It’s just that UCU isn’t doing what a union ought to do any more. It’s abandoned class consciousness and traditional Marxism in favour of identity politics, political posturing and faux “social justice”. Rather than focusing on collective action and employment rights, both my local branch and the central union and leadership are obsessed with trans rights, Palestine, and policing speech, and other modish social justice causes. They aren’t interested in or doing any of the traditional work of a union at all.

At my local level, the people who are heavily involved in our branch are very into this. They are also senior to me in my own department and I’d be the first to be targeted by them in the workplace if I didn’t confirm exactly to the “right” opinions. You may not be aware of this, but some workplace bullies absolutely love the union because it gives them a chance to operate even more effectively. I used to be involved at a local level but gave up after it became clear that the main thing was conforming to very specific political opinions and not deviating from them. Often, these are driven disproportionately by the PhD students’ interests (eg gender, Palestine, decolonisation etc.) as our branch likes to look good to the campus student activists and grad students have more time for activism than we do. (Our Athena Swan committee was diverted by local branch activists to refocus on “gender identity”, nonbinary and trans issues instead of women’s careers, and dumped any interest in actual women, or out-of-fashion problems like maternity rights, children and childcare - also because for the most part PhD students don’t tend to see those things as relevant to them).

If I, for example, was targeted as an employee for any expression of perfectly legal gender critical views, neither the local nor the national union would help me with my employment rights - quite the opposite: they would enjoy throwing me to the wolves.

Finally - the union is expensive. I’ve paid around £300 per year of my after tax income for nearly 20 years, to a union that does nothing to represent my employment interests nor any kind of collective bargaining or “class consciousness”. I’m just no longer able to justify paying this in the current financial climate, just so the leadership can have endless self-indulgent conference motions on trans rights or Israel or whatever, to be honest. I have a family and need to spend that £300 on them.

Chrysanthemum5 · 06/03/2025 14:21

Completely agree @pleasedonotfeedme

I don't need a lecture on what a union is - I've been on picket lines since I was a child, miners strike etc and I know what an effective union does. UCU is not effective at all and fails all its members

Original poster

DanceAppleGCMum · 06/03/2025 15:38

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 13:29

You write as if we’re all dumb and don’t understand what a union is for. We aren’t “struggling” with this “framing”. It’s just that UCU isn’t doing what a union ought to do any more. It’s abandoned class consciousness and traditional Marxism in favour of identity politics, political posturing and faux “social justice”. Rather than focusing on collective action and employment rights, both my local branch and the central union and leadership are obsessed with trans rights, Palestine, and policing speech, and other modish social justice causes. They aren’t interested in or doing any of the traditional work of a union at all.

At my local level, the people who are heavily involved in our branch are very into this. They are also senior to me in my own department and I’d be the first to be targeted by them in the workplace if I didn’t confirm exactly to the “right” opinions. You may not be aware of this, but some workplace bullies absolutely love the union because it gives them a chance to operate even more effectively. I used to be involved at a local level but gave up after it became clear that the main thing was conforming to very specific political opinions and not deviating from them. Often, these are driven disproportionately by the PhD students’ interests (eg gender, Palestine, decolonisation etc.) as our branch likes to look good to the campus student activists and grad students have more time for activism than we do. (Our Athena Swan committee was diverted by local branch activists to refocus on “gender identity”, nonbinary and trans issues instead of women’s careers, and dumped any interest in actual women, or out-of-fashion problems like maternity rights, children and childcare - also because for the most part PhD students don’t tend to see those things as relevant to them).

If I, for example, was targeted as an employee for any expression of perfectly legal gender critical views, neither the local nor the national union would help me with my employment rights - quite the opposite: they would enjoy throwing me to the wolves.

Finally - the union is expensive. I’ve paid around £300 per year of my after tax income for nearly 20 years, to a union that does nothing to represent my employment interests nor any kind of collective bargaining or “class consciousness”. I’m just no longer able to justify paying this in the current financial climate, just so the leadership can have endless self-indulgent conference motions on trans rights or Israel or whatever, to be honest. I have a family and need to spend that £300 on them.

Show quote history

Hear hear.

OP posts:

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 15:45

This issue of PhD students in the union is pretty complex. When I was a graduate student, of course, I was all for it. But, as a poster points out upthread, some of our workplace rights might centre around pay and conditions for postgraduate supervision, and that’s not an easy problem to negotiate if graduate students are also in the union. For example, it might be in all our interests if our institutions stopped outsourcing undergraduate teaching to postgraduate students at cheap freelance rates, and instead paid and regulated teaching and marking properly as something that we ought to be doing as a core part of the university. But grad students are unlikely to see things like that, and there’s a conflict of interests right there. Grad students rightly have a different set of priorities to university staff; and I’m not sure these always gel well with each other.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 15:55

DanceAppleGCMum · 06/03/2025 08:08

@Patterncarmen I tried to be pretty active in the union when I was a member. I didn't run for leadership positions but I attended meetings and spoke up in them. But the branch was controlled by a very vocal group of old buddies who set the agenda and actively worked to undermine and humiliate people who challenged their views. These were views not just about HE, our university, our branch but about all sorts or wider political issues which somehow crept into the purview of the union and it's meetings.
When Jo Grady was going for leadership, the blinkers fell and I saw that actually the whole of UCU was the same - a small number of horrible, bullies setting the priorities for the Union that stretched well beyond UKHE. So I left.

My issue with PhD students being I the Union is that they're students, not staff. Why not let undergraduates in too?
PhD students' contractual engagement with the university is completely different from people who are employed there. It makes no sense for us to share a union - they have a Union already which is focused on student issues.

My other issue that some of my grumbles with UKHE and my employer is actually because of PhD students - too many, poor quality, exploited for fees, inappropriately workloaded. How can we have the conversation about this in/with the union when the people the conversation concerns are sat there?

As to your points about academics struggling to frame their job and employment (rather than vocation). Speak for yourself. This absolutely doesn't represent my experience at all. Being an academic, to me, is just a job. It's a very easy way to pay the bills. Nothing more, nothing less. I appreciate that might not be the case for others

Undergraduates aren’t teaching your seminars nor marking papers. PhD students are. They are also doing research. PhD students are also being exploited in their roles, and want representation. I don’t understand the hostility to this other than the desire to maintain hierarchy?

I said nothing about how I framed anything…I just noticed that a lot of academics do seem to treat their discipline as a calling. It is fine if you see academic work as purely transactional for money.

If you didn’t like Jo Grady, you could have said so. Did you ever vote in the national elections, or express your concerns in the branch committee. We had a group of rather unpleasant folk in the branch executive, and a group of us proposed a different way of doing things, and they were out. It is very possible.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 15:58

PicturePlace · 06/03/2025 06:47

Students are now seen as consumers. Universities are run for profits. The latter two points are absolutely true.

Yes, students are seem as consumers. We are providing an expensive service.

Universities are not run for profit, that would be illegal. There are no profits. How can you still not understand that? Their task is to try to stick to budget and to return a surplus, which is then - by law - reinvested into the university.

I understand it fine. It is a very common technique to use semantics to pretend someone else doesn’t understand. The surplus is not all reinvested in the university…it is being used to pay some fairly enormous sums to Vice Chancellors. The latter have made some ridiculous investments in foreign campus’s, and campus infrastructure that are putting their universities under financial threat.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 15:59

bge · 06/03/2025 10:13

Totally agree @DanceAppleGCMum with all your points. My UCU chapter is one famous for political actions outwith university employment law. If you don’t match their politics 100% there’s no point. I have no interest in this.

I also just see it as a job.

But yet you are commenting here.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:07

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 13:29

You write as if we’re all dumb and don’t understand what a union is for. We aren’t “struggling” with this “framing”. It’s just that UCU isn’t doing what a union ought to do any more. It’s abandoned class consciousness and traditional Marxism in favour of identity politics, political posturing and faux “social justice”. Rather than focusing on collective action and employment rights, both my local branch and the central union and leadership are obsessed with trans rights, Palestine, and policing speech, and other modish social justice causes. They aren’t interested in or doing any of the traditional work of a union at all.

At my local level, the people who are heavily involved in our branch are very into this. They are also senior to me in my own department and I’d be the first to be targeted by them in the workplace if I didn’t confirm exactly to the “right” opinions. You may not be aware of this, but some workplace bullies absolutely love the union because it gives them a chance to operate even more effectively. I used to be involved at a local level but gave up after it became clear that the main thing was conforming to very specific political opinions and not deviating from them. Often, these are driven disproportionately by the PhD students’ interests (eg gender, Palestine, decolonisation etc.) as our branch likes to look good to the campus student activists and grad students have more time for activism than we do. (Our Athena Swan committee was diverted by local branch activists to refocus on “gender identity”, nonbinary and trans issues instead of women’s careers, and dumped any interest in actual women, or out-of-fashion problems like maternity rights, children and childcare - also because for the most part PhD students don’t tend to see those things as relevant to them).

If I, for example, was targeted as an employee for any expression of perfectly legal gender critical views, neither the local nor the national union would help me with my employment rights - quite the opposite: they would enjoy throwing me to the wolves.

Finally - the union is expensive. I’ve paid around £300 per year of my after tax income for nearly 20 years, to a union that does nothing to represent my employment interests nor any kind of collective bargaining or “class consciousness”. I’m just no longer able to justify paying this in the current financial climate, just so the leadership can have endless self-indulgent conference motions on trans rights or Israel or whatever, to be honest. I have a family and need to spend that £300 on them.

Show quote history

Most of the commentary above is through the lens of gender critical views, which seems to so dominate your world view that you abandon any leverage you have with the employer. And I do think the latter is very stupid, yes.

Exhibit A: You are worried about £300 being expensive. That’s one hour of a lawyer or a nice dinner out, or a night in a London hotel. That’s probably because you are underpaid so much that a few hundred quid is a major expense. In industry, that’s chump change. If you want to accept those conditions that is up to you, but it seems to be very foolish to accept being underpaid.

Newcastle is going to strike…that’s fairly traditional union work, but of course, striking has been deemed on this board as not being creative.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:11

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 15:45

This issue of PhD students in the union is pretty complex. When I was a graduate student, of course, I was all for it. But, as a poster points out upthread, some of our workplace rights might centre around pay and conditions for postgraduate supervision, and that’s not an easy problem to negotiate if graduate students are also in the union. For example, it might be in all our interests if our institutions stopped outsourcing undergraduate teaching to postgraduate students at cheap freelance rates, and instead paid and regulated teaching and marking properly as something that we ought to be doing as a core part of the university. But grad students are unlikely to see things like that, and there’s a conflict of interests right there. Grad students rightly have a different set of priorities to university staff; and I’m not sure these always gel well with each other.

That I will say is a nuanced comment.

However, it is well known PhD students are being exploited.

They don’t have the same concerns as an undergraduate. The UG student union is appropriate for them.

They are supposed to be (usually) academics in training. And UCU offers continuing professional development that could help them, and a voice.

I might offer that the adjunctification of the faculty would not have happened with more faculty governance and with a union in which people participate meaningfully. It offers leverage against things like that.

bge · 06/03/2025 16:14

I would strongly push back at phd students being faculty in training. In STEM that is not even close to the truth. We are told 2.5% if phd students become permanent lecturers, but a vast majority work in science, pharma, medicine etc.

anyway. This has confirmed to me that we have very different opinions and backgrounds and my time reading this thread is better spent writing my grant 😁

DrUptonsGardenGnome · 06/03/2025 16:20

Patterncarmen · 05/03/2025 22:08

No that's not right - I think unions are valuable in some industries and for some workers. But not for me, and especially not in this role.

So in your role, a union doesn’t work for you. You won’t join one or consider it. So why are you commenting on unions for universities and their effectiveness. You have automatically rejected them.

Show quote history

I don't have to be Black to think and say that racism is worng.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:22

bge · 06/03/2025 10:13

Totally agree @DanceAppleGCMum with all your points. My UCU chapter is one famous for political actions outwith university employment law. If you don’t match their politics 100% there’s no point. I have no interest in this.

I also just see it as a job.

Again, I’m not seeing in the news things about UCU deliberately violating employment law. Do you have a link?

You can see it as just a job, and that’s OK.

I suspect it goes back to universities being businesses (I’m waiting now to be told technically they are charities, etc, but nonetheless) where education is vocational and transactional only. There is even a WonkHE article on why we need to encourage students to be consumers. You give the lecture which costs them a certain amount of pounds, the student consumes the lecture, produces X assignments, they get their mark, and those marks lead to a degree (the product) and a a job. And that’s all education is. Purely transactional. And being an educator is purely transactional. I guess primary and secondary school are too, except the teachers are being paid by taxes.

But if that is the climate or your world view, to give up any leverage you have with the employer doesn’t seem to make sense.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:23

DrUptonsGardenGnome · 06/03/2025 16:20

I don't have to be Black to think and say that racism is worng.

Show quote history

People’s race is not a choice. They are born with it. Being in a union or not is a choice.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:24

bge · 06/03/2025 16:14

I would strongly push back at phd students being faculty in training. In STEM that is not even close to the truth. We are told 2.5% if phd students become permanent lecturers, but a vast majority work in science, pharma, medicine etc.

anyway. This has confirmed to me that we have very different opinions and backgrounds and my time reading this thread is better spent writing my grant 😁

But do your students work in the lab with you, and do you co-publish with them?

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:25

Chrysanthemum5 · 06/03/2025 14:21

Completely agree @pleasedonotfeedme

I don't need a lecture on what a union is - I've been on picket lines since I was a child, miners strike etc and I know what an effective union does. UCU is not effective at all and fails all its members

Yes, 100% of UCU members receive no benefit at all. Again, link for that?

bge · 06/03/2025 16:27

I didn’t say the union violates employment law. I said the activities they focus on are separate to that - they are obsessed with Palestine, for example. I don’t want that from my union. I want a focus on our working conditions.

I am a prominent scientific researcher and do see this as a job. If I left the university I’d get snapped up quickly in other industries (I know this). I have little loyalty to my university and don’t see it as a vocation - I see science as my vocation, and I can do that in a fair few places. And I absolutely HATE being patronised, and found the union officials to be industrial strength patronisers

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 16:33

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:11

That I will say is a nuanced comment.

However, it is well known PhD students are being exploited.

They don’t have the same concerns as an undergraduate. The UG student union is appropriate for them.

They are supposed to be (usually) academics in training. And UCU offers continuing professional development that could help them, and a voice.

I might offer that the adjunctification of the faculty would not have happened with more faculty governance and with a union in which people participate meaningfully. It offers leverage against things like that.

Show quote history

My institution doesn’t even recognise the union and it’s never part of any discussion on pay or casualisation. So how do you think it’s going to have an effect?

I think you must be an enthusiastic PhD student, from the spelling/grammar mistakes, and the earnest desire to explain to us all what a union is. For lots of us the mad gender politics might be the last straw, but that doesn’t mean we “see everything though a gender critical lens”. Far from it. I have voted in every UCU national exec vote since 2004. I’ve been on several strike actions and ASOS actions, and none had any substantial impact. The USS was completely trashed in successive stages and the union was completely ineffective at stopping any of it — the UCU leadership attitude was more like “oh dear, what can we do?”

And we thought Sally Hunt was ineffective, but she wasn’t remotely as bad as Jo Grady. The “four fights” nonsense was run like student politics -- indulgent, confusing, ineffective. It was bad enough in the 2000s, but it’s like a playtime union now. I calculate I’ve spent over £6k on union membership over the years, and it’s done nothing of substance at all on the steep decline on pay, working conditions and pension rights since 2004. The last set of strikes were not just an abject failure, but actively counterproductive.

Your logic that we shouldn’t “accept being underpaid” is very odd. The UCU has done nothing about pay that’s had any real impact for over 20 years. So why is me not continuing to fund a lot of faux social justice posturing equivalent to “accepting” being underpaid? Your posts really are quite confused.

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 16:39

BusyGreenFinch · 06/03/2025 12:45

I'm similar to bge. My local branch has a whole bunch of political positions I really disagree with (I'm politically centrist) and has got themselves into hot water legally several times in recent years. I also have a number of disabilities and protected characteristics that are not currently trendy. So I held my nose and joined the Free Speech Union (I never thought I'd willingly join a group formed by Mr. Young and yet this is how the world works) to at least be there for me if my local UCU branch ever take umbrage with me.

Oh, Toby Young’s outfit.

Well, in the guise of free speech, President Trump is outlawing campus protests, especially if they are Pro Palestinian. And Liz Truss is claiming that Britain wants to be part of the “second American revolution”. She announced a new “free speech media network” at a right-wing conference in Washington. Liz Truss is always a winner, no?

Orwell’s 1984 and Doublespeak comes to mind. It is like heading up a group called the Renewable Energy Foundation, and finding it promotes oil, gas, and nuclear. (And, yes it does exist).

Patterncarmen · 06/03/2025 17:10

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 16:33

My institution doesn’t even recognise the union and it’s never part of any discussion on pay or casualisation. So how do you think it’s going to have an effect?

I think you must be an enthusiastic PhD student, from the spelling/grammar mistakes, and the earnest desire to explain to us all what a union is. For lots of us the mad gender politics might be the last straw, but that doesn’t mean we “see everything though a gender critical lens”. Far from it. I have voted in every UCU national exec vote since 2004. I’ve been on several strike actions and ASOS actions, and none had any substantial impact. The USS was completely trashed in successive stages and the union was completely ineffective at stopping any of it — the UCU leadership attitude was more like “oh dear, what can we do?”

And we thought Sally Hunt was ineffective, but she wasn’t remotely as bad as Jo Grady. The “four fights” nonsense was run like student politics -- indulgent, confusing, ineffective. It was bad enough in the 2000s, but it’s like a playtime union now. I calculate I’ve spent over £6k on union membership over the years, and it’s done nothing of substance at all on the steep decline on pay, working conditions and pension rights since 2004. The last set of strikes were not just an abject failure, but actively counterproductive.

Your logic that we shouldn’t “accept being underpaid” is very odd. The UCU has done nothing about pay that’s had any real impact for over 20 years. So why is me not continuing to fund a lot of faux social justice posturing equivalent to “accepting” being underpaid? Your posts really are quite confused.

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I’m sorry you work for an institution that doesn’t recognise the union, and that you are in that situation.

Nope, professor emeritus. I even have nominals. And very glad I’m retired.

I do think UCU did make some leeway on USS. Mark Taylor Batty struck me as a decent negotiator. I remind you that the anti union laws instituted by the Conservatives made things very difficult.

What is real social justice to you? I don’t see concern about genocide in Palestine as faux. A member of our branch committee was Palestinian, and she didn’t see it as faux. Do you think about it, or is not important? Or does the gender critical views outweigh that?

You shouldn’t accept being underpaid. But you are. You are doing it of your own free will and volition. Why?

I’m glad you voted and struck, thanks for that. Voter turnout did not tend to be very good in UCU. Nor did it in the United States in the last election, and well, we have President Trump to deal with now.

Did you get involved in your local branch otherwise?

Not confused whatsoever. Because I knew employment law (courtesy of UCU) and paid quite a lot of attention to how SMT worked from being in the branch executive, I was promoted and made a very decent wage. HR didn’t want to promote me because I was active in the union, but they had to, because I met all 14 criteria in the specs, and they knew that I knew the law. I was able to take early retirement in my late 50s because my wage was higher. And, I received a buyout, because the inept SMT ran the university into the ground and wanted to get rid of people who had a higher salary. Being in UCU was very advantageous to me. It taught me a lot how management thinks and how faculty think. I’m seeing from this thread that my assumptions are not far wrong.

That all said, the university got their money’s worth. I had grants, and I published quite a lot. And, I worked in the branch committee and passed on information to my colleagues so they could prosper as well. That’s an example of how collective action can work.

As an aside, I also never thought education should be purely transactional. I don’t see how that inspires enthusiasm in students for learning, but that is another topic for another day.

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 20:39

@Patterncarmen if you’re emeritus and now retired, you must be enjoying a rather nice final salary pension — that we won’t now get. No wonder you’re happy to overlook the failure of the union! Their complete abandonment of those of us who now will get a pension A THIRD the size of yours really rankles. The pension was the biggest issue of the last twenty years, and the union completely fumbled it. Well, more than fumbled it. Did absolutely fuck all to help.

I do think you are a bit confused about the role of a union, to be honest. You’re lecturing us about class consciousness and collective bargaining, but identity politics is the very opposite of class consciousness. And if a union is there to provide collective bargaining on employment issues, why it is concerning itself with empty conference motions about international affairs that it has absolutely no leverage or purchase on? Is the UCU for members, or for social justice notions about Palestine? Why should I pay membership dues for the union to focus on international conflicts that they can’t do anything about and are nothing to do with my employment? If I want to get involved with Palestine activism, why is the union the place to do it? Why isn’t it focusing on employment conditions, workplace bullying, workload, childcare, etc.? The UCU did absolutely fuck all during COVID when many of us were doing crazy workloads online, plus also looking after our kids full time with no support from management or the union or anyone.

PatternCarmen - on the one hand you think we should all get involved to negotiate with our employer. But the union locally and nationally is obsessed with social justice issues that have nothing at all to do with our employers. If they have a dismal, even catastrophically miserable record on the actual main issues which affect us as employees, aren’t they pretty rubbish as a union? Where’s all the collective bargaining and class consciousness?

Patterncarmen · 07/03/2025 23:28

pleasedonotfeedme · 06/03/2025 20:39

@Patterncarmen if you’re emeritus and now retired, you must be enjoying a rather nice final salary pension — that we won’t now get. No wonder you’re happy to overlook the failure of the union! Their complete abandonment of those of us who now will get a pension A THIRD the size of yours really rankles. The pension was the biggest issue of the last twenty years, and the union completely fumbled it. Well, more than fumbled it. Did absolutely fuck all to help.

I do think you are a bit confused about the role of a union, to be honest. You’re lecturing us about class consciousness and collective bargaining, but identity politics is the very opposite of class consciousness. And if a union is there to provide collective bargaining on employment issues, why it is concerning itself with empty conference motions about international affairs that it has absolutely no leverage or purchase on? Is the UCU for members, or for social justice notions about Palestine? Why should I pay membership dues for the union to focus on international conflicts that they can’t do anything about and are nothing to do with my employment? If I want to get involved with Palestine activism, why is the union the place to do it? Why isn’t it focusing on employment conditions, workplace bullying, workload, childcare, etc.? The UCU did absolutely fuck all during COVID when many of us were doing crazy workloads online, plus also looking after our kids full time with no support from management or the union or anyone.

PatternCarmen - on the one hand you think we should all get involved to negotiate with our employer. But the union locally and nationally is obsessed with social justice issues that have nothing at all to do with our employers. If they have a dismal, even catastrophically miserable record on the actual main issues which affect us as employees, aren’t they pretty rubbish as a union? Where’s all the collective bargaining and class consciousness?

@pleasedonotfeedme I retired early, and am not receiving my pension yet. I was able to retire not because of my pension, but because I saved my money, did some investment, lived frugally and paid off my mortgage early. I’m living off interest from my savings and investments. Just like I learned employment law to protect myself, I learned about finance. I taught in the UK for a little over a decade, and most of my pension is abroad anyway. USS contributes very little to my personal finances.

You claim the union did absolutely nothing except for a social justice platform you disagreed with. That’s simply not true.

Do you know that UCU paid several million in strike pay to members? I would venture that you yourself received it. It may have even covered a reasonable proportion of the £6000 in dues you paid over twenty years in addition of course to the legal protection and other benefits. Do you know how unusual that is for a union to do that at the level that UCU did? Do you have any idea how hard the trustees worked in their own time to make sure the money was there for the members, particularly those on lower incomes?

The UCU negotiators for USS accomplished this which was very significant. Benefits were restored in full. But that must have passed you by.

https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/13216/UCU-Rising-USS-pensions-justice-has-prevailed#:~:text=In%20the%20joint%20statement%2C%20UUK,have%20lost%20since%20April%202022.

I myself helped develop a CPD course to help faculty and spent my free time to do it. Have you taken any of these?

During COVID at our institution, I spent many hours advising members on how to respond to unreasonable workload demands and the need for technology provision. We established a food bank on our campus for faculty and students. A UCU officer spend a long time on a decent document advising faculty on how to deal with student poverty with resources. These are just a few examples.

But if you concentrate only on your disagreement with UCU’s political platform, it is fairly likely you will not even notice or automatically discount what was accomplished. I never claimed UCU was perfect, but I will say this.

How many of your colleagues scabbed during the strikes, did the marking and covered the classes of those who did? Perhaps your ire should be directed at them. If you don’t stand together, you fail. And the working conditions will continue to get worse.

Good luck to you.

UCU Rising: USS pensions justice has prevailed

https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/13216/UCU-Rising-USS-pensions-justice-has-prevailed#:~:text=In%20the%20joint%20statement%2C%20UUK,have%20lost%20since%20April%202022.

pleasedonotfeedme · 08/03/2025 01:24

@Patterncarmen no, I’m not taking about that pensions issue at all, but way before all the stuff about the fund valuation. In any case, any “wins” are much less down to UCU and more to market movements which affect the fund valuations.

When I started contributing in 2004, the USS was a very well managed fully funded final salary scheme. Over a period of about a decade up to 2014 USS and the UUK held a number of votes with members to downgrade the scheme. First the final salary section closed to new members. Then the final salary section was removed from younger members, and then from everyone who had less than a certain number of years. The retired and those about to retire kept their final salary entitlement, but everyone else lost it and had to take a much-diminished “career average” pension instead. For people like me, the difference may end up being a really huge amount - like a third of what current retirees get.

It was a big deal. During this time the pension went from one of the only decent things about academia to a shadow of what it was. UCU was as much use as a blooming chocolate teapot. They had no impact on the situation at all. We all ended up with a hugely reduced pension which also impacts much more on female staff, whose “career average” is disproportionately affected by having children, and taking much longer on average to be promoted than male colleagues.

The union was completely ineffective in all of this. In fact it barely raised a peep. I happen to think that a workplace union should focus its efforts on this kind of thing, and not on non-employment related political issues in other countries. It’s badly run, the leadership is terrible and no, I’ve never seen a single personal benefit. Because of a quirk of my contract I’m not eligible for strike pay and they have no recognition at my institution anyway!

And our branch does nothing of this food bank and staff support of which you speak. They have meetings at which the branch officers argue about Palestine, show off to the graduate students, and talk about who’s doing the next round of leafleting. There is no staff supporting or advice or anything of that nature going on. Lots of tweeting and flag waving and speeches. Not much action or class consciousness raising though.