UCU at it again - another ballot for strike action

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UCU - UK wide university strike ballot opens

What the actual fuck is wrong with these people?

My prediction is a 30-odd percent turnout with 40-odd percent voting in favour of strike action. Idiots.

Why do you see a union campaigning against yet another below-inflation pay rise, after years of below-inflation pay rises, as meaning that there must be something wrong with them? What do you think they should be doing instead?

So pleased I resigned from UCU last year. I spend my £30 a month supporting real feminist causes.

There are sector wide redundancies and closures of whole departments. Striking is pointless.

Ok. What do you think they should be doing instead?

Rather this than bleating about Gaza.

I think they should have had an effective campaign for proper pay rises instead of their disastrous four fights campaign. If they had done that years ago we wouldn't be where are - with senior leadership who know the union is useless.

Bet they're glad that Trump has fixed the Israel-Palestine conflict so they can focus on this for a bit.

• a pay uplift that is at least RPI + 3.5% or £2,500, whichever is the higher, on all pay points
• joint action to protect national agreements relating to terms and conditions of employment
• a national agreement to avoid redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the sector.

???😮

Fighting for improving terms, reducing precarity etc.

So things like, say:

• a national agreement to counter redundancies at all universities
• protect existing national agreements over terms and conditions
• a fair pay offer
• jointly lobby the UK government for a new higher education funding settlement.

That kind of thing? I've copied those straight from the UCU's website about the current strike proposal.

Those are great @GasperyJacquesRoberts the problem is that the union has proven itself to be so incompetent that the senior leaders know they can do whatever they like.

It's lovely to have great aims but UCU have destroyed any leverage they had

They should have one tangible goal rather than nebulous demands which take no account of the wider national landscape of HE.

UCU is determined to be in constant battle with the employer which undermines it's credibility and makes it look like a jumped-up student politics organisation. They should step in when there's a clear thing that happens rather than just being constantly moaning about conditions which are actually pretty decent.

And agree with PP that they've been so ridiculous and incompetent (and academics mitigate so heavily for the disruption of strikes) for the last few years that the union having a ballot won't bother university managers at all.

Striking over pay - no. Yes of course a fair pay offer is the right thing to do. But not when it comes at the expense of more thousands of job losses.

I don't know about you but this year I got a 1.summat pay increase. Inflation is way over that. Last year, and the year before, and the year before etc I also got below-inflation pay rises.

Thinking about it, I've worked in academia for well over a decade. In that time I'm struggling to remember a single year where I got a pay rise that kept pace with inflation. Contrast that to the previous decades I spent working in private industry where pay rises to at least match inflation were de rigueur and then we got performance-related pay rises on top.

Is that not a big enough deal for you to justify a union balloting its members for a strike? If not, what would be? Demanding that universities follow existing agreements about redundancies? Making a stand against the catastrophic funding of higher education? Or do you think that uni staff should just meekly say "Um, I'm not particularly happy about this" as their pay, conditions and the sector as a whole gets eroded?

FFS, I'm not even a member of a union right now but this thread has made me want to be.

But they're not just proposing a strike over pay. They're proposing a strike over pay plus redundancies, protection of existing national agreements over terms and conditions and lobbying the government about funding of higher education.

What's your actual objection here? Is it that you think they should be striking over redundancies, protection of agreements and funding without consideration of pay? Or that they shouldn't be threatening a strike at all? Or something else?

Pointless striking. Not enough are in UCU so the work is covered with minimal problems.

I am in UCU but I won’t strike this time.

My objection is the strike asks includes increased pay and no redundancies. Which is impossible. If your demands are impossible to meet, which these are, then the only losers are the students in the short term and the sector in the long run.

And the sector already lobbies government a lot, so again that bit is pointless.

The decision about whether to strike shouldn’t just be about whether the cause is just. It should also consider whether the strike is winnable. Because strikes involve considerable financial sacrifices for members, and every unsuccessful strike is burning through the union’s political (and financial) capital.

This isn’t winnable, so to lead members out on strike is unconscionable. The only people who will win are university management, because it will weaken the union.

I'd rejoin UCU if it would grasp a new nettle and make it their job to poke a stick at flawed uni business models, lack of financial oversight, overpaid VCs, schoolleaver demographics for at least the next 10 years, Russell Group insanity on grade requirements for vocational/shortage subjects, reform of the student loan system. Get involved in why the sector is falling.

@busybusybusy2015 Agreed - otherwise it's just refusing to row a boat with a big hole in it.

Can I ask a really dumb question? As I haven't really paid attention too much to what's going on - but isn't a strike something that happens when negotiations fail? Has the Union been in discussion with Universities about this (or these many things) and this has gotten nowhere, thus now the strike?

It seems to me though, that the demands are all symptoms of the the fourth bullet: "jointly lobby the UK government for a new higher education funding settlement" - I don't really see how the Universities can do any of the prior elements without fixing the overall problems in the sector, of which a lot are due to government policies (actually more than just HE funding...). Do you really need to strike to ask to work together? Have the Universities refused to work with the Union on this?