I realized this thread has been thoroughly depressing me, and have stayed well away from it for a while. It's dispiriting enough having to cope with the atmosphere in the work place, which has been incredibly divisive and unpleasant since the MAB was called, but being called names and accused of deliberately sabotaging students on this thread was entirely voluntary. I'm engaging with no more of that.
I have unapologetically supported the action - with reservations - to date. In the last ballot I would have voted 'No', but a turn of events she brought about put paid to that. My own position is ambivalent. In principle am very pro-Union - in the university I work in it makes sense to be - and my local branch is strong, knowledgeable, and a godsend for more reasons than one.
I wish I could say as much for national, in particular the General Secretary, who I've complained elsewhere on the HE boards is unfit for post. It seems I'm far from alone in this view. It's in no small part her mismanagement of this whole dispute that's landed us in this impasse. She has an unfortunate ability to take simple ideas, toss them in a bowl of indecipherable word-salad whilst trotting out her interminable catchphrase 'let me be crystal clear' (she's anything but), and make them far more complicated than they ever needed to be.
Her first cock-up was the four fights. Pay and conditions, and a more simplified request in relation to that, has all the bases covered. She's muddied the water and made it less than clear what was actually being asked for. Another blunder was the disaggregated ballots. That meant some universities took a massive pay hit for striking to benefit those who didn't meet the 50% threshold, many of which were in the USS scheme (this was her chief concern) whilst the striking institutions were not.
There was fury amongst members when she stood down strike action in March, thus undoing a lot of the momentum gained thus far. Members were not consulted, but were asked to agree to it in an online poll subsequently. Members said 'piss off', and rightly so.
Grady wanted to call off this action when she'd got what she wanted: a significant backtrack in the raiding of the USS pension scheme. The members she'd sold short, many of who were in the striking institutions said 'get lost, you're not throwing us under the bus as we've sacrificed the most and stand to gain nothing from this'. Individual branches started petitioning her. There was a vote to continue action - which she didn't want to do - and she lost.
This dispute might have been resolved under the terms currently offered had it not been for her shenanigans. We are now well into sunk costs fallacy, and people are disinclined to give in when they've already sacrificed so much and it's cost them thousands in lost pay.
Hence we saw the MAB. Her mandate only has a limited period still to run.
Frankly, I think we are at a stalemate. The Tories are now saying they'll nix any pay increase offers for the public sector (we'll call it that, for sake of argument) despite the fact they've been taking real-term pay cuts for in excess of a decade. But that's the Tories. You'd expect as much.
The VC of the University of York is currently appealing to UCEA to sit back down at the negotiating table. That's the one piece of good news this week.
In the meantime, to say the HE system isn't in a horrendous mess is nothing short of wrong. Humanities are taking the biggest hit. There are redundancies, VSS schemes, and slashed courses everywhere. Some subject groups are practically running on a skeleton staff everywhere. In the meantime, those same institutions are throwing up shiny new buildings (admittedly from a different budget but they're not broke as they like to claim) and even opening new campuses.
AI, digital media and anything relating to sustainability and climate change are taking over the more classical subject disciplines we've been used to. And I see the standard of undergraduate writing. Dumbing down is a fact.
We had one of the best HE systems in the world. We've blown it.