Newcastle university workers on strike (Picture: Martin Richard Levy / Ian McDonald)
UCU union members at Newcastle university want to take hard-hitting action to defend jobs and education.
They struck for 14 days in March. They have now voted for a further 21 days of strikes and a possible marking and assessment boycott.
Hundreds of jobs are threatened.
Workers plan to disrupt student open days, graduation days and exam board meetings—which need to take place to sign off students’ final grades.
If the union members decide to withhold students’ grades through a marking boycott, it will escalate the level of disruption.
It can mean students graduating without knowing their full marks and a flood of complaints from students to management.
Last week, UCU members at Sheffield University and Durham University voted for strikes.
At Sheffield, management wants to cut costs by £23 million. The UCU branch says that bosses have not demonstrated the financial need to make these cuts.
Edinburgh University UCU will start a strike ballot on Monday 7 April.
And workers at Brunel, in west London, are set to strike for five days this week.
At Kingston University, talks between the bosses and UCU have broken down.
Bosses there want to slash education opportunities at the west London university.
They are threatening to close the humanities department and cut courses alongside forcing through redundancies.
The bosses had agreed with the union to enter into conciliation talks with Acas to try to resolve the dispute.
But on 3 April they announced they would no longer participate.
More branches like Kingston should move towards strikes.
Rather than struggling alone, they could look for ways to spread the fightback.
For example, workers from Newcastle and Durham could link up their strikes, speaking at each other’s branch meetings and organising joint mass rallies that bring together workers and students.
Unite members who work for the UCU union are continuing their strike over toxic working conditions and racism towards their members.
Workers put an automatic reply on their emails to tell people they are on strike and explain when they will be back at work.
They were shocked to see that the bosses had changed the message to simply say that they are “away from the office”.
A Unite member told Socialist Worker, “It shows how far they are prepared to go so that there is no publicity.”
The UCU encourages its members working in education to use similar out of office messages when they are on strike.
It underlines the point that they are being micromanaged.
The Unite members are set to strike for four days this week, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday next week and eight more days in April and May.
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