University workers at UCU union conference vote to resist the jobs massacre as crisis rocks sector (Photo: UCU / X)
Higher education is at crisis point. Yet at the UCU union’s annual congress this week there was a battle to get the union leadership to back nationwide action this autumn.
Higher education delegates voted for a “coordinated national campaign” across the sector to “defend jobs, pay and pensions”. And they agreed to move urgently towards a ballot to take up the fight over job losses.
The government’s Education Select Committee reported this month that 24 universities are at risk of collapse in the next year.
University bosses are pushing through cuts that will end careers, slash courses and transform education beyond recognition. Last year 15,000 jobs were lost in higher education.
Nearly 90 percent of universities are looking at hiring freezes or voluntary redundancies. They are quietly terminating the contracts of their army of workers on temporary contracts.
In other places, bosses are trying to back away from their legal responsibilities to let workers join the TPS pension scheme. At Southampton Solent University, bosses are threatening to fire and rehire workers and employ them through a wholly owned subsidiary without the same access to the pension.
UCU union members are already taking militant action. At Goldsmiths in London, students organised a rally on Wednesday over plans for £22 million worth of cuts. The workers are considering indefinite strikes.
At the University of Nottingham, UCU members are set to take two months of strikes from next week after bosses told nearly 2,700 of them they are at risk of redundancy.
Branch president Lopa Leach told Socialist Worker that workers at Nottingham are ready for action.
“They are angry. These cuts are not needed. If management don’t stop, they will see our strength.
“This is affecting so many other universities. It will mean even fewer working class people coming to university. That is just awful,” she said. “It will hurt the local economy, it will ruin neighbourhoods.”
Nottingham delegate Alan Barker told conference he was “extremely surprised” by the lack of a nationwide strategy for the union.
He said that job cuts are “not just an existential threat to our universities but to us as a union”.
Christina Paine from London Metropolitan University, where they are striking against planned cuts to 120 jobs, told Socialist Worker, “We have got university after university every day going into a new fight. And it feels like we are falling over a precipice.”
“We can’t fight this branch by branch. The only way to respond is by unified action.
“We need to do whatever we can to get people motivated. But we should go as soon as we can to a national ballot.”
Mina, also at London Met, agreed. “The students are in the front line of the attacks,” she told Socialist Worker. “Students look at the national union and think, why isn’t the union fighting? We are a union – we should be coming together.”
Delegates resolved to start a ballot for action in every university with the demand that the bosses rule out compulsory redundancies.
As university managements are unlikely to rule this out, this strategy would enable a coordinated fight against job cuts nationwide that would allow for action in the autumn.
A motion from the University of Liverpool also proposed to link the industrial struggle with a political campaign including a lobby of parliament and a national demonstration.
But some of the union’s leaders are pulling back from calling for coordinated strikes.
Speaking at a congress fringe event, newly elected vice president for higher education Mark Pendleton put an alternative position of trying to build up union density before taking action.
He said, “We haven’t necessarily done the work to actually do the deep organising and build capacity in our union across the branches to be able to effect change. How do we organise to mobilise rather than just calling out members all the time?”
Few union members would oppose a programme of “outreach and engagement” as Pendleton suggests. But planning for strikes shouldn’t be conditional on doing this first. There is an urgent need to act to defend education.
This goes beyond the jobs massacre. University workers’ pay has been held back for years and inflation is set to skyrocket. Workers will be hit with a deepening cost of living crisis, especially the support workers and casualised workers.
Striking has been shown to help build the union and can win support from students. For example, Nottingham UCU reports that the branch is bigger than ever.
The implications go far beyond the UCU and higher education.
The cost of living crisis is deepening amid Donald Trump’s war on Iran, profiteering bosses and Labour’s austerity 2.0.
If the left and unions don’t give a lead, the far right will grow out of the demoralisation and whip up scapegoating against migrants and refugees.
There is the potential to push for action. Resident doctors in the BMA union have already announced further strikes over pay, jobs and defending the NHS.
They are set to walk out for four days from 7am on 15 June—shower their picket lines in solidarity and invite them to speak at your trade union meeting.
Socialists in the trade union movement have to push for strikes this year at every opportunity. Organise now for a hot autumn.
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