Where should the college dispute go from here?

High spirits on a college workers’ picket line in north London (Picture: Guy Smallman)

The industrial action in English colleges is hanging in the balance. There were strikes at 17 colleges and college groups across the country last month over pay parity with school teachers, national bargaining and workloads.

At the UCU union’s yearly congress last May, union members in further education voted for a nationally coordinated campaign.

Pay and workload were central issues. There was also a campaign for an agreement that would allow further education to be levelled up through nationally binding agreements was at the heart of the dispute.

A ballot campaign was launched that originally had around 70 colleges involved. This was soon whittled down to 54 participating in the ballot.

Some 33 of those succeeded in getting past the 50 percent turnout threshold required by anti-trade union laws. Out of these only 17 struck.

This confirmed the fears of those of us on the left of the further education committee (FEC). Despite the motion voted for at conference, the national campaign is becoming a series of local disputes essentially over pay and workload.

It comes from a combination of the right within the union failing to mobilise their own branches and regional officials pressuring branches to settle.

Some of these branches have achieved good results over pay and extra holiday entitlements. But it was another missed opportunity for national action.

Members demonstrated their appetite for this kind of action when they voted for it at the national conference and on the picket lines in January.

The FEC meeting last Friday agreed to encourage those branches left in the dispute to escalate their action.

It also agreed to organise a lobby of parliament as well as prepare for an aggregated ballot—a single ballot across the sector—over nationally binding agreements and to build national action.

UCU union members are holding a strike ballot over victimisation at New City College, made up of several colleges across East London and Essex. English For Speakers of Other Languages (Esol) teacher Wojciech Dmochowski is fighting to be reinstated.

He was dismissed for protesting at another campus against redundancies, for putting up posters and for his use of union email lists.

None of these are sackable offences. UCU members at two of the group’s campuses are voting in a ballot that ends on Friday.