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Seven question & answers on the decision by the Higher Education Committee (HEC) on continuing our dispute
Below we answer seven questions on the Higher Education Committee (HEC) decision on Friday 17 March not to put the University and College Employers Association (UCEA) “offer” on the “Four Fights” (pay, pay gaps, workloads, and casualised contracts) dispute out to consultation.
As previously reported, members of our branch voted at a large strike meeting on Thursday 16 March to oppose the suspension of strikes. This vote was replicated many times over by branch representatives at the Branch Delegates Meeting (BDM) later that day - the eventual vote was 70% against calling off strikes this week and only 16% in favour.
Our assessment is that HEC made the correct decision.
We will follow up these seven questions and answers with another message with a brief report from our delegates to the BDM on Thursday 16 March, the day before the HEC meeting. There has been some public misinformation about this BDM, and our delegates’ report clarifies important points about its process and outcomes. Some of this, in advance of sharing that report, is included in answers to the below questions.
Seven Questions on that HEC decision
Q1: Why did the HEC “go against” 36,000 members who voted in an e-ballot?
Q2. Isn’t it undemocratic to ignore the e-ballot?
Q.3. Didn’t the Branch Delegates Meeting, called to discuss the e-ballot the day after it opened, also support putting the “offer” from employers to members? Isn’t it anti-democratic to go against the BDM?
Q4. Why would anyone not want to consult members on UCEA’s “offer” in the Four Fights dispute (pay, casualisation, equality/pay gaps, workloads)?
Q5. Isn’t there a USS “breakthrough”?
Q6: Couldn’t we just go with that “breakthrough”?
Q7. Is this a gamble? Does the HEC’s response to the employer “offer” mean that we could lose everything (e.g., the gains on USS)?
Q1: Why did the HEC “go against” 36,000 members who voted in an e-ballot?
This idea has spread on social media. However, it is inaccurate. There was what was initially called a ‘survey’ but has become referred to as an ‘e-ballot’. It was opened and closed within 48 hours, without any proper analysis and explanation of what was being asked, or how. Importantly, the question in the e-ballot was what social scientists who construct surveys call a “double-barrelled” question: two questions with potentially different responses, combined in a single question where only one possible answer can be given. Further, each of those two questions combined two separate disputes in one. This means it is impossible to interpret the answers to such an incoherent question, and apply it meaningfully to our dispute.
By contrast, members in our branch meeting supported the idea of a proper consultation over the USS offer, but not over the pay and pay-related offer. Members were also opposed to calling off the strikes during consultation. But that was only possible to determine because we decided to break down the single ‘double-barrelled’ question into the four separate questions it contained.
Additionally, the proposals about which this survey asked were rushed out to members without either the elected negotiators or the elected HEC having seen them. The online survey did not provide any proper explanation or background about what the proposals entailed and only very limited time for discussion and analysis of the offer. It was circulated 48 hours before an HEC meeting, which is supposed to be the forum which decides on matters such as whether, on what, and how to consult the membership. In other words, the e-poll bypassed the union’s democratic structures in an unnecessary rush, given the proposals were not time-limited.
Q2. Isn’t it undemocratic to ignore the e-ballot?
Democratic decisions (including ballot questions) must be sound, and those participating in making them need to be well-informed for results to be valid. Where the questions are complicated, a reasonable time scale to answer them needs to be provided. Not only that, there are clear democratic obligations that the rules of the union demand are followed. For UCU, this includes a requirement that the HEC authorises ballots, consultations, including the detail of the questions put, and so on. On all those counts, this survey failed. It was a 48-hour plebiscite, announced at very short notice, during a strike period, and on the afternoon of a mass demonstration, with no democratic structures of our union having been consulted in its design or methodology. It presented the proposals without context and in a tendentious and triumphalist way, without members being provided with a baseline against which to consider them, and without fully and properly explaining the consequences of any decision. This on top of an incoherent (confusing and confused) question.
Such an exercise is not a meaningful consultation of members. Nevertheless, the HEC did not ignore the data from this poll. It did however decide that, due to the rushed and incoherent nature of this poll, the results could not be determinative of our union’s position. The HEC has not ruled out consulting members on any element of the offer in the future, but has simply affirmed that any future consultation should follow a proper process, authorised democratically, and executed in a sound way. Indeed, another HEC meeting should review this question of consultation next week.
Q.3. Didn’t the Branch Delegates Meeting, called to discuss the e-ballot the day after it opened, also support putting the “offer” from employers to members? Isn’t it anti-democratic to go against the BDM?
When the BDM was asked the same question as the e-ballot, the majority (decisively) voted “No”. Some branches, including our own, had requested taking separate votes before the BDM, on questions conflated in the survey and posed to the BDM delegates. These were
- Do you want to consult the membership on the Four Fights proposal (pay and conditions)?
- Do you want to suspend the strike action on that dispute?
- Do you want to consult the membership on the USS proposal?
- Do you want to suspend strike action on the USS dispute?
The organisers of the BDM would not allow this. Nor did they permit our delegates to speak.
Instead, following the No vote on the single question, they put two separate questions to a vote: 1. Do you want to put the offers on Four Fights (pay and conditions) and on USS to members? 2. Do you want to suspend the strike action during that consultation? Whilst being somewhat of an improvement, the new questions conflated two distinct disputes (USS and Four Fights). As our branch strike meeting identified, many members might not want to consult on the Four Fights offer, even if they wanted to do so with the USS offer (see below as to why). The conflation of questions led to a paradoxical result: the vote for the first question (for consulting the membership on the offers) was marginally Yes, while the vote for the second question (continue striking) was overwhelmingly (70% to 16%) for Yes.
See our delegates’ report soon to be circulated.
Q4. Why would anyone not want to consult members on UCEA’s “offer” in the Four Fights dispute (pay, casualisation, equality/pay gaps, workloads)?
Quite simply, the “offer” here is not a concrete offer (as this blog from an ex-HEC member explains - we’ve seen most of it before, and rejected it!). It includes a general commitment from UCEA to consult employer members on some issues, and to monitor on others. But on key matters, such as casualisation, whilst it proposes that each university might get rid of zero hour contracts, it leaves that to each university to decide based on considerations specific to it. On the more numerous and widespread forms of casualisation (as-and-when, fixed term contracts, let alone the highly problematic “open-ended contracts with end dates subject to funding”) it proposes nothing. On workloads and pay gaps it proposes some standards for the sector to aim for (to be developed in consultation with the unions), but no mechanism or or obligation for HEIs to implement these. On pay, it proposes to “review the pay spine”, but that review will not include any increase in pay for our members.
The pay settlement remains the same as we rejected earlier this year: 8% for the lowest grades, where UCU do not have any members rising to 5% over two years for almost all of our members. In other words for UCU members it represents a 15% real-terms pay cut, or 55 days of working for the employers for free, for life.
We rejected similar proposals on the other ‘pay-related’ elements of the Four Fights in 2020. It is a terrible trade union strategy to accept a warmed up version of a deal you have already rejected, unless you think you are losing the dispute. If that is what these officials think, they should be honest about it and have the debate in the open.
Q5. Isn’t there a USS “breakthrough”?
The employers have made some positive-sounding statements on the USS front. However, the matter is not settled. They have made significant caveats in their public support for restoring the benefits cut and reducing member contributions. These are that the scheme be in good health on a long-term “sustainable” basis, according to a scheme evaluation, and that the separate HEI member organisations vote for this in a consultation.
As we know from previous experience, it is precisely the valuation methodology and the USS Executive’s ability to adjust it that produces valuation deficit outcomes. For example, the employers decided to reduce their ‘risk appetite’ in 2020 (their subjective sense of the scheme’s prospects), causing the projected deficit to increase to £14bn. It is also this methodology that underpins any consideration of long-term sustainability (see this note by a USS observer, and actuarial expert Dennis Leech). So, this “offer”, with a very subjective sense of “sustainable”, and dependent on consultation with employers, is a potentially huge get-out clause for employers. They have not really firmly committed to a specific outcome and there is as yet no “bankable win”, as explained in this blog. At the same time, we also need them to commit to reviewing the methodology.
This not to say that members should not be consulted on the USS proposals, but that these should not be misrepresented as a done deal on getting our benefits restored. If we consult, we should be clear about what is on the table. The survey did not make any of these issues clear.
Q6: Couldn’t we just go with that “breakthrough”?
No. Not only is the offer not a clear victory as some have claimed, there is also another principle here. We voted in a ballot for strike action based on a prospectus (published by our leadership) that settling one dispute would not mean we settled the other. Each had to be considered independently. One hugely important reason for this, in relation to USS, is that a large percentage of our membership is in post-92 Higher Education Institutions and are therefore not in USS, but in a different pension scheme.
Several pre-92 universities, including Imperial College and Reading, are not in the Four Fights national pay dispute but are in the USS dispute. So stopping that dispute would also potentially isolate them. For example, Imperial College UCU have said that their employer is waiting for the outcome of the national pay dispute before making an offer.
Q7. Is this a gamble? Does the HEC’s response to the employer “offer” mean that we could lose everything (e.g., the gains on USS)?
No, this is very unlikely. There is no conditionality between the two disputes. Secondly the statement made by Universities UK (UUK) is simply their statement, and is not conditional on UCU’s attitude towards it.
The USS dispute is institutionally and legally separate to the Four Fights dispute, involving a different employers’ organisation, UUK. At the same time, the Four Fights offer does not contain enough concrete, significant gains that might be lost by a hasty rejection.
