You might have seen that the University and College Union (UCU) achieved a mandate for Industrial Action and wondering what this means for you? We have put together a guide to help you understand what will happen and how you may be affected.

Have a read below to find out more.

1. What’s going to happen?
2. What is industrial action at university?
3. Will there definitely be a strike?
4. What is the dispute about?
5. Who benefits from successful strikes?
6. Can’t you protest in a way that doesn’t affect students?
7. What can you do?

The University and College Union, the trade union that represents over 130, 000 university workers in the UK, announced the results of a nationwide ballot of members on possible future industrial action. Members voted to support strike action by an overwhelming majority, based on a historically high voter turnout.

What’s going to happen?

The Union has gone through democratic processes and outlined a plan of action:

• 24, 25, 30 November 2022
• Marking boycott in the new year
• Escalation of indefinite action in February 2023

Please note – none of these dates and actions have to take place. The November days are to show university leadership that staff are serious and current working conditions are unsustainable. Employers, including Coventry University and our VC John Latham now have the opportunity to negotiate meaningfully. Our VC has it within his remit to stop the action. 

Action under this mandate can take place until April 2023, as any mandate is for six months.

What is industrial action at university?

Industrial Action is a collective agreement to organise among employees as a way to compel a powerful employer to negotiate, usually as a position of last resort after conventional attempts at negotiation have failed. Striking is lawful. Historically, strikes have played a major role in securing workers’ rights, safe working conditions, and fair rates of pay in many kinds of employment around the world.

Industrial Action can take many forms:

• Strike Action – means employees withdraw their labour and loose pay for the time they are on strike. For students, this will be most visible or impactful with the withdrawal of teaching activities on strike days. But it’s not only lecturers who are UCU members it also includes researchers, librarians, technicians, administrators and other university staff, so various other activities are also affected. 
• ‘Action Short of a Strike’ (ASOS) – includes working to contract (most UCU members normally work well beyond the full-time hours they are paid for), not covering for absent colleagues.  
• Marking Boycott – means members will not mark coursework. This could threaten graduation and shut down progression in the summer of 2023.

Will there definitely be a strike?

Not necessarily. The point of announcing strike action is to put pressure on the employers to negotiate when they are refusing to do so. Union organisers will typically suspend or cancel a strike action if the employer shows signs of negotiating constructively. The ideal outcome is that this happens early enough to avoid the strike completely. 

Unfortunately, in recent previous disputes with UCU, the employers’ representatives have followed a hardline policy of refusing to engage, resulting in large numbers of days lost to strike action. The hardline approach has failed to break the UCU’s challenge, however, and so it’s at least conceivable that the employers will take a different line this time and co-operate to settle the dispute.

What is the dispute about?

The dispute ties together a number of problems that are fundamentally reshaping the nature of higher education in the UK: 

• Casualisation: many staff are living on precarious, short-term contracts and often don’t know in the summer whether they’ll have an income in September. 
• Rates of pay: have fallen steadily in real terms and are now worth around three-quarters of their 2009 value. This makes embarking on a career in universities the privilege of the independently wealthy.
• Systemic inequality, with a particular focus on the longstanding gender, ethnic and disability pay gaps.
• Workload and working conditions, with a focus on manageable hours and reducing levels of stress and ill health. Spiralling workloads and out-of-balance staff-student-ratios means students in 2022 do not receive the kind of attention and education staff would want to provide and which they were able to provide a mere couple of years ago.

Who benefits from successful strikes?

In short: everyone. The university as a whole would improve by engaging meaningfully with the collective unions’ proposals. Announcing action is to encourage employers to talk about proposals submitted in spring by all university unions – UCU (as the union for teaching and professional service staff) as well as Unison, Unite, GMB, and EIS. Concretely, university life would be improved in the following ways:

• We’d get pay justice: the negotiations with the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) are on behalf of all university workers: lecturers, researchers, administrators, cleaners, porters, maintenance staff, lecturers, Teaching Associates, post-graduate students who teach: everyone who keeps universities running. Under the current UCU mandate, teaching and professional service staff withdraw their labour and sacrifice their salary in this action to may pay better for everyone, in UCU or not. Improving pay will end pay injustice and close the gender, race, and disability pay gaps. 
• Universities would be more inclusive and representative of the population at large and student body in particular. The current real-term pay cuts and pension cuts mean that soon only the independently wealthy will be able to afford to work in higher education. This would undo the years of work that staff and student groups have spent attempting to democratise universities. Fighting these cuts is to prevent entire groups from being excluded from participating in Higher Education, either as workers or students. Higher Education, raising the future generations of leaders, should be open to workers from all backgrounds, not in the least because students deserve and need to see themselves and society represented. 
• Workload would be sustainable, and learning conditions improve. To secure tuition fees, universities have increased student recruitment exponentially, while the number of secure contracts have not grown in the same line. The spiralling student-staff ratio results in staff not having the capacity nor time to ensure students receive the attention which staff would like to give them, which students mere years ago did get, and which students had been promised as they registered. Manageable workloads mean adequate attention to students’ development, assignments, wellbeing, and futures.  
• Putting a halt to the creeping casualisation and precarity is needed to ensure PhD students, post-doctoral positions and fellow, and Hourly Paid Lecturers stop spending entire summers worrying about whether or not they’ll have any employment in September, let alone pay. The revolving door of short-term contracts harms students. Lecturers on more secure contracts support students developing educational relationships with their lecturers in the long term and ensure their access to teachers’ expertise is not dependent on the caprices of (non-)renewal of short-term contracts.

Can’t you protest in a way that doesn’t affect students?

Practically speaking, no. Students are at the heart of the university, and whatever we do to try to improve university will affect students – and we’ve already been doing a lot of work to prevent students from feeling the worst of the impact of managerial decisions, but that is not tenable. Not a single UCU member wishes to disrupt students’ learning experience. And all UCU members recognise that many students have experienced a lot of disruption in recent years.

UCU’s view is that the quality of the student learning experience is already badly affected, nationwide, by the problems we’re trying to address, with stressed, underpaid and precarious staff often teaching to excessively large classes amid dysfunctional admin structures. We cannot give the support we want to give. 

Unfortunately, it’s clear from our prolonged experience with university employers that they fail to acknowledge the alarms raised by staff over unsustainable working conditions. Only disruption – or the threat of disruption – to teaching or assessment has helped bring employers to the table. 

Since we have not been able to achieve meaningful dialogue any other way, we now believe that effective industrial action is the best path to achieving lasting improvements to both the working conditions of staff and the learning conditions of students, this cohort and future cohorts.

What can you do?

We all, staff as well as students, want to either avoid industrial action, or, if needed, make it as short as possible.

The stronger the solidarity, the more the VC can’t just wait this out and hope staff give up before he has to negotiate. Students showing solidarity with staff and engaging in rethinking the university sends the strongest sign to the VC that he cannot let this drag out but rather has to negotiate with the people who make this university run. Students can help in various ways:

• Write to the VC 
• Speak to your classmates about what’s going on
• Stop by and chat with UCU members on strike days
• Speak to your Student Union