It is committed to ensuring that the new union has a democratic structure through which members can determine policy, and elected officers and professional officials can be held accountable. It seeks to defend educational equality, and to oppose the consequences of neo-liberal marketisation. It is opposed to all forms of racism, sexism, oppression and imperialism.
Saturday 24 June 2006, London Metropolitan University
Opening Plenary
Amanda Sakur (Senior Lecturer in International History at LondonMet) explained the nature of the lengthy dispute at LondonMet, and how colleagues in the then lecturers’ post-92 and FE union NATFHE had organised to secure solidarity, adopt tactics that enabled them to maintain the dispute over a long period, and ultimately to win.
Alex Callinicos (Professor of Politics at Kings College)
described the political and economic context in which assaults on the integrity of Higher Education, and on the contractual conditions of staff (such as those at LondonMet) were taking place. These circumstances were the drive to secure the policies of neo-liberalism across the globe: the commercialisation and the commodification of all services, including health, education and security. He spoke of the ways in which this drive had provoked a wave of resistance in all five continents, a resistance that had produced significant popular victories against privatisation and attacks on welfare, particularly in Latin America and Europe. This was an example to us all.
Fanny Gillot (a student at the Sorbonne, whose speech was translated from the French by Richard Kirkwood of LondonMet) explained the background to the protracted and ultimately successful recent struggle against the CPE law in France – a law that would have enabled employers to sack young workers without justification or compensation. The genesis of the movement against the law lay in three events: the campaign of school students of the previous year, the victory of the ‘No’ vote in the referendum on the EU Constitution, and the revolt of unemployed and the dispossessed of the banlieus. She explained how students occupied the universities to prevent the victimisation of staff or of student activists, and of how alternative universities were established to continue education throughout the dispute. The movement united the youth of the suburbs with the students, and these with young workers in both unionised and non-unionised workplaces. The violence of the riot police against students was eventually overcome. She explained how the movement developed an informal leadership that could plan strategy and respond to attacks in order to keep the initiative over the months of the struggle. The refusal of the trade union leaders to negotiate a compromise with the Government behind the students’ backs had been an important fillip for the movement. Equally, the failure of the unions’ leaderships to call mass strikes in support of the movement had been disappointing. Nevertheless, at the height of their campaign they had 3m marching in the streets of the cities of France. So prolonged and determined was the movement that the Right became divided, and the Government was forced to withdraw the legislation. This successful movement in France was seen by most activists not as a particularly student or youth affair, or as particularly French, but as part of a global struggle against neo-liberalism and the market.
Tony Benn explained the importance of independent organisation of working people, particularly in the circumstances where the Labour Party had been kidnapped by New Labour. He spoke of the history of the movement, and how the history of the trade union struggle for adequate and accountable and transparent representation had necessarily been a political struggle for democracy at a wider level. He spoke of the assault of the neo-liberal policies fostered by the GATS and the World Bank and the IMF on the conditions of working people, and how these policies were incompatible with democracy. He spoke of the frequent e-mails and letters from those resigning from the Labour Party in despair and disgust. He always responded by asking them what they were going to do now that they had resigned. He had himself left Parliament to spend more time on politics. What was their political activity to be? For him, the issue was not which political party, whether it be the socialist workers’ this or the communist that, … The real problem was the shortage of socialists generally. He welcomed the formation of an organised Left in the new union, the UCU, and its commitment to democracy and accountability. He wished the new union well.
Chaired by Lesley Catchpowle (University of Greenwich), the session was addressed by Malcolm Povey and by Sasha Callaghan.
Sasha Callaghan argued that the current assaults on education in general were part of a diet of policies that were reactionary at their core. The conditions in FE were now dire as a result of the widespread refusal of the employers to honour national agreements, and the progressive erosion of anything that looked remotely like national terms and conditions of service. Employers were using the increasing casualisation of the profession to weaken union resistance so as more easily to push through their policies. Government policy for post-16 education was the clear context – a dissolution of education in favour of short-term skills training, a localisation of contractual terms, and an employer-driven agenda in which pedagogic and educational concerns were sidelined. If the UCU was to mount effective resistance to these assaults, it needed democratic structures that would empower the membership in branches, and at regions and conferences. It also needed an elected lay leadership, and appointed officials, who were committed to a membership-driven organisation, and to the full accountability to conferences and Council of all of the union’s committees and all of its paid officials. It needed a leadership that was fully committed to the struggle for equality, and to eradicating all discriminatory barriers to education, and to employment and advancement in education, whether these be based on gender, ethnicity or disability. Only in this manner could the fiasco of this year’s FE pay campaign be avoided in the future – a campaign for which there had been inadequate preparation, weak and incoherent leadership, undemocratic processes, and sometimes a disdain by officials for members’ representatives.
Malcolm Povey (Research Fellow at Leeds University, and editor of University Worker, which circulates primarily in pre-92 universities) explained how the current HE dispute had transformed his Association. Members had been determined to win, and had been outraged by the assault by the management on their integrity, and by the threats that they had endured. Mild-mannered academic staff had been driven to mass demonstrations on the campus, and to confronting the Vice Chancellor to insist on being given an explanation and an apology for his attitude and his behaviour. It was important, he argued, to understand that the dispute, and the employers’ over-reaction to it, were not the cause of this militancy and determination but rather their occasion. The cause was more deep-seated and structural. It was the transformation of education into a global business. Turnover of UK Further and Higher Education now dwarfed that of the pharmecutical and IT industries combined; both enjoyed a corporate image overseas, and an opportunity for profitable expansion there, that was eye-wateringly attractive to the private sector. Moreover, the commercial returns from academic research were dramatically expanding. For these opportunities successfully to be exploited by the private sector, however, requires the transformation or eradication of the educational and academic ethos, and the dissolution of nationally negotiated salaries and terms and conditions of service. That is the reason for the rapid growth of casualisation in the sector. Part-time work and temporary contracts are the visible expression of the employers’ strategy. The Framework Agreement of two years ago was the formalisation of that strategy; ensuring a settlement this year that union members would understand as a defeat was the beginning of its ‘end game’. The aim is a post-16 educational system that is segmented to serve different corporate needs and markets, and whose staff are on salaries and conditions determined exclusively by market considerations. In failing to understand this political context, and in ‘selling-out’ this year’s HE campaign, the UCU leadership had played into the employers’ hands. Our leaders’ political blindness, and their naieve insistence that the dispute would be a short-lived, economic struggle, rendered them innocents in the face of the employers’ representatives. Whatever divisions threatened to fray its ranks, Ucea knew its objective and what was at stake in the struggle. So did the Government. But the struggle over pay and conditions is not over. It cannot be over, whether the vote in the ballot is ‘yes’ or ‘no’, because the neo-liberal drive will ensure that the employers will be back for more. This unsatisfactory settlement, if accepted, will ensure that first the Russel Group and then other universities will be pushing for local bargaining.
As workers in education we will have no choice but to fight. That is why we need a rank and file organisation like the UCU Left. We need an organisation that will support the leadership as long as, and only as long as, it fights for the members’ interests but which can offer alternative leadership should the union leadership stumble. It needs to be an organisation based in every branch and association, and committed to ensuring that it is the membership that is in control of policy, and fully informed about the context of the struggles that we will face. It needs a paper that presents those arguments, and around which its activists can organise. That paper needs to be a paper that addresses the rank and file, and is produced by the rank and file. It should not be a paper of ‘the Left’ but should appeal to all who are committed to a democratic and fighting union. With that in place, we have a serious opportunity to resist neo-liberalism, and of rescuing education from its embrace.
The Conference closed with a unanimous adoption of the Statement and the election of the Steering Group.
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