The UCU Left is a national organisation of University and College Union activists. 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.

HE Sector - Consultation Conference - 24/11/2006

Conference Report - Tom Hickey (Transitional NEC)

This year, the University and Colleges Union (UCU) came into existence as the amalgamation of the AUT and Natfhe – the unions which represented teaching and related staff in the universities and in further education. The amalgamation created the biggest education union in the world. On Friday 24th November it ceased to exist as an amalgamated union.

On Friday, at a hotel in London, the first conference of the UCU’s Higher Education Sector (HESC) met to discuss the lessons to be learned from the pay dispute of last academic year. This was a dispute whose ending had split the members of the union. The central aim of ‘catch up’ in relative pay was not won, yet the union’s leaders called off the action just as its effects were about to bite, and contrary to conference policy. Many members had been dismayed by this, and had interpreted it as expressing both a lack of resolve on the part of the leadership, and a lack of respect for democratic process.

At this conference on that Friday, in a sometimes heated and tense debate, the delegates divided on this issue. But it was not a division based on old loyalties to the constituent parts of the amalgamated union. The conference divided politically between those loyal to the old leadership, and supportive of the decision to call off the dispute, and those critical of both. And this was a difference that divided both of the old constituencies. The newly amalgamated union was no more. The UCU was no longer an amalgam; it had become a single entity but one that contained differences of view.

The conference voted to adopt a series of motions, typically by a 2:1 margin (there were no counts) but sometimes more closely:

  • to establish a substantial strike fund, and an effective process for making prompt payments;

  • to build a renewed campaign on pay and conditions, linked to the fight against the neo-liberal
    marketisation of education;

  • that industrial action should, in future, only be suspended by the decision of elected
    representatives at a special conference and not by elected or appointed officials;

  • that future disputes should not rely solely on one form of industrial action, and should seek
    to involve the widest possible set of members;

  • that future campaigns must prioritise the conditions of those on short-term and casual contracts,
    and be aimed at securing a minimum national contract for all academic staff;

  • that the UCU will not seek its own sectional interests at the expense of other workers in the sector,
    and hence will seek flat-rate elements in all claims;

  • that any threat to national bargaining will be resisted by national industrial action.


There was generalised shock and disapproval uniting most of the conference at two suggestions from the delegate from the University of Liverpool. For him, the job of the UCU was to get the best for its members even at the cost of other trade unionists, and the job of local associations was to get the best deal locally even if that was at the cost of national bargaining, and hence to the detriment of other UCU members.

The overwhelming disapproval of the Conference at these suggestions augurs well for the new union.
Branch motions debated at the conference (pdf)
Branch report - Celia Hollingworth, Bristol UCU - 5/01/07 (pdf)
Letter published in the THES - 8/12/06 (pdf)
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