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.
UCU Left - Policy Discussion - National Bargaining
Please find below a brief introduction to a discussion document produced by a UCU Left Steering Committee member on the subject of National Bargaining in HE. As this is a discussion document we would welcome your comments and any suggested alterations. The (amended) document will be presented to the next UCU Left members conference and, if appropriate, voted upon as a UCU Left policy statement. Please email your comments to uculeft@btinternet.com
Extract of article by Tom Hickey (UCU NEC Member)

Ending national bargaining to secure higher HE salaries? Effectively turning the UCU into a professional association? These are the issues that now face the recently elected national leadership of the UCU. It is a decisive moment for the membership of our new union.
The issue is will this new leadership be prepared to organise for, and lead, a campaign to preserve national bargaining when, as seems likely, the employers move to undermine the national arrangements later this year.

The consequences of local bargaining are not difficult to predict:

  • The creation of a multi-tier sector, with an elite sub-set of research-intensive institutions at one end, and ‘teaching only’ institutions awarding ‘third-rate’ degrees (as they will inevitably be regarded) over two years at the other;


  • Within institutions, a progressive breakdown of the common salary structure in favour of individual contracts, first to senior academics below the Professoriate, and then to all academic staff;


  • The consequent marginalisation of the UCU as a force affecting the quality and remuneration of working life in HE;


  • A generalised weakening of trade unionism in the sector that would quickly lead to regionally differentiated salaries for non-academic staff as well, and a worsening of the pay differential between academic and non-academic posts;


  • A gradual move away from permanent contracts to a bifurcated workforce – permanent contracts for a minority of research and teaching coordinators, and casual contracts or time-limited contracts for the majority of researchers and teachers, and project-related workers and those engaged primarily in consultancy.
The starting point in resisting local bargaining is to recognise the political context of the employers’ drive to achieve it. That context is the Government’s corporate-friendly, pro-market, neo-liberal agenda. In other sectors of the economy, this agenda means a destructive internal market in the health service leading gradually to the privatisation of the NHS. It means the privatisation of air traffic control, of the Bank of England, of the postal service. It means league tables for schools, a national curriculum, and an educational ethos based on testing. It means the abolition of ESOL provision. In HE it means the fostering of corporate competition and the Americanization of educational provision.

Part of this agenda, therefore, necessarily entails pushing the employers towards the abandonment of national terms and conditions so that universities are forced to differentiate their ‘product’ in the marketplace, and to charge students according to the value of the product. Associated with this is the importance of paying staff as little as the labour market will bear which, in most cases, requires a gradual move not just to local bargaining but, in the longer term, to individual contracts for core staff, and casualisation for the remainder.

It is for these reasons that it is not simply mistaken but quite patently ridiculous for members of the UCU, particularly those running for high office, simultaneously to say that they are opposed to the loss of national bargaining and, at the same time, to insist that they want the UCU to be a non-political organisation.

Read Tom's original article in full - available here (pdf)


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