On Friday 17th March, Higher Education Committee met to take urgent decisions in our two live disputes. However, the way the meeting was arranged and run and its outcome has left many members confused, alarmed and angry. It has sown division at a point where we need unity and is the culmination of a number of poorly-made decisions that demoralise members and undermine our effectiveness as a union.
This doesn’t cover every aspect of what happened and I would also recommend Immediate Past President, Vicky Blake’s article as another perspective on this.
We often claim to be a member-led union. The uses of this term can range from the sincere to the glib but, if this is really what we are or aspire to be, there are some key principles we need to follow, including:
- Members have the right to be meaningfully consulted
- Our democratic processes give decisions legitimacy and accountability and must not be undermined
- Elected lay members have a responsibility to represent those who elected them.
At face value, Friday’s meeting rejected the results of an informal e-consultation of members and, to a lesser degree, the outcome of a Branch Delegates Meeting held the day before.
However, it is necessary to go below the surface and examine this in context, including how both processes were conducted and who controlled them.
The Consultation
The e-consultation was initiated by the General Secretary without any reference to HEC, despite HEC having the responsibility for running the disputes and in direct contravention of procedure/policy, reaffirmed at a recent HEC meeting
It was run on the basis of a single, leading question that conflated two disputes, two different offers from employers, consulting members and whether to stand down action or not, all in the middle of a period when we are re-ballotting to extend our mandate beyond next month.
Do you support UCU members now getting a vote on the negotiated proposals that have been reached, and pausing strike action (ASOS would continue) whilst this consultation takes place? Yes/No
As one member described it:
a deliberately obfuscatory question which forced us to vote an entire yes or an entire no on two separate and divergent issues.
While the e-consulation was running, members were offered a podcast from the General Secretary (with lengthy transcript) and the highly-partisan use of the union’s official Twitter account with soundbites, hyperbole and general over-selling of what’s on the table. What members needed and deserved was a proper analysis of the offers from HEC and/or or elected national negotiators, presented in a coherent, accessible and easily digestible format.
The Branch Delegates’ Meeting
At Thursday’s branch delegates meeting, those in attendance repeatedly asked that the questions of consultation and pausing action were separated into two different votes and were initially told this was not possible. On the question of consulting members, the vote result was:
- Yes 37%
- No 56%
- Abstain 7%
(unweighted vote results – before that relevant multipliers to reflect branch size were applied)
Having run and shared the above result which, the ability to run two separate votes was suddenly announced. Unlike the first vote, the results of the subsequent votes were not shared with the BDM and only circulated, once weighted, the following day. They were not given to HEC members in advance of its meeting.
- 52% were in favour of consulting members
- 32% were opposed to consulting members
- 16% abstained from the vote
- 70% were opposed to suspending the planned action
- 16% were in favour of suspending the planned action
- 14% abstained from the vote
The HEC Meeting
HEC members are also part of National Executive Committee (NEC), which met on Friday as well. The HEC meeting followed immediately after NEC and its agenda was only circulated while everyone was occupied with NEC, with little option to challenge it in advance of the meeting beginning. It read as follows:
15:15 1 Apologies for absence
15:20 2 Question 1:
Should the proposals agreed with UCEA and UUK relating to the USS and Four Fights disputes be put to UCU HE members in a formal consultation?
3 Question 2:
Should the strike action called for 20 th – 22 nd March be suspended?
16.15 Voting commences
16.30 Close of meeting
No other business was permitted, including motions and amendments. We were informed that the meeting was not being conducted under normal standing orders (unclear whether standing orders were suspended and, if so by whom, or just did not apply) and, as a result, HEC members were prevented from bringing pertinent business that was relevant to the discussion in hand. We were further prevented from voting on the questions in relation to each dispute separately, despite the fact that they are not just one amorphous whole..
HEC normally functions with an agenda comprised of various reports, and including proposals in the form of motions from members, i.e. part of the agenda is determined by members of the committee. This did not happen on Friday, preventing us from fulfilling a vital part of the role we have been elected to by members.
As the elected part of the Executive for the HE sector, our job is to deal with the detail. We have two live disputes, offers from two groups of employers and a large amount of specific aspects within these to consider. This cannot be reduced to the two questions that were on the agenda, nor could we do so adequately in the 75 minutes available to us.
Everything about last week was rushed and in the wrong order. At the weekend, incoming committee member, Lucy Burke, imagined how this might have been done instead.
So What Now?
However, we are where we are and we cannot simply rewind to where would rather be. There is now an expectation amongst members to be consulted on something, regardless if this is not a good time to do it or not. It is the job of HEC to now try and make sense of all of these conflicts and contradictions and we need the time and proper means of doing so. Friday’s meeting offered neither.
The vote that passed was close but with a majority rejecting the proposal to consult members. However, this cannot and will not draw a line under this. All that was rejected was that specific proposal to consult members, one with no detail about how it would be done, in what context, on what timescale or with what information and/or recommendations provided as part of that process.
The next HEC on 30th March will not be so constrained and proposals are already in preparation, some even in circulation, that will be part of that meeting’s agenda. It is now incumbent on every member of HEC to engage fully with a process that can hopefully lift us out of the wholly avoidable hole we have been languishing in these past few days.
With apologies for any typos, gramatical orother errors. In the interest of getting this out asap, I have not yet proofread but will correct any of these in due course.
Grant Buttars: UCU NEC 