Sally Hunt is General Secretary of the highest-profile trade union in higher education, representing approximately one-third of academic and academic-related staff. However, UCU has not been particularly successful at defying the general trajectory of government and sector policy. Nonetheless the union continues to be both an effective bargaining force on several issues that affect its members, such as casualised contracts and gender iniquity, on which quite a bit of progress has been made in recent years.
University staff continue to be relatively well paid compared to other sectors, and the union’s ability to disrupt university life through strike action and marking boycotts is still significant; an ongoing dispute this year has once again drawn much attention to matters of pay, equity and employment rights within the sector.