How can you take industrial action against the Secretary of State?
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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In general Universities and College Union disputes around pay and conditions stem, as you may reasonably expect, from the New JNCHES negotiation with universities and colleges as employers (in the form of UCEA).
That’s how industrial disputes go. Workers are unhappy with the actions of their employers, and take action – protests, strikes, work-to-rule, and all of your other favourites.
The 2025-26 New JNCHES pay negotiations have resulted in a UCEA “final offer” that sees a pay increase of 1.4 per cent (with the usual option to defer), alongside further action on very low salaries, alongside the now familiar menu of working groups covering an update to the pay spine, pay equality, workload, and contractual terms. This is in the context of “the difficult challenges facing the sector”.
A below-inflation pay rise like this represents a real-terms pay cut for university workers. In a normal year this would result in a punchily-expressed response from the unions (generally with UCU in the lead), and a rash of ballots for a national strike – most likely featuring impressive invective about “greedy” vice chancellors and (my particular favourite) “shiny new buildings”. If you’ve been watching this cycle for a few years you’ll also know that the fact of the dispute means that the useful and important joint working groups on contracts, the spine, and working conditions never actually happen.
And this year the unions went into negotiations with an “ask” of 3.5 per cent (indeed, some parts of UCU were initially looking for 7 per cent). So you’d have put money on the usual response. Unison suggests that each union will be recommending that members reject the final offer.
But last week’s UCU Congress brought innovation. Motion HE14 noted the ongoing sector financial crisis, and its roots in the way the government funds universities – and resolved to open a trade dispute with the Secretary of State, rather than with the immediate employers of university staff. This appears to entirely have replaced the now-abandoned plan to do the usual strike action against employers.
There is some legal analysis underpinning this new approach, based on an analysis published by the “university rank-and-file” grouping. The argument can best be summarised as drawing a direct line between the decisions of the Secretary of State in setting the parameters of the funding model and the worsening terms and conditions experienced by staff at universities – for several years universities as employers have blamed a lack of income for not meeting the full union pay claim, so you can kind of see the logic.
What’s less clear is what industrial action against Bridget Phillipson (or her successor) would look like. Last year’s action (in particular the marking boycott) arguably foundered on the huge impact it had on students, and it is unlikely a similar approach will help the Department for Education or the Treasury see the union’s side of things. It would also have to be England only – the Secretary of State has no say on HE in Scotland, Wales, or Northern Ireland.
The motion to congress was brought by a group calling for a reform to the higher education funding model, a moratorium on redundancies in the meantime, and a cap on student recruitment (making the health and safety argument on teaching workload). You’ll note that not all of this can be accomplished directly by the Secretary of State.
It remains to be seen how other campus unions, or indeed employers, will respond to this unexpected turn of events. There was initially a plan (we hear from Unite) to develop a joint statement on higher education funding as a part of the New JNCHES process – this was to be agreed at the 15 May meeting but seems not to have happened. A joint statement between staff and university leaders would be both powerful and timely, and of all the options available seems most likely to protect universities against what is likely to be a very rough spending review.
I appreciate the outside the box thinking here but as per the above I do fail to see how this could really work. Part of the problem is that the govt have started to parrot the tired old lines from UCU (VC pay too high despite being a drop in the ocean of uni spending, new buildings and maintenance being unnecessary), so if UCU were to try to argue that the funding model made pay rises unaffordable, the govt would both say “but you claimed the sector is awash with cash, plus you also opposed most of the non staff spending” – and they’d also say that this demonstrates the need for efficiencies in terms of spending and delivery. And people not in the industry would be onside by and large, because if it’s this or eg child poverty, child poverty is going to be the focus.
I don’t disagree that the govt are allowing HE to fall off a cliff by the way, it’s just that IA over the funding model (or indeed over pay rises) is just not going to work – the strategy here is even more wishful than the 4F one was. Even with that, if eg number controls are to come in then that is going to lead to job losses too.
I say this quite often on here but I really can’t stress enough how irresponsible the IA over the “four fights” was, in terms of the waste of energy and resources and also in terms of the nonsense justifications that UCU put out to justify it.
As a recently exited (through a VSS) academic and UCU member I can very much see both sides of the argument over who is responsible for the truely dire position that UK universities find themselves in. I also see that employers and staff need to combine forces to make their joint cases stronger and more coherent in the face of a governments (or both potiltical aides) who do not apper to see the value of a strong and sustainable higher education sector. Too much energy has been expended by the two sides fighting each other. The “four fights” is an example of this. Sadly, I don’t see much appetite for real change.
It brings to mind the Monty Python, Holy Grail black knight “all right we’ll call it a draw” sketch.
Yes – I think that the entirely justified and necessary USS action convinced a lot of members that a radical, action-focused approach was necessary across the board. I do think that Jo Grady is central in the blame game here – she is not a radical but pretended to be one to get elected on a “#nocapitulation” ticket, destroying the less radical organized side of the union in the process, meaning that there have not been enough checks on eg “is this action likely to actually win” because she’s still having to act out this fantasy version of herself as radical. That’s emboldened the core of genuinely radical people on the HEC (here I mean UCU left and the supposedly independent left people who go along with everything UCU left do) who would rather be on strike than win, who also dominated negotiations til 2023 (remember when they were still aiming for a MAB in March 2020?), and who have run the Union’s resources of goodwill from the less committed into the ground, to the extent that IA still gets endorsed but there is barely any actual engagement outside of a few large branches. It is good to see that the Grady supporters have now organized as a less radical counter, but they themselves are still not really pragmatic enough to avoid the Union skewing to constantly being in IA.
This shift to radicalism (and in truth I think a lack of seriousness in leadership from HEC and Grady alike) has meant that the employers have ended up looking like the reasonable ones a lot of the time – the nadir of this being the arguments from Grady that if only Oxford University colleges would sell off all their property to [insert buyers here], this money could be redistributed to other uni’s to enable them to employ fixed time research staff hired on particular projects as permanent. It’s hard to come back from the claims of the sector being “awash with cash” only two years ago to “actually we know the uni’s can’t afford what we were asking for” without looking fundamentally unserious.
I know that the GS is a position which is there to represent policy agreed at congress but this not only speaks to the incoherence of these systems but also of the really vital importance for the GS to run on a realistic ticket. This also seems in part to be what has led to the internal IA in UCU both recently and eg over the fixed term people working on PGR students – it would have been a lot easier to manage that one had Grady not made the cause so central to her brand.
In truth the only likely “solution” to IA over pay and conditions which is focused on the sec of state is further rises in home tuition fees (along with a demand for efficiencies), which UCU don’t want – a fee rise was also realistically the only way the 4 Fights would have been solved. So what we’ll get again from UCU here will be unwinnable protest action from a membership whose impact is declining year on year as the older members either retire or quit the union, to be replaced by PhD students who are undoubtedly valued members, but whose IA just does not affect a University much.