UCU pay ballot fails to meet threshold
David Kernohan is Deputy Editor of Wonkhe
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To the surprise of almost no-one, the University and College Union’s ballot for industrial action on the 2025-26 New JNCHES pay round did not meet the statutory turnout threshold. Just 39.3 per cent of registered members voted during the six week ballot period, of these just under 70 per cent voted for industrial action.
At a cost of around £200,000 – funds that could have been used to support some of the many branches currently taking local action regarding redundancy plans and course closures – UCU’s Higher Education Committee now has a second data point in a series that includes the initial online consultation (32 per cent) that suggests members appetite for national action is limited.
General secretary Jo Grady admitted that “our immediate next steps must be to understand why more members did not engage with the ballot”. She committed to delivering a strategy, and to work with the HEC secretary to bring people together in the new year. The UCU Left bloc has argued that “the central problem is that many UCU members, including dedicated union reps, don’t believe that our leadership is willing to lead a serious fight”.
I also understand the parallel EIS-ULA ballot failed to reach the 50 per cent threshold. We have yet to hear on the ballots by Unite and Unison.
It is instructive at this point to look back at the meeting of HEC held on 1 September. The committee narrowly voted (20 votes to 19) to hold a short, six week, ballot with the intention of starting a six month mandate for action in early December (with a fair part of that period covering a point in the calendar where little or no teaching – and frankly not much other activity – was taking place).
At that meeting committee members heard that a short ballot would be unlikely to cross the 50 per cent turnout threshold, and that a ballot would potentially jeopardise local action, would be expensive, and that no plans to raise turnout from the 32 per cent achieved over the summer existed.
Beyond what was discussed it was also well understood that national industrial action on pay was unlikely to be effective given the financial plight of large parts of the sector. Previous UCU campaigns had accused universities as employers of building up “reserves” at the expense of staff pay, but given UCU’s parallel (and very welcome!) campaigning on university finance it was fairly clear that such a strategy was not going to work in 2025.
As I feel like I have mentioned a ridiculous number of times, the decision to ballot stalled long-overdue joint work on reforming the salary spine, diversity-driven pay gaps, workload, and contract types. This was work that had already begun, with the support of unions and employers, and that had at least an even chance of improving the terms and conditions under which many staff are employed. In failing to successfully ballot members, we can hope – at least – that this valuable work can continue.
The pay uplift of 1.4 per cent (and associated measures) was enacted on 1 August 2025 in some providers, and is due to be applied elsewhere by 1 July 2026 (at which point spine points 5 and 6 will be deleted).
Looking forward, the New JNCHES pay round for 2026-27 will kick off in the spring of next year. The promised UCU strategy would need to include measures that could drive up participation in ballots – even if the Employment Rights Bill removes the threshold and allows for e-balloting – if the possibility of meaningful industrial action is to have an influence in these and future negotiations.
This was a ballot doomed to fail from the outset – though even I wasn’t expecting turnout to be quite that bad.
Why HEC thought it was a good idea to ballot nationally on pay when colleagues are fending off redundancies in their thousands, to waste a six figure sum on this, and to burn through the goodwill and energy of reps like me in trying to get the vote out, is beyond me.
Will the people who wasted 200k of union money on this ballot reflect at all, do we think? As you say, this was incredibly predictable from a union whose decision making processes are basically set up to prevent coordinated and realistic action even setting aside the clowns of ucu left and their zeal to be out on strike whenever possible. Members are wise now to the rules on ballots and are not-voting on purpose, clearly, but to get 30% of responses as “no” too – I mean, this is a vote of no confidence in HEC isn’t it. But I bet ucu left still end up with a majority the next time and thus do it all again. What really needs to happen is a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the union via structure, not just hoping hec elections go the way of the more realistic.
And I appreciate the more moderate people saying “we need a mandate” but I’m sorry, the recent history of the union shows members what happens when there’s a mandate for action and the answer is, immediate pointless strikes.
An utterly predictable result, and a complete waste of union resource. Worse – the decision to run this doomed ballot will harm staff. The joint work which could have improved some conditions has been pointlessly thrown away. Meanwhile, Jethwa is already out there laying the ground work for next year’s pay cut – those on HEC who pushed for this ballot have now revealed just how weak the union is. No doubt that will be reflected in UCEA’s position on pay next year.
I can only hope Grady and those with power in the union actually do reflect on this result (the second national ballot fail in a row), and come up with a coherent plan that returns UCU to it’s core focus of a union which is capable of improving staff pay and conditions.
It’s interesting to see the response from the people who aren’t in UCU Left but clearly quite close to them. There seem to be two main reasons why they think the threshold was not met. One is that the union didn’t make a big enough deal of HEC bracketing a motion opposing redunancies onto this pay dispute. Now maybe that was a clever way to get ia on the main pressing issue of the day; but the best case flip side to this is that people were being asked to commit to IA on two issues when we’ve seen how well being on ia about 4 went last time. But also, national action over redundancies is not allowed by law, so there’s no way it could have been sold outwardly in that way. I think ucu left actually know this, and tacked it on so they’d have a good reason to explain the result afterwards – having forced the leadership to campaign on pay but actually then claim the dispute was about something else. Added bonus there of pretending they’re not to blame and that the leadership are liars. It’s clever but ultimately obnoxious and self defeating.
The other is that ucu apparently lost momentum and the confidence of members when it didn’t reballot in summer 2023, and thus allowed the mandate for IA to expire then. Apparently people were really keen to keep that dispute going and the employers were on the ropes… I imagine this is true up to a point (well the first bit) in certain high density membership branches but the national picture was much different, with most branches long since having given up on the MAB (which had very limited buyin anyway) and members skint and exhausted after weeks with no pay. The idea that a summer 2023 ballot would have definitely met threshold is questionable alone, but ongoing participation in action into 23-4 over the 2023 pay offer would have dwindled further still.
Basically this is an unserious union isn’t it. At branch level it can be effective and offer good support. At national level it is a total basket case. Ucu left are undoubtedly the most to blame, but there’s a reason that the union couldn’t settle on a 5% payrise in 2023 and that’s because its GS has from the start pretended to be a non-capitulating radical which means she can’t offer the actual, sensible balance needed when faced with people in decision making roles who’d rather be on strike than at work, as it’s part of a wider revolutionary struggle.
Just to note here, IMO they should have reballoted in summer 2023, but also IMO this would have not got close to the threshold – and yes, that failure would have been read as ‘leadership don’t want it enough’ etc but the time to sensibly stop was pre-MAB – once into it, they needed to see if they could keep going, even if most branches had long since given up. The excuses to not ballot at that point were code for ‘this has obviously failed’ but the stated reasons – including ‘paid staff at the union need a summer holiday’ IIRC – weren’t really sufficient.
(I also want to mention here how damaging the MAB was to inter-personal relations – it’s not only its failure that has a lasting impact. If you weren’t willing to participate, you basically had to actively undermine it or risk disciplinaries; but those who did participate were forced in some branches to directly lie to their line managers – who are not necessarily evil fatcats, they are often on exactly the same salary point or in some cases lower ranked, sometimes personal friends, and if not that, people who have often done substantial work to support and advance their colleagues’ careers – these things are hard to move past and people won’t necessarily be willing to sign up to this sort of thing again).
Since you’re the expert (you reliably fill every UCU thread with long, rambling critical posts and self-replies, shouting into the void) what is the best strategy for reversing the erosion of academic pay?
We should not have gone to ballot on a 20-19 vote. The structure of NEC is crippling our whole union and destroying it from within. UCU Left think they can rise from the ashes at some future point when the oust the GS. Up to that point they will undermine her in every possible way, limiting any possible progress.
The GS is not blameless and I hate being part of a union that cannot resolve it’s own internal industrial dispute with Unite. We just look stupid at that point – balloting to take action while denying our own staff a negotiated sensible outcome.
Well one thing as I’ve said above is to have a reformed structure of UCU decision-making so there is a unity of focus, and there isn’t constant unhappiness with every compromised position the union finds itself in. That basically means more power to GS and less to HEC I think but others might disagree. It would also shift towards IA as a last resort rather than a first option. A default of strikes because members voted for IA isn’t even popular among committed trade unionists let alone wider membership. There also needs to be an acknowledgment from leadership at branch and national level that people who join primarily for protection are not lesser members. This attitude has resulted in the obvious disconnect in the last few years.
The next is to have realistic pay claims each year, or if the union insist on asking for 15% when the Uni income is going down year on year, then at least a wider acknowledgment to membership of what is going to be likely.
After this, what is needed (as Jo Grady wanted back in 2023) is to try to expand recruitment of membership across the board but especially at what are the smaller branches at present. With this you would have to have a moderation of tone and aims too.
I imagine though that the above is not what you’re asking – I think you’d see this as at cross purposes – but basically I don’t think there is any realistic way to return pay to its value from ten or fifteen years ago, aside from a huge increase in tuition fees and even then it probably wouldn’t find its way to pockets. That ship has sailed; the issue is how the union regains any kind of bargaining power rather than aiming for 25% pay increases. It’s unfair that pay has not risen, I don’t disagree, but I guess my main opinion is the union needs to be realistic.
“General secretary Jo Grady admitted that “our immediate next steps must be to understand why more members did not engage with the ballot”. She committed to delivering a strategy”
I was a UCU branch officer during this dispute and attended every single one of the weekly internal briefings, and the one question that recurred in *every single discussion*, no matter what branches were involved, was “What is the strategy to win this dispute?”
I’m pleased to hear Grady is “committed to delivering a strategy.” If she had delivered it *during the ballot window*, more people might have voted.
Given Higher Education Committee majority (UCU Left plus ‘UCU Left Lite’) not the General Secretary own the dispute, its timeline and its ‘strategy’, how could the GS have delivered this mythical strategy?
I suspect that you use strategy in the sense UCU Left Lite use it. You were and are in favour of the ballot, know it’s not cool with UCU members and academics to own this commitment subjectively, so need to third party and blame a mythical strategy that was sitting wrapped in Christmas paper, had widespread majoritarian support from the off, and just needed to be articulated.
It’s a wider problem — arguably with trade unionism — that instead of members and workers clearly stating ‘I want this/I don’t want this’, they’d rather blame a third party for not providing the service of an automatic winning costless strategy. Better the member who says ‘I ain’t up this. Can’t afford it’ or ‘now is the time. Let’s do this. Who’s up for it?’ than the ‘if there was a well-worked out strategy…’.
Of course, if the GS was allowed to articulate a proper strategy, UCU Left and UCU Left Lite would immediately pile on and suggest fiddling while Rome burns.