The material in this blog post is adapted from our regular “Introduction to Oxford UCU” open meetings for non-members and new joiners. Check our calendar for the next scheduled open meeting.
- Introduction to trade unionism
- Introduction to the University and College Union
- Organising in our workplace for social change
- How to join and get involved
Introduction to trade unionism
What is a trade union?
Trade unions are organisations of workers who have common interests. They represent workers in negotiations with employers over terms and conditions (e.g. pay and workplace safety) and they protect workers in disputes over things like discrimination or unfair treatment, workload/job conditions, redundancy, etc.
Unions give workers a collective voice in determining their working conditions!
Why do we need trade unions?
Without trade unions, there is a large power imbalance that makes the employer-employee relationship unfair. Coming together as a union begins to redress that power imbalance. Employers have always been effective at working together to control labour. Workers must do the same to have any chance at a fair relationship. Unions provide a mechanism to hold employers accountable for things like health & safety and fair pay and working conditions. Better work then hopefully leads to a fairer society.
This works, of course, because there is strength in unity. Any workplace issue will be better resolved collectively than alone. This is communicated clearly in this quote from early trade unionist Mary Macarthur (1880–1921):
“A trade union is like a bundle of sticks. A worker who is not in a union is like a simple stick. She can easily be broken or bent to the will of her employer. An employer can do without one worker. He cannot do without all his workers.”
Fundamentally, trade unionism is about solidarity. Solidarity with other people doing the same job as you, solidarity with other workers across your institution and across the sector. But also solidarity with other struggles in your community, other workers outside of your sector, and with worker’s struggles globally.
What do unions do?
Unions represent and advocate for worker’s interest through collective bargaining and mutual support. In practice that means negotiating terms and conditions with employers, having a say on any proposed policy changes or restructuring through consultation, and directly supporting individual members who are experiencing work-related issues. Unions provide legal advice to their members and occasionally engage in legal challenges that can be very influential for the society at large. Unions provide professional development and training opportunities, they campaign on issues that matter to members, and, only as a last resort, they engage in industrial action like striking. This might be the most visible union activity, but the majority of time is spent dealing positively with employers over pay and conditions and resolving grievances.
The union is us
An important part of trade unionism is that decisions are made and priorities are set democratically. This is how we can say that we have a collective voice and take collective action. This is a kind of democracy that we might not often experience in our daily lives. We might vote every few years for our members of parliament and city councillors, and certainly some of us have some control in our workplace, but this influence is much different from the everyday participatory democracy of a trade union.
“Policies are designed to undermine working class organization and the reason is not only the union’s fight for workers’ rights, but [unions] also have a democratizing effect. These are institutions in which people without power can get together, support one another, learn about the world, try out their ideas, initiate programs, and that is dangerous.” —Noam Chomsky
A world without trade unions
Without the work undertaken by trade unions, there would be no laws governing maximum working hours, no personal protective equipment, no sick pay, and no right to paid rest breaks. Legal battles supported by unions have protected employment rights that frankly I take for granted:
- Equal pay
- The national minimum wage
- Pension rights
- Family friendly policies
- Parental leave
- Holiday pay
- The right not to be discriminated against
- The right to time off for trade union activities
- The right to be accompanied by a trade union rep to grievance and disciplinary hearings
It is easy to forget that these rights had to be hard won. Consider these two salient examples described in Len McCluskey’s Why You Should Be A Trade Unionist.
Example: Gender Pay Gap
In 1968, women machinists and members of the Transport and General Workers’ Union (T&G) at a Ford factory in East London walked out over unequal pay. The men were getting paid more than the women. After halting car production for four weeks, the women won better terms and were offered 92% of what the men were making. This paved the way for the 1970 Equal Pay Act, which legally enshrines the right to equal pay for equal work. Although, it wasn’t until 1984 that the Ford machinists were actually receiving equal pay, after another six-week strike. Women still make on average 1/5 less than men in the UK—which is one reason why equality is still at the forefront of union activities.
Example: Statutory Minimum Wage
For as long as I can remember, there has been a legal minimum wage, but I didn’t until recently think about how it came about. Here in the UK, It turns out that you can trace it back to a T&G biennial delegate conference in 1987. Two young women moved a motion on the introduction of a statutory minimum wage – it passed and then became union policy. It then became incorporated into existing Trade Union Congress (TUC: a federation of trade unions that collectively represents most unionised workers in England and Wales) and Labour Party policy, which led directly to it being adopted in the 1992 Labour manifesto, before being introduced by Labour government in 1997. So we have union democracy, and the link between the labour movement and the labour party to thank for the statutory minimum wage in the UK!
Introduction to the University and College Union
What is the University and College Union?
UCU is the recognized representative for hundreds of thousands of workers in Further Education, Higher Education, and Prison Education across the UK. We engage in “sectoral bargaining”. All higher education institutions in the UK bargain collectively. Our branch, University of Oxford UCU, is one of the largest UCU branches.
Who do we represent?
Oxford UCU is the bargaining representative for all academic, academic-related, and research jobs at grade 6 or above.
- Academic teaching and research staff (postgraduates, postdocs, faculty, lecturers, tutors)
- Academic-related and professional services staff (Librarians, IT, most administrative staff, including in offices like HR and finance)
If the salary scale for your role is Grade 6 or above, UCU is engaged in collective bargaining that affects your pay, working conditions, pension, and contract.
If you are employed solely at one of Oxford’s constituent colleges, you can definitely still join UCU, but there is a caveat. The colleges do not formally recognize UCU, which means that we cannot bargain collectively with any of the colleges. We can and frequently do offer guidance and support to members who are employed on college-only contracts. UCU caseworkers can also assist members who want to raise a formal grievance. We have local campaigns related to college recognition and casualisation that will be especially relevant to college members.
What do we do?
At the national level, we negotiate with two representative bodies. On pay and working conditions with negotiate with UCEA. This is a body which represents all the higher education institutions, so they represent the employers as a whole.
On pensions we negotiate with a different representative body, UUK. If you’re employed by University of Oxford, unless you’ve opted out, you’ll be on the USS pension scheme. UUK represents the subset of higher education institutions that participate in the USS pension scheme.
Those negotiations are happening at the national level. There may sometimes also be local issues to be negotiated directly with University of Oxford.
Sometimes members have specific issues and UCU will support them and provide advice to help resolve the issue.
We make decisions democratically. This means there are a variety of elected positions both nationally and at the branch level. We meet at least termly as a whole branch. At these meetings we will vote on motions. Some of these motions may also feed up into high level decision making structures like annual congress or branch delegate meetings.
There are several regular meetings with the university that are venues for them to consult with us on any changes that might affect our members and for us to bring up any issues.
UCU also offers professional development and training opportunities on a variety of topics, organises conferences on issues like workload and equality, and coordinates several national and local campaigns.
Recently, the biggest UCU campaign was called “UCU Rising”. Which concerned two disputes. The first was about pensions. In 2018 and then again in 2020, employers proposed massive and unjustified cuts to the USS pensions. These cuts were going to mean that future guaranteed pensions for the average member would be slashed by ~35%. Eventually, UUK even admitted that the cuts were unnecessary, but we still had to go a strike to get them reversed. Eventually it was a full victory. So if you are on the USS pension scheme, you are significantly better off than you would have been if UCU hadn’t stood up.
The other part of the UCU Rising campaign is called the Four Fights dispute, which is about pay, the gender and ethnic pay gap, workload as well as casualisation in Higher Education. There was some progress last year, but in general these are still central issues for UCU.
There are also some active local campaigns here in Oxford. A big one is about college recognition—trying to get oxford’s constituent colleges to recognize UCU. There is also the anti-casualisation campaign, which recently published a report on pay and working conditions for casualised staff in oxford colleges and the department of continuing education. This report revealed that many teaching staff are making below the Oxford Living wage once preparation and marking are factored in. This campaign are also helping staff to assert their employment rights after the recent tribunal case in which tutors successfully argued that they had been denied employment rights through “sham contracts”.
Organising in our workplace for social change
Climate crisis
Let’s start with an issue I’m sure you all care about: the climate crisis. How can organising in our workplace help bring about the social change required to mitigate and adapt to the climate and ecological crises?
I’ve been very inspired by the paper “Rethinking academia in a time of climate crisis” by Anne Urai and Clare Kelly, which invites us to consider how we need to change how we operate in academia, especially academic science, in light of the climate crisis.
Many of us already take action in our personal or private life and as citizens, while neglecting our professional life as a sphere in which to take action and push for change.
Inspired by doughnut economics, they defined an academic doughnut bounded by social foundations that universities should provide, and the outer human and planetary ceilings that universities must avoid overshooting. The ways the academia currently undershoots and overshoots these boundaries are barriers to meaningful action on the climate and biodiversity crisis. The authors go on to propose seven changes required to enable academic action on climate change.
Bringing about these changes in our sector will take sustained, collective, local action—that’s what a trade union is for! To demonstrate how trade union work can be helpful here, consider this recent paper on researchers perception of climate action in UK universities “Wanting to be part of change but feeling overworked and disempowered“. They found that high workload, uncertainty about what action to take, and lack of agency or power were the most commonly cited barriers to doing more on climate change. All three of these can tackled effectively from within UCU.
Regarding workload, UCU has been fighting the workload issue for years. It is one of the four issues that make up the four fights dispute. There have been some recent local wins negotiating Codes of Practice on Managing Stress in the Workplace. Training available if you want to become a workload rep to focus your campaigning efforts on this issue. UCU runs a workload conference which recently took place on April 20th.
On the issue of knowing what to do, UCU offers several online interactive workshops focused on climate and sustainability such as, “Embedding climate education in the curriculum” and “UCU Decarbonise and Decolonise”. If you were to sign up to be a rep of any kind and wanted to get involved with bargaining around environmental issues, there’s a special course for that.
If this sounds exciting to you, I would strongly encourage you to consider volunteering for the Environmental Rep on Oxford UCU’s executive committee. This position is currently vacant so we are not making full use of the avenues available to us to influence University of Oxford’s climate impact. This would be a clear way to find your agency and power.
Social inequality
Equality was one of the pillars of the four fights campaign, in recognition of the fact that issues of inequality intersect with all of the other fights. Casualised positions are disproportionately occupied by women. Casualised contracts deny employment rights like parental leave. The precarity, low pay, and high workload of an academic career often makes it untenable for the less privileged or for those who have caring responsibilities.
An obvious way to make progress on gender inequality would be to improve our support for parents. Currently at Oxford, we only get 2 weeks of paternal leave. The UCU branch at Kings College London recently negotiated an increase from 2 to 6 weeks paternal leave, along with a 20% child care cost subsidy for children under 3 years, and 20 weeks maternity leave among other big wins, including an increase in the London Weighting from £3.5k to £5k. KCL UCU won big here because they had a strong, well-organised branch. Their success is an inspiration and a testament to what UCU can achieve but it also directly helps us here in Oxford by raising the bar. How will we at Oxford UCU build on the KCL win?
Not just negotiating pay and conditions
Lastly, I thought I would highlight some of the recent motions that we passed as a branch so that you can see that what we do is not just negotiating pay and conditions (however important that may be). We recently passed a motion to introduce caste as a protected characteristic. We passed a solidarity motion with the Keep Campsfield Closed campaign, which opposes the reopening of an immigration removal centre in Oxford to be run for profit. And we recently passed a motion in solidarity with Palestine and to answer the calls from higher education institutions in Palestine. This included donations to Medical Aid for Palestine and the local Oxford Ramallah Friendship Association.
How to join and get involved
I hope I’ve given you a number of good reasons to join UCU. UCU provides:
- Training opportunities and professional development
- A collective voice: have a say in your immediate working conditions but also the future of higher education
- Access to legal advice
- Support with your workplace issues
- A structure in which to campaign for causes that matter to you
Student membership options
Student membership options have recently changed.
If you are enrolled in a postgraduate research program and do not have an accompanying employment contract that would entitle you to a Standard membership, you are eligible for UCU’s new PGR membership (£0.99). This membership gives you all the entitlements of a Standard membership which allows you to participate in union democracy and stand for elected positions, etc.
Standard Free membership (free for 12 months) is available for PhD students who are also contracted to work in higher education (e.g. teaching, research, or academic-related work).
Student membership (free) is available for any student at any level that is planning to teach in post-school education.
UCU has adopted a policy to campaign for PGRs to be recognised as members of staff, as they are in many other countries. PGRs deserve employment rights like a living wage and parental leave. For an example of a recent win on this front, PGRs who work for Newcastle University negotiated that they will receive fractional contracts, instead of being zero hours workers. There is a PGR working group within Oxford UCU.
For anyone who is not a student, membership fees are calculated based on your income. UCU members can claim tax relief on up to 67% of their total annual subscription.
Casework
A great way to get involved is through casework. Caseworkers are UCU members who volunteer to provide general help and advice when members are experiencing issues at work. Case workers do not solve a problem on behalf of the member, but they can support a member by directing them to the relevant procedures and potentially accompanying them at meetings. This can be a very rewarding way of supporting your colleagues. You get to meet people from all over the university and support them during a time of need. Training is available and you would be supported by others with more experience.
Facility time
We have a facility time agreement with University of Oxford which means that UCU members who hold a position within the branch (caseworker, rep, committee member) are entitled to paid time off for training and to carry out their union duties. The University recognises that it’s important to have a well-functioning branch, so your union work should not add to your workload.
Reps and local contacts
We need reps and local contacts in every workplace: every department, every college, and ideally every building! A strong network of local contacts helps us to be sensitive to our members needs, to coordinate our activities, and to function effectively as a collective. As with casework, there is training available to help you learn how to be a rep. The rep role can be as small or as large as you want it to be.
Executive committee
The day-to-day business of the University of Oxford UCU Branch is conducted by an executive committee who meet biweekly. The committee interfaces between the local membership and the university as well as national and regional UCU. We are often unable to fill all committee posts which means we are not taking full advantage of the opportunities available to us to advocate on behalf of our members.
The deadline to submit a nomination for a committee role for the 2024-2025 academic year will be June 4, 2024. No prior experience is necessary. Nominations must be proposed and seconded by two members other than the nominee. Open positions include:
- President
- Sexual Harassment and Gender Based Violence (SHGBV) Officer
- Environmental/Green Rep
- Health & Safety Officer
- Learning Rep
- Oxford & District TUC Rep
- Pensions Officer
- Communications Officer
- Ordinary Committee Member
We are holding an informal in-person session at 3 pm on Thursday 16th May in the University Club, 11 Mansfield Road, when you can drop in and speak with current Committee members about the various Committee, Rep and Caseworker roles, and how you can get more involved with the branch. A second hybrid session will be held on Thursday 23rd May, with further details to follow.
TL;DR
Want to see change in your institution, in your sector, in your community? Do you value education and want to protect it? Do you are about worker’s rights, health & safety, workload, casualisation, equality, climate change? Do you want to build solidarity and take collective action?
- Join UCU (https://www.ucu.org.uk/join)
- Come to meetings. Join our WhatsApp community. Subscribe to our google calendar.
- Get involved in a local campaign
- Sign up for training or professional development courses
- Sign up to be a caseworker
- Become a dept rep, college rep, or health & safety rep
- Nominate yourself for a role on the executive committee
- Email ucu@ox.ac.uk with any comments, concerns, or questions
Collective action starts here.
Oxford UCU 