Breaking the impasse: Reflections on university worker organising in the UK

Since 2022, Britain has been in the midst of its largest strike wave in decades, with protracted industrial action across much of the public sector, as well as in industries such as transport.In the twelve months to June 2023, four million working days were lost to labour disputes, a dramatic shift from 2018, when the corresponding figure was just 272 000, the sixth-lowest annual total since records began in 1891.Perhaps surprisingly, however, two-thirds of the working days lost in 2018 were in the education sector, primarily universities (ONS, 2019) -and university strikes have accounted for a significant proportion of the total working days lost in each subsequent year.In early 2018, up to 42 000 members of the University and College Union (UCU), employed at sixty-four universities, struck for fourteen days as part of a national dispute over privatisationinflicted reductions to pension entitlements.The mass mobilisation by UCU was a surprising about-face for a union that for many years had been criticised by its members for its overly cautious approach to industrial action.This mobilisation reached a crescendo in the spring of 2018 with a rank-and-file rebellion of members, many of them newly activated by the dispute, opposing capitulation by the union's then-leadership to the proposed cuts.The pension dispute, however, was not based around a sector-wide demand.Proposed changes to the pension scheme primarily affected staff in the older research-intensive universities that participate in the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS).Faculty at the remaining hundred or so "new" or "post-92" universities accrue pension benefits in a separate plan.(The "post-92" universities, former polytechnics and teaching colleges, are so called because they were granted the right to call themselves universities by the government in 1992).In addition, casualised staff who move frequently between institutions on so-called "fixed-term" and "zero-hours" contracts -and who in any case may feel sceptical about their long-term prospects in the sector -were often less identified with the issue of the dispute than academic and professional services staff on openended contracts at the striking universities.UCU's casualised members, who have suffered the most severe assaults on their working conditions, were nevertheless present in significant numbers on the picket lines in 2018 and were often more militant than their more secure colleagues.They naturally wanted to see the union address the issues that mattered most to them as well.Under pressure to reflect this reality, a year later, UCU opened a second, parallel dispute, involving workers in all 160+ British institutions of higher education.Known as the "Four Fights", this revolved around claims on four issues: 1. Pay, which since 2009 has been eroded by one-fifth in real terms, even before Britain's recent cost-ofliving crisis; 2. Equalities, with women, workers of colour and workers with disabilities facing substantial pay gaps; 3. Workloads, which are widely viewed by university staff as having become unmanageable, contributing to high levels of poor physical and mental health amongst university

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