Why we don’t want an immediate reballot: a view from the grassroots at the University of Edinburgh

Blog post by Sophia Woodman and Sophia Lycouris[*]

After several months of strikes and marking boycott, we are approaching the end of UCU’s current mandate for industrial action on 30 September without having resolved the Four Fights dispute. There are a number of views among members about how to proceed and one of these is that we need to renew our mandate immediately by launching a reballot. In this way we could continue to undertake whatever form of resistance or labour withdrawal is needed without any gaps, until we win.

Much of the discussion about the reballot has focused on procedural matters such as whether or not HEC and union officers ‘must’ enact all Congress motions, what exactly happened at the 30 June HEC meeting when the reballot motion was on the agenda and who has the power to call a reballot. There’s also been discussion around national level resources, financial and staff-wise, as well as holiday periods, and what they do and don’t allow for. In this blog post, we take a different tack and consider a view from the grassroots, in a large branch (with over 3,000 members) that has been committed to the MAB and to getting out the vote in the two past national ballots.

Union officers, local organizers and active members in UCU Edinburgh have been in a constant cycle of intense activity since this period in our dispute began last year, but especially since January 2023. In February and March, we undertook 12 days of strike action, with all the attendant organizing work, both before, during and after. During that time, our next reballot campaign began. Getting out the vote work (GTVO for short) is labour intensive: membership lists have to be checked; local contacts in each part of the institution provided with the information and materials they need to contact ‘their’ members; individual members contacted, and re-contacted, and voting records maintained. Without all this work, we risked falling below the crucial 50% voting threshold required under the Tory union laws. We know what a successful ballot takes, and it was a lot of patient and painstaking work for officers and local contacts to achieve the turnout of over 60% at our branch. (This is based on members reporting to us that they’ve voted). As the second largest branch nationally, the level of participation at the University of Edinburgh contributes significantly to the success of the ballot nationally.

With the GTVO barely over, we were faced with organizing the marking and assessment boycott at Edinburgh. We built new channels of communication with members, initially mainly via personal networks and conversations, but assisted by an online branch organizing platform off university servers, where members could ask questions, discuss strategy and share ideas and news. We held many local and branch level meetings to encourage members to join the MAB, as well as innumerable individual conversations, e-mails etc. Recognizing that participation would become untenable for many members without some means of supplementing their lost wages—our employer announced pay deductions of 50% for salaried staff, and guaranteed hours members lose 100% of their pay if they did not do their marking—we had to set up a system to raise funds, particularly from members who had no marking to do. Communicating to students why we were engaging in the MAB, as well as to a wider public were also crucial tasks.

The point of this brief description of the organizing work of the past months is to provide an indication of how much labour and energy has been involved. There have been many positives: we’ve built new relationships, made new friendships, developed new skills and capacities, as well as shared analysis of our concerns about our workplace. Many members have become more actively involved in the work of the branch. We’ve cemented and built networks of solidarity with a wider group of students. That level of local engagement has been critical to the major impact of our MAB at Edinburgh, which has been widely documented. Working with students is one of our priorities and a fundamental part of the long-term strategy for sustainable resistance we have been trying to build since 2018 in Edinburgh. This does not only include working with students and other unions on campus, but also creating links with other struggles within the city of Edinburgh. Again, we feel very proud that our long-term work on staff- student solidarity had wider impact during this summer’s MAB. The University of Edinburgh students staged a number of spectacular actions during the ‘graduation ceremonies’ in which they received empty degrees. These scenes were broadcast live as part of the normal way the University of Edinburgh runs its graduation ceremonies. Sections from these livestreams were captured and circulated widely on social media, and contributed to building up enthusiasm about persevering with the MAB. Links to these short videos were repeatedly included in messages Jo Grady, our General Secretary, sent to UCU members across the country during this period. Students from other universities adopted similar tactics and produced a range of impressive performative events in the weeks that followed. This is an important victory in the long-term project of building staff-student alliances with national impact we should use as foundation for future work in this area.

However, the work we undertook in the past few months on all the different levels described above cannot be continued indefinitely at this level of intensity. We are fully aware of the work that a reballot would entail, and in our judgment, in our branch, it would be impossible to achieve the levels of engagement with members that we would need over the next month, as many people are away on leave, both organizers and ordinary members. Launching a reballot without that capacity runs the serious risk of failing to achieve the 50% turnout we need. This would be disastrous for our union and our dispute.

In our view, at this moment we need to conserve resources and capacity as we face formidable odds in our struggle to reclaim our universities: an extremely hostile Westminster government, the lowest levels of public funding for HE in the OECD, an entrenched model of the ‘business university’ with decision-making dominated by financial considerations, and an extremely hardline faction in control of UCEA that has explicitly dedicated itself to breaking our union. UCEA’s intransigence in the face of calls from staff, students, politicians and the public to #settlethedispute—as documented by our negotiators in their report this week—is ample evidence of this. We also lack the density of membership—in part because our union only represents part of the staff of universities—that could effectively bring our institutions to a stand-still. It is naïve, at best, to imagine that we can achieve a one-off big ‘win’ in this context.

Despite all those constraints, we’ve achieved a lot that we can be proud of from our industrial action. After years of struggle, we’ve won a commitment that cuts to our pensions will be reversed next year. This year’s action on the Four Fights got employers back to the negotiating table several times, and achieved a higher pay offer, although this is far from what we want or deserve. We also got employers to agree to taking action on the three other fights, through developing national frameworks to address each of them.

Our negotiators have outlined the impasse we face at national level. At this point, we need to build our union for a long-term struggle to achieve our vision of fair working conditions and free education. For this, we need a longer-term strategy that isn’t reliant solely on constant industrial action. Without strong local branches and a growing membership, we can’t win disputes at either local or national level, and will also not have the strength and organizing networks we need to ensure any benchmarks agreed with employers (such as on casualization) actually get implemented in our institutions.

In our view, we now need to stop, think and focus on two things: 1) how to approach recruitment of new members and 2) how to engage new and existing members with regular participation in branch activities and wider union activities.

UCU is not a service union, it is a member-led union, but the work to develop member-led methods of operation has only started recently. In the past few months there have been webinars any member could attend and e-consultations to support the official process of making decisions. How can we expand on this? What else is needed? We can’t explore this in detail here, but watch this space!! We are passionate supporters of a much-needed long-term strategy for a member-led union and more posts on this topic will be coming in the near future. The one thing we can say at this point is let’s make a thorough assessment of all types of progress we made so far regarding engagement of the full membership during the past months. How did this work? What observations can we share? How can we build on these achievements? What specific activities should we continue to run regularly? What do we want the alternative university to look like? We would also like to encourage others from other branches to engage with this type of work and share their thoughts and achievements in local engagement. This is a call for a brainstorming process at national level about long-term strategy.

Last but not least, the sustainable approach to long-term struggle we advocate in this blog must include comprehensive consideration of colleagues’ overall wellbeing. In the current situation, we urgently need to consider how to conclude the MAB in a way that takes into account what is humanly possible for those trying to complete outstanding marking alongside the normal work at the beginning of the new academic year. In other words, the MAB needs to end in a way that protects people from unpaid overwork as much as possible. We are convinced that an orderly end to the MAB now is likely to provide more protection to staff than trying to continue via a hasty reballot and a short gap between mandates. We are aware that this suggestion might sound controversial and even defeatist to some, however we need to remember that UCU members are finite beings with bodies and minds that are limited, which is why long-term strategy is the only way forward.

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Sophia Woodman is a sociologist at the University of Edinburgh. She’s co-president of the UCU Edinburgh branch committee and a member of UCU Commons.

Sophia Lycouris is an artist and academic who works at the University of Edinburgh. She is the UCU Edinburgh Equalities officer and sits on the STUC LGBT+ Workers Committee. She is a member of UCU Commons.

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[*] Both authors are writing in their individual capacity, and their views do not necessarily represent the UCU Edinburgh branch committee.