*Our thanks go to UCU Commoner Sophia Woodman for the blog title!
Note: this blog draws from experiences of the MAB that have been kindly shared by UCU Commons members. As such, the insights presented here represent partial and contingent perspectives and therefore make no claim to easy applicability under any and all conditions. Furthermore, except where noted otherwise, all information that might make any individual, branch, institution and/or other group identifiable has been redacted in the text of this blog. This is to ensure that the details of organising – as well as organisers – are not inadvertently revealed to potential readers of this blog that belong to university Senior Management Teams or employers’ representative organisations. This write-up is a product of the collective labour of several UCU Commons members.
Experiences of the MAB, which began on 20th April, were very mixed and it was highly financially stressful for members, especially given salary lost due to strike action earlier in the year. Numbers participating at each institution also varied widely, as did the timing of the disruption due to differences in academic calendars across the four UK nations. While there have been several branch-level MABs in recent years (e.g. at Leicester, QMUL, Liverpool), this was also the first MAB to be called in an ‘aggregated’, all-branch dispute at the national level since 2006. It has become painfully apparent how different – and challenging – a national-level MAB is in comparison to a local-level one. Thousands of members across the country have lost huge chunks of their salaries due to deductions (losses that many can ill afford given the ongoing cost-of-living crisis), meaning that next steps will necessarily include challenging punitive deductions via realistic legal routes and grievances. Moreover, through a variety of appeal options, students are likely to hit back at universities and the sector’s regulators for the severe disruption they have faced. This year has demonstrated just how little regard our employers have for academic standards and integrity, and that the so-called ‘no detriment’ policies they implemented could, in fact, create and shore up significant future detriment for students. For example, PhD students may be left to contend with the potential disadvantage of only having had one viva voce examiner as they attempt to navigate job markets. This experience has also reminded us that employers are prepared to engage non-specialist markers to undermine the boycott (as individual employers such as QMUL have already done in the past), offer to pay PhD students and other precariously employed members of the university to step in and take on boycotted marking, or to offer insulting ‘goodwill payments’ to students with ‘pending degree classifications’. The reckless intransigence of our employers has proven especially damaging for particular groups of students. These include those working in marginalised subject areas (which replacement markers are egregiously unqualified to assess) and international students, for whom a delayed graduation and the absence of a complete final transcript makes them vulnerable to the Home Office’s Kafkaesque visa regime.
Following the outcome of the HEC consultation on the MAB, in which a majority of members voted to end it before the expiration of the industrial action mandate on the 30th September, we deemed this an opportune moment to reflect on the experience. More specifically, we want to consider some of the concrete, on-the-ground conditions under which the 2023 MAB worked well, as well as suggesting some paths forward for future organising. This blog post is structured thematically under the following headings: mapping, community, and organising with other groups.
Mapping
It is worth briefly reiterating the unique characteristics of the MAB as a form of industrial action. As has repeatedly been noted elsewhere, the benefit of a MAB is that it can strike (pun intended) to the heart of the business of the modern university: in the words of Katy Fox-Hodess and comrades, the “necessity of maximising student recruitment and graduation”. What’s more, a MAB is an opportunity to target industrial action strategically and limit as far as possible the number of members risking disproportionate and punitive salary deductions, which were unhesitantly implemented by the vast majority of our employers in 2023. For example, those who do take part can be subsidised, through wage-sharing schemes, by those who cannot or will not boycott assessment, either because they have no involvement in it or because their participation would have little impact. In order for a MAB to be effective, however, it needs solid planning. As Fox-Hodess and comrades have also emphasised, this needs to begin well in advance, not least so that members have time to prepare financially for the action. This planning must also centre hyper-local, granular organisation within individual schools, departments, sections or subject groups. This brings us on to the first thematic area of the post: mapping.
Branches need to know what their areas of relative strength and weakness are, and this means surveying and mapping members. As argued elsewhere, these efforts need to start in advance of the MAB itself. There may be objections from branches that collecting and storing this information carries a risk of it being intercepted by employers, who would then use it to mitigate the impacts of the MAB. However, this is not in itself a reason not to do this, as this risk of information leaking can be managed and the benefits of having this data and knowledge far outweigh the drawbacks. It is also likely that the employers already know, from prior experience of industrial action, which departments or units are most likely to have a large number of members participating in the MAB.
As we all know, the fact of whether or not an individual is planning to participate in industrial action is confidential information. This makes it difficult for branches to know with exact certainty how many members are participating in a MAB (just as branch committees would/should not ask members to confirm whether they are planning to strike). Nonetheless, constant ‘mapping’ of activity can also take place through regular reports from units, departments or schools about levels of participation.
What many of us in UCU Commons have learned from the MAB in 2023 is that the knowledge, tools and capacities necessary for making a success of a MAB at both national and branch levels need to be developed over a longer time period. First, across most universities, MAB participation was highly unevenly spread, with usually only a handful of departments or units with large numbers of members boycotting. This points to an oft-repeated need for UCU to increase its membership density as a general precondition for robust action, especially among groups with chronically low membership. Perhaps the national union structures, together with paid officials, could work with branches to develop context-specific recruitment materials tailored for low-membership groups. Density of participation in the MAB matters more today than they did before the beginning of the Covid pandemic, which stimulated the creation of ‘mitigation’ and so-called ‘no detriment’ policies for students with incomplete sets of marks. Few institutions have the level of quasi-democratic academic governance that enabled well-organized members at Cambridge University to defeat proposed mitigation measures in their Regent House. In most cases, the only way to stop these measures being implemented is by denying them the threshold basis of marks from which missing marks are ‘estimated’.
As reported by one member who participated, one factor that reduced the impact of the MAB was the effect of the semesterisation of the academic teaching year; in other words, the move from modules that span the whole academic year to those that run over the course of a single semester. This meant that the number of potential participants in the MAB was necessarily restricted only to those with marking duties in the May-June marking period, and not the January marking period. The only solution to this would be for members with semester 1 marking duties to be on MAB in January, while those with semester 2 marking would boycott in May-June. While it is obviously more difficult to start a MAB earlier in the academic year, this should still be something to aim for. Indeed, late last year some UCU Commons members made the case for a winter MAB in order to exploit the changes brought in to mitigate the effects of the pandemic, which have had the effect of shifting significant weight onto Semester 1 marks.
This, therefore, suggests an opportunity for building research and organising capacity within branches, who know their own conditions and members best. By pooling their members’ extensive knowledge and expertise, they could gather data on what the teaching year looks like locally – complete with pressure points – and keep this both for their own benefit and for use by the national democratic structures and union staff. Ultimately, we need to build this organising capacity in order to be able to sustain a MAB for longer, both to counteract semesterisation and to create an escalating MAB that allows employers to perceive the progression and graduation problems ahead and waver in their resolve to ‘tough it out’ and ignore students’ concerns – a resolve that might only be stiffened by the drama of a high-stakes showdown in the final months of the academic year.
Community
If a MAB is to work, it is vital to recognise and alleviate the isolation and loneliness that participation can entail. The pressure to relent and complete assessment duties is immensely strong, especially in contexts of hostile departmental management, individual job insecurity or environments where the future of degree programmes or departments are in doubt. Therefore, collective solidarity and support from branches is essential, and during summer 2023 this often took the form of regular meetings or drop-in sessions that are open for members’ questions. These drop-ins are especially helpful if they include sessions tailored to individual categories of staff – for example PGRs, Heads of School or chairs of Boards of Examiners – and run by members belonging to those categories. These meetings were especially important for boycotters who were in the minority in their department or unit, as it eased their isolation and linked them to a supportive community. Branches all over the country will have built up a wealth of knowledge about useful strategies for supporting members boycotting assessment. Now seems an ideal time to capture these so they are made available to future branch committees and for future actions.
Furthermore, it is important to be honest about the fact that many of us are deeply emotionally attached to our work. This is a major reason why community, care and mutual support are so important: boycotting members in many branches will have suffered the insult and the indignity of having their modules assessed by anonymous markers, some by their own colleagues. These experiences highlight how, for many of us, the acts of teaching and assessing are not simply routines, repeated year-on-year, from which we are completely alienated. Rather, they represent part of a cumulative process, such as a module lovingly built up and nurtured over time, in dialogue with colleagues and successive generations of students. Therefore, we must continue to foster supportive conversations among ourselves about the psychological impacts of participating in this kind of action.
Another crucial plank of branch efforts during the MAB was, of course, fundraising to materially support members engaged in the boycott. Many branches set up salary-sharing schemes, which were crucial for supplementing local strike funds (if these were in place) while also allowing members not able to boycott to contribute to the action. In some instances, these were extremely successful; one large, active branch raised £30,000 by asking members to donate whatever they could afford. However, one member active in the MAB found it difficult to attract salary pledges from large numbers of members. The long summer holiday period also hindered fundraising efforts; the lack of fundraising activities taking place was not for a want of ideas, but for a lack of members with time and capacity to organise these activities.
As has been noted previously on this blog, member engagement is an important lesson we have learned from the two disputes in 2022-2023. Successful member engagement and organising takes time, and at its best it is a years-long process with an emphasis on ensuring continuity. With this long-term perspective in mind, it is vital that we build relationships with all our colleagues and push back against the divide-and-rule tactics of our employers, which will prepare us for future actions. The MAB tested social relationships within branches and academic departments and schools, between academic and non-UCU Professional Services (PS) staff, sometimes to breaking point. One member, employed at a large pre-92 university in the north of England, recalls chatting over coffee to some PS colleagues and learning that they had no idea of the scale of deductions that UCU members taking part in the MAB were enduring, and expressed shock when they did learn about it. Many of us would prefer it if all university staff were in one union, so that bringing the university to a complete standstill through industrial action would be much easier. As many of us know, those who really keep the university machine in motion are professional services staff of both UCU-eligible pay grades and below, but our density of eligible PS members remains too low. If we are to even think about enacting this transformation as a long-term goal, we must do our best to ensure open channels of communication between ourselves and our non-UCU colleagues. Due to the highly constrained legal environment for trade unions in the UK, it is difficult to communicate formally with these members, but branches should prioritise maintaining regular contact with the branch committees of PS unions, possibly through the creation of a Trade Union Liaison Officer post (or similar) or similar on the branch committee. Nor is there anything to stop us chatting informally with our non-UCU PS colleagues, whether they are eligible to be UCU members or not. It is obviously important to ensure, since they can neither take part in UCU industrial action nor get involved on a ‘sympathy strike’ basis, that non-UCU PS colleagues are not exposed to potential legal or disciplinary issues, especially given that they are already underpaid, more surveilled at work and face fewer career progression opportunities than academic staff. Nonetheless, it is difficult to see how a MAB (or any industrial action, for that matter) can be successful without the full knowledge and understanding – let alone sympathy and solidarity – of our non-UCU colleagues. Potential ways to meet and build solidarity with non-UCU colleagues might include department- or faculty-wide ‘coffee club’ initiatives that provide opportunities for different staff categories to mix (either subvert an official one or create your own!), or university-wide networks focussing on other cross-cutting issues such as research or EDI: for example, women’s or LGBTQ+ staff networks.
Support from other groups:
In order to garner support for our action and intensify pressure on our employers, it was crucial to reach out to our students for support, and this includes prospective students. Some branches called local strike days due to disproportionate salary deductions for boycotting members, and some of these were made to coincide with university open days. These events, when our employers pull out all the stops to attract new students, presented an opportune moment to disrupt and locate ourselves within the process of student recruitment. Picketing on open days also created the opportunity to contact an interested group usually out of our reach: the families of prospective students, whose personal financial resources are crucial to propping up the fees-based HE funding model.
Finally, organised and vocal student support for the MAB was critical. Protests staged at ‘graduation’ ceremonies were among the most publicly visible manifestations of staff-student solidarity. However, in the most successful cases, this solidarity had been nurtured and built up over a long period of sustained, genuinely reciprocal organising in alliance with students. As was the case at one large university, this organising must also take a wider perspective of building the alternative university: a long term project that both encompasses and exceeds time-limited actions as well as connecting them to broader struggles for a radically just society. At the very heart of these organising efforts was a commitment to continuity in all strategies in the future. Since the university is a collective to which, inevitably, most students belong only temporarily, this continuity necessarily involves building durable alliances that survive changes to both student and staff communities and allows for the transfer of valuable experience. These alliances must not only take in conditions within the university, but also those in the society beyond it.
It is clear, therefore, that organising at a very local level is key to a successful MAB, and this requires time and the ability to focus on this task well ahead of the MAB starting. Most, if not all branches will have found this time in short supply ahead of this particular MAB. But although this MAB has not produced the results that we wanted to see, it is equally clear that this is not for lack of effort at the local level. There have been huge achievements locally, relative to the starting position of branches with widely varying levels and traditions and organising. The more that we build on these achievements, the more that we can tackle the fundamental issues of membership density and member engagement that continue to make our task of achieving better working conditions a very steep one.
UCU Commons a 