Annual Meeting of Staff on Casualised Contracts: A Report
By Ben Pope
Highly visible consequences of the structural funding crises in UK tertiary education are omnipresent at the moment, and the damage done to individuals and communities by this unfolding disaster will be with us for much longer. On Saturday 22 February, one of the regular, scheduled responses to these structural failings took place in London, as representatives of well over 100,000 precarious workers* in higher and further education met for UCU’s annual meeting of staff on casualised contracts. The meeting heard about successes and new initiatives that show that UCU members have an increasingly clear vision for post-16 education without endemic insecure employment and are organising to make this a reality, despite all the challenges that we face.
Positive developments featured at the meeting included the launch of the new research staff manifesto and accompanying branch guidance. These documents set out clear and practical demands on employers which, taken as an integrated whole, would make a significant difference to staff in one of the most casualised segments of the higher education workforce. Parts of the manifesto build on an important agreement to pilot a pooled resourcing model (breaking the link between individual posts and particular research funding grants) at the University of Bath. The meeting heard that negotiations to establish similar pilots at other universities are well advanced. Some of the principles of the manifesto demands can also be applied to other types of staff in both higher and further education, and this could be a focus of further work in the coming years.
The meeting also heard more details about last year’s major win for Doctoral Tutors (postgraduate students who are also employed as teaching staff) at the University of Sussex, and the substantial campaigning, organising and negotiating work that made this possible. The co-chairs of the Anti-Casualisation Committee (ACC) also reported on related wins at Sheffield and Cambridge universities in the past year. These local developments are significant for the wider ‘PGRs as staff’ campaign, alongside the recent increase in UKRI stipends for postgraduate researchers.
The ACC has played a part in reinvigorating organising at the regional level in several parts of the UK, and this was highlighted in the panel discussion. Through motions carried and a workshop, the annual meeting continued a new ‘tradition’ of ensuring that the intersections between casualisation and equalities issues are highlighted every year. Some delegates also heard more about what might be included in the forthcoming Employment Rights Bill, at a workshop featuring a guest speaker from the TUC.
However, both the number of nominations for election to the new ACC and the report of the outgoing co-chairs made it clear that capacity for further organising and campaigning is severely stretched in many areas, and we urgently need to improve member engagement with anti-casualisation work and to build a bigger base of activists. Some regions (certainly London, the North West and South West) are developing more active anti-casualisation networks, but others currently have no regional anti-casualisation officers. Discussion at the annual meeting also reflected the fact that the process to stand for election to ACC (and indeed the other NEC advisory committees) can place unnecessary obstacles in the way of casualised members in particular, not least because our enforced mobility between institutions sits uneasily with a requirement for branch nominations to a role that is representative of casualised members as a whole.
The dissemination of information to support local bargaining and organising also featured in the discussion. There is an ever-expanding library of negotiating advice and campaign materials, and notices of local wins are posed on the UCU website, but there is clearly a substantial appetite for further information-sharing and comparison across institutions (see the 2023 FOI report on support for research staff as an example of benchmarking across universities). The meeting discussed the increased difficulties of communicating both with members and beyond the union since the takeover of Twitter by a notorious plutocrat who is now openly supporting the far right.
Nonetheless, UCU Commons members came away from the annual meeting with more optimism than we had beforehand. Alongside the positive developments mentioned above, we were pleased that member engagement and the removal of barriers to participation in democratic structures were prominent topics, and that the debate also included areas of the union’s work not always directly associated with casualisation (such as pensions). Commoners have been very active in anti-casualisation work since we started organising together, and this year’s annual meeting was no exception. The meeting was co-chaired by Tilly Fitzmaurice, NEC representative of casualised members in HE, and Ben Pope was a panel speaker (as North West regional anti-casualisation officer in HE) and co-facilitated the workshop on the research staff manifesto, drawing on his experiences as joint anti-casualisation officer at the University of Manchester. Jo Edge, NEC representative of women members, also spoke in the debates throughout the day. UCU Commoners in general are always glad to hear from anyone who wants to talk about the future of UCU’s anti-casualisation campaigns – see here for the different ways to contact us.
* 100,000 is a very conservative estimate. The only remotely secure figure that’s publicly available is the 71,715 fixed-term academic staff in HE (HESA 2023/24). To this have to be added thousands of HE academic staff on ‘open ended’ contracts with an ‘at risk’ date (usually fixed-term contracts in all but name), a probable c.13,000 fixed-term academic-related professional services staff in HE (based on 2019/20 figures), and at least 15,000 fixed-term or zero-hours staff in FE (based on this 2019 report). The biggest unknown is the proportion of the 60,360 ‘atypical’ academic staff in HE (HESA 2023/24) that should be considered casualised workers within the sector: some will be genuine freelancers, for example, but this number also includes the lowest-paid and least secure teaching and research staff (such as many postgraduate researchers who also teach). Data on non-academic ‘atypical’ staff are not even collected.