Anti-Casualisation at Congress 2023
By Ben Pope, NEC representative of casually employed members in HE until the close of Congress 2023 (with thanks to David Harvie, serving honorary treasurer since Congress closed)
UCU Congress 2023 took place in Glasgow on 27–29 May, and over 90 pages of motions were discussed over those three days (including the further/higher education sector conferences). Members of UCU Commons have been reflecting on the motions (both adopted and not adopted) related to policy matters that are important to us. This particular blog post focuses on policies adopted to support postgraduate researchers and other casualised workers across HE and FE.
Although this area of activity hasn’t attracted the same attention as other aspects of Congress 2023 (for example, the motions on the invasion of Ukraine), this was an important Congress for UCU’s anti-casualisation work, principally because of the very strong support shown from the Congress floor for the present direction of travel in a number of areas in which we currently have significant momentum.
PGRs as Staff
The original research done by postgraduate researchers is a vital contribution to human knowledge and an essential part of the wider research ecosystem, together with its role in the career development of individual researchers and educators. But the pandemic in particular highlighted how postgraduate researchers (PGRs) are disadvantaged by being classed solely as ‘students’ and denied full employment rights. Campaigning for the recognition of PGRs as staff, as they are classified in many other European countries, has been UCU policy since 2020. This is a long-term objective, and the precise form of a ‘new deal for postgraduate research’ (to use the title of a current UK Research & Innovation consultation) is still an open question in some of its details. But in motion HE24 (HEC and Warwick University, with amendment from the Black Members’ Standing Committee), Congress reaffirmed the broad principles of the policy.
The policy was given real substance from the outset by the General Secretary’s decision to fund a fixed-term full-time post dedicated to the campaign, which has been held as a job share by Ellie Munro and Alex Kirby-Reynolds. They presented a report on the initial phase of the campaign, which was endorsed via motion HE23 (HEC). The report shows just how much Alex and Ellie have been able to achieve in a short time, but also how far they’ve been able to integrate support for local organising with campaigning and negotiations and with UK-level lobbying of bodies such as UKRI. With the ‘new deal’ consultation process still ongoing, it is vital that this lobbying work continues.
But both the report and HE24 also emphasised the opportunities to expand this ‘integrative’ approach to other ‘hard-to-reach’ groups of highly casualised staff, ranging from postdoctoral researchers to prison educators. Organising PGRs can be very challenging, as the elements of HE24 from Warwick University show, but has corresponding value as a model for organising other groups of workers. I and many other members of UCU Commons are very keen for UCU to invest more in organising.
What do we mean by this? It’s not just about recruitment, but it is essential that we increase the number of members and increase our union’s density (the proportion of eligible workers that are members). When we take industrial action, we need as many people as possible involved. Second, we need to encourage more members to become more involved in UCU’s democratic structures, whether this be at branch, regional or national level. The more members that are involved in making decisions, the more collective strength we have behind those decisions. And the task of maintaining branches’ activity currently falls on too few shoulders. Third, we should encourage members to apply their professional expertise to UCU-related matters. A large proportion of our members are practising researchers and their various skills could be invaluable both for developing our critical understanding of our individual and collective employers and for informing our own strategy, tactics and vision as a union.
Motion 27 (Cambridge) also calls for UCU to strategically invest in organising, making explicit reference to PGRs. I personally believe that the experience and connections built up by the PGRs as Staff campaign over the last two years can and should be a foundation for further progress in this area. However, the exact form that this takes is ultimately a matter for the General Secretary, not Congress, to determine and the current plan for the organising role mentioned above to continue on a part-time basis (0.5 FTE) is currently the subject of a dispute between the union representing UCU staff and UCU management—so it wouldn’t be appropriate to say more here. Nonetheless, I see investment in organising in general as the key way in which we can move forward as a union, and all of us involved in UCU (both members and staff) need to take responsibility for making this a reality.
PGRs as UCU Members
Eligibility for ‘full’ or ordinary (as opposed to student) UCU membership for all PGRs would obviously be a consequence of the recognition of PGRs as staff, but ordinary membership for current PGRs, even when they are not (yet) employed in any capacity, is a logical extension of the PGRs as Staff campaign: since postgraduate research is in fact a job, and its current ‘student’ status ultimately facilitates the exploitation of cheap research labour, why would UCU continue to reflect these circumstances in its own membership structure? On a more pragmatic level, many PGRs move in and out of employment as graduate teaching assistants (GTAs), demonstrators, research assistants and the like during their postgraduate careers, and access to ordinary membership throughout this time would simplify matters considerably (see also rule change motion 43, Migrant Members’ Standing Committee, on access to legal support for student members).
Nonetheless, rule change motion 42 (Durham University), which made ordinary membership an option for PGRs, needed more debate than the other motions mentioned in this post. There are questions of principle: should we create a further, potentially quite large group of members who can vote in elections to committees that steer disputes in which these members can’t directly participate? And there are questions of practicality: as things stand, the membership database isn’t set up to handle a whole category of ordinary members who aren’t in employment (see guidance to Congress from officials and NEC), which could undermine the accuracy of membership data that has by law to be sent to employers in relation to ballots for industrial action—and we know that employers are always keen to challenge the validity of these ballots.
The overwhelming vote in favour of the rule change shows that Congress delegates placed a far higher value on inclusion of PGRs than on either of these concerns, and I’m personally glad that they did so. But I hope that the new NEC will work with officials to address the practicalities of the rule change: a great many manual exclusions (for members on long-term leave and so on) are already made for each ballot, but if a large number of non-employed PGRs take up ordinary membership this could put the system under serious strain. I’m sure that the membership database can be updated, but such fundamental changes to a complex system are usually difficult (and costly).
Administrative challenges aside, Congress sent a clear signal about the importance of PGRs and PGR organising to UCU in HE, and UCU Commons members did our best to help ensure that this message comes across as clearly as possible: PGRs are literally the future of the union, and we need to involve them in its present as much as possible.
Research Staff
Research staff in HE are another highly casualised group that have been at the heart of recent efforts to strengthen our organising and bargaining, and a particular focus of the Anti-Casualisation Committee in the past year, thanks in large part to significant new agreements at the Open University and University of Bath.
New UCU guidance on campaigning and negotiating for secure researcher roles was published just before Congress 2023, and takes a multi-pronged approach to the problem: creating genuinely long-term posts through proper workforce planning that breaks the link between finite funding and contract length; restricting the use of fixed-term contracts; and ensuring that any fixed-term or otherwise insecure contracts have a greatly reduced risk of redundancy through active bridge funding and proactive redeployment.
This position was informed by a research staff working group, which also put forward new campaigning ideas: creating a way to rank employers by levels of support for research staff, and developing a research staff manifesto. Both the idea of a working group itself and the proposed campaign are reflected in motions HE21 (Newcastle University) and HE22 (Open University): this work is now in progress, and the endorsement of Sector Conference will expedite it.
One significant barrier to organising casualised research staff has always been the fact that strike action by staff on fixed-term research contracts often feels more disruptive to their own work than to the employer. But questioning the ways in which the salary deductions from striking research and research-related staff are spent provides a way of redressing the balance. Several branches and the Anti-Casualisation Committee have been working on this problem, eventually leading to a branch action notice published in February 2023. Until now, it’s been difficult to provide guidance to branches on this issue due to a lack of Sector Conference policy: motion HE8 (Anti-Casualisation Committee) removes this barrier by resolving to support branches in developing demands appropriate to their local circumstances, e.g. extending individual contracts and/or ring-fencing an amount commensurate to the overall deductions to support casualised research staff in various ways.
Engagement with and pressure on research funders is obviously important in this context as well, and motions HE9 and HE26 (both University of Glasgow) reinforce the significance of this work. This could be joined up with the ongoing engagement with UKRI by the PGRs as Staff campaign (see above).
Outsourcing, Private Providers and Further Education
Both PGRs and research staff are heavily concentrated in the larger and older universities, and it was important that Congress and the sector conferences also discussed newer and sharper ends of the marketisation of tertiary education. Motions HE34 and 76 (both University of Sheffield International College) resolved a campaign for recognition in a particular private provider (Study Group) and a mapping exercise of UCU members in private and outsourced education providers in general—both pieces of work that I would certainly be glad to see undertaken. Motion HE25 (University of Surrey) resolved to collect data on the conditions faced by PGRs also work for agencies (such as Unitemps) and for subsidiary companies: this too is important work, and could be integrated within a renewed and expanded PGRs as Staff campaign.
I obviously wasn’t able to attend the FE Sector Conference, but motions resolving to undertake a new survey of the experiences of casualised staff (FE6, Anti-Casualisation Committee, following this 2019 survey) and addressing the intersection of disability and casualisation (FE7, Disabled Members’ Standing Committee) show the commonalities of challenges and campaign solutions across HE and FE, and how much we can therefore learn from each other.
Three further motions should be mentioned: 73 (Anti-Casualisation Committee) is important in setting UCU’s anti-casualisation work in a broader context of resisting precarity in all sectors; 75 (London Metropolitan) highlights the fact that even mandatory training is often unpaid for casualised staff, and that agreements to address this are valuable; and 26 (University of Liverpool) addressed financial support for casualised members taking industrial action. It’s important to note that the existing arrangements for the UK-wide Fighting Fund already allow loss to be evidenced in a variety of ways and include a ‘special circumstances’ route for priority of payment and consideration of irregular hours/income—but there’s still scope to improve our support for members in this respect, and had I remained on NEC I would have continued working on this as a priority. Hopefully the incoming NEC will take up the issue.
These motions all show members from different groups and orientations within UCU moving broadly in the same directions, sometimes working closely together. Commons members were proud to play our part, with a special mention to Emma Battell Lowman (who moved HE23) and Tilly Fitzmaurice, who succeeds me as NEC representative of casually employed members in HE—good luck to Tilly in working with the new NEC to implement the anti-casualisation resolutions of Congress 2023, as well as continuing to develop the intersections of UCU’s equalities and anti-casualisation work that were very much present at Congress in the discussion of the motions mentioned above.
Next Steps
If, upon reading this, any of these motions and the work they commit the UCU to really speak to you, do please reach out to the named members proposing or supporting them (UCU Commons members here, NEC contact form for UCU members here), or to UCU Commons in general. So much of UCU work is done in addition to our regular jobs, with most of us not benefitting meaningfully from facilities time, so any help at all from any part of the sector is gratefully appreciated, and all constructive ideas are very much welcome (we’ll try to reply as quickly as possible, but please bear with us if necessary).