HEC and the Summer Ballot

by: several UCU Commons members of HEC who are not currently on holiday

On 1 August 2023, UCU members received an email from the General Secretary (GS), Jo Grady, informing them that the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) had not moved employers enough on our ongoing pay and conditions (‘Four Fights’) dispute, and announcing plans for a way forward, but leaving the current dispute in limbo. This comes after months of punitive deductions for thousands of staff participating in the MAB across the sector, and as the final modicum of goodwill left in our members is evaporating. How on earth did we get here?

We want to address three main things in turn in this blog: 1) the logistics and practicalities of a summer reballot, 2) the role of the Higher Education Committee (HEC), national officers and the General Secretary (GS) in this process and 3) the role of the ‘UCU Left’ faction in disrupting decision-making processes to the detriment of members.

Background

UCU’s current mandate for industrial action in the HE sector runs out at the end of September 2023. A quick reminder of what we’re up against with the Trade Union Act 2016:

• A mandate is only live for six months at a time.
• By law, ballots must be conducted by post.
• An independent scrutineer (Civica) must oversee the process.
• Turnout must be over 50% for a legal mandate to take action.

So, balloting in this way is very expensive, and extremely time-consuming for virtually all the employees of the union, as well as  for hundreds of branch reps and branch members. The whole system is rigged to trip us up and to create the risk of an employer legal challenge. And employers know this. When balloting, the union wants to maximise the likelihood that the 50% threshold will be passed. And balloting is not something to be done lightly, not least because of how complex it is in practice. UCU staff have the unenviable job of getting the vote out to members via all means possible, dealing with exclusions, new addresses, movement of members between branches, etc. Branch officers and activists have to GTVO, report exclusions, and otherwise support voting. Members have to vote.

The last two HE ballots we have conducted on an aggregated basis. Both comfortably – but not overwhelmingly – got over the threshold and gave us live mandates. These two mandates have enabled us to bring all our branches out for the first time, together, and brought UCEA to the table for the first time since 2020. They undoubtedly played a big role in our historic victory on USS pensions, as well as on the initial offer of a 5–8% pay increase from UCEA, as well as achieving much of what we asked for in our terms of reference on casualisation, workloads and the pay gap (which, at their core, are matters for local resolution).

The Reballot

At the end of May, UCU’s Higher Education Sector Conference (HESC) at annual Congress voted for a long summer reballot, to replace our mandate when it runs out. Despite this, a reballot has not yet been organised or carried out. Why?

The first crucial point to understand is that ‘the will of Congress’ is not wholly determinative of what UCU does. Congress can pass motions and set policy. (Around 140 motions in total were on the agenda for Congress, HESC and the parallel Further Education Sector Conference. Many were not debated for lack of time, but at least half were carried). But the policies decided by Congress and sector conferences have to be legal, operationally feasible, and in accordance with the union's rules and trustee obligations. National Executive Committee (NEC) and its higher education and further education subcommittees (HEC and FEC) are our union’s executive; they instruct the GS and the GS, in turn, instructs staff and manages operations. Congress cannot successfully force NEC or its sectoral subcommittees to instruct the GS to do something illegal or that would risk the existence of the union. Similarly, Congress cannot force these committees to force the GS to do something operationally impossible (the clue is in the word ‘impossible’). Furthermore, these committees have an affirmative executive duty to take into account operational realities. NEC, FEC and HEC have to balance the many demands of our sectors and try to enact Congress policy as effectively as possible. This is why Congress policy needs committee decisions to be enacted. It's also why Congress motions that seek to specify tightly-scheduled operational stuff are most likely not to work out. Congress simply does not have access to up to date information.

UCU democratic structures have divided powers with distinct responsibilities. NEC members are elected as is the GS. There would be no need for such elected representatives if there was an automatic conveyor belt between the passing of a Congress motion and its implementation.

Here is the motion (numbered ‘HE19’) to reballot over the summer, which carried at the HESC:

Long reballot over summer, industrial action at start of term - University College London

HESC resolves to ballot members for industrial action in a long ballot commencing as soon as possible and ending in September 2023 over the outstanding USS and JNCHES disputes, in order to be able to take strike action from the start of the autumn term.

What are the logistical difficulties in implementing this motion?

First, a summer reballot is generally a *really bad idea* from an industrial perspective. We actually have data on this – but the reasons are quite obvious. The vote must be a postal ballot. Members are very often away on holiday over this period, not picking up mail, and moreover many are not checking email/social media, which is where the bulk of get the vote out (GTVO) activity happens. We need to reach a 50% turnout with a convincing majority of members voting YES. This is hard enough in term time. And we only have to look at the Royal College of Nursing’s recent failure to reach 50% in its strike ballot to know how precarious and demanding it is to hit that threshold.

HEC were told that a summer reballot would be incredibly hard to operationalise by the GS, because, in addition to the UCU members needing time to rest over the summer, UCU staff also, rightly, expect to be able to take annual leave during this period. This is why our standing orders, in clause 11.2, rule out time over Christmas, Easter and the long summer break as ‘working weeks’. If we reballoted over the summer we would either be forcing staff to cancel their holidays as we need all hands on deck to succeed, or we would be doing a ballot without a large enough number of energised staff ready to GTVO. It’s a bad idea. While we have got over the threshold in the last two ballots quite comfortably, it’s not comfortable enough to be down by 10–20% of staff – and potentially a much greater percentage of lay reps – to reach turnout.

A second logistical complication comes from Civica, who must, by law, conduct the ballot on our behalf. They can’t just squeeze us in when we want and they have a monopoly on this  – and so we dance to their tune on availability.

Tl;dr: A summer reballot isn’t possible for several reasons BEFORE we even get to the actions of HEC: 1) because it would act against the interests of UCU to knowingly risk not making threshold and damaging our reputation; 2) we do not have the staffing levels to manage it; and 3) the potential spanner in the works of Civica and their availability.

But now we come to the role of HEC – and specifically UCU Left – in this, which is where things get really infuriating.

HEC and UCU Left’s role in this mess

Congress motions around industrial action aren’t simply enacted by the GS and staff. HEC must instruct them based on what is passed at Congress. This is done by bringing motions to HEC, which then votes on them. Over the summer period, the HEC delegates its powers to the elected Officers (Vice President, President-Elect, President) and the GS – at least three of whom must be available to make decisions. This is because – yep, you got it – we should all expect to be able to take a break from this stuff over the long summer period.

The last HEC before the summer period was on 30 June. We had hoped to get through all the business from the HESC at Congress in order to have a clear plan forward for members who were holding the line on the MAB and losing pay.

The reason we didn’t get through all of the business is quite simple – the UCU Left faction and those voting with them filibustered, challenged the chair and delayed matters in order to run over our allotted time for the meeting. It’s as simple as that.

The agenda was ordered such that it made sense chronologically, and while there was a challenge to the ordering at the start of the day, those challenging did not have the simple majority needed for this challenge to pass. This is democracy. UCU Left lost its effective majority on HEC at the last set of elections. So, the agenda stood as it was. The final matter we got to before the end of the meeting was around the reballot. The General Secretary had brought a paper to HEC, outlining her plan going forward for reballoting and recruitment. This did not align with the motion passed at Congress, but as we’ve already said, a summer reballot was not operationable.

Note, that if that paper had been voted down, it’s possible  that the officers would have decided to start a summer ballot even in the absence of an HEC vote on the proposed motion. The GS plan and the motion were the only alternatives and it’s a reasonable inference that in rejecting the first HEC was at least ok with the second. By not voting on either, there is no firm evidence of HEC’s preference.

In our standing orders, clauses 2.2 and 3.2 are quite clear about the reasonable notice that NEC and subcommittee members should have for meetings: an agenda must be circulated at least a week before the meeting. The agenda contains the times of the meeting, and any extension to these, therefore, needs a procedural motion – a suspension of standing orders. This is because those attending have planned their time around the agenda. The meeting’s stipulated end time – 4pm – arrived before we were able to vote on the GS’s paper, although the debate had happened. A proposal was made to suspend standing orders and lengthen the meeting time by five minutes in order that we could vote on the strategy and have a clear plan. Such a vote to suspend our standing orders requires a two-thirds majority. Without the numbers to vote down the GS’s paper and plan, many members of HEC voted against this simple extension of five minutes to allow for a vote, arguing on grounds of access and caring responsibilities. Some even left the room in an attempt to lose our quoracy (which is one third of the total membership of 41). So we were left hanging, with no clear way forward for the summer months.

Since this meeting, members of HEC in UCU Left and others have written to request an emergency HEC - presumably in the hope that some other HEC members would not be able to attend this emergency meeting, and so voting on the GS’s paper and plan would have gone their way. However, it isn’t possible for HEC members to requisition a meeting in August: as we’ve already stated, our standing orders exclude this time from ‘working weeks’. An almost equal number of us wrote to request we vote via e-ballot – after all, the debate had already happened. One has to wonder why certain people argued against extending a meeting by five minutes on access and caring grounds, who also think it’s perfectly acceptable to request an emergency meeting in the holiday period, when children are off school, holidays are booked – and disabled folks, like several members of HEC, are resting.

To say it plainly, the reason UCU Left filibustered, then didn't vote to extend, and then opposed an e-ballot is that they knew that with the full HEC voting, they would lose. Thus, their only hope was to try and schedule a meeting in the hope that some of the majority would be unable to attend and they could win on a minority. Frankly, this is what stifling democracy looks like. This is procedural manipulation.

Rather than grant our request for an e-ballot, which would be the quickest, most accessible way to resolve urgent outstanding matters (the MAB, the reballot), it seems we are in a stalemate, while hundreds of members are out there haemorrhaging pay and our hardship funds are depleted.

The fault for this lies with a particular set of people on HEC who voted not to extend that meeting (the vote to extend was at 62%, so not quite the two-thirds majority needed).

During the writing of this blogpost, it emerged that an emergency HEC will be scheduled by the GS and officers as a response to the failure of ‘talks about talks’ with UCEA, announced on Monday 31 July (not, as some are saying, a response to certain members asking for a HEC). We are torn over this. We must do our best to all attend, because (unlike in light of the refusal to vote on the GS's plan in the June HEC meeting) there is a legitimate reason to hold an emergency meeting: the factual circumstances surrounding the dispute have materially changed with UCEA disengaging completely from negotiations. But, we worry about the precedent it sets when our powers are devolved to the GS and officers over the summer because elected representatives both need and deserve to have time off. We should be operating in a high-trust environment, and we hope that one day we will. But right now, we certainly are not.