Introducing...Vivek Thuppil

Dear subscribers,

Today, we have an elections mailout with a difference. You’ll be hearing from Vivek Thuppil (he/him), who works at Bangor University and has already been elected unopposed to a Migrant Members’ (non-EU) seat.

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Therefore, today Vivek is sharing what he would have written in his election address, if he had had to contest the election. Informed by an international perspective, Vivek proposes a way for UCU to significantly grow its influence. We hope you enjoy reading it!

You’ll find more information about all UCU Commons candidates on our website. We have also written an explainer of the role of NEC and the elected officers, how the voting system works, and why it is vitally important to vote in these elections. Please keep reading and sharing it!

The UCU officer hustings were held on Wednesday 5th February, and the recording is now available online. We strongly recommend giving it a watch.

If you are still yet to receive your ballot papers, order a replacement set here.

In solidarity,

UCU Commons

**

Growing our influence, by Vivek Thuppil

Hello, everyone! I am a Representative of Migrant Members on UCU’s National Executive Committee (NEC). This year, I have been elected unopposed for the next two year term, and as a result, I didn’t have to write an election address and I won’t appear on your ballot paper. So I thought I would write to you about an issue that I think is very important.

I was recently reminded of this issue again when I was trying to convince someone that it was in their best interests to join UCU as a member. They told me that they had looked into joining, but decided not to because it would have cost them more than “the equivalent of two Netflix subscriptions”. Whether you might have heard such a similarly blunt reason or not, I am sure that all of you are aware of colleagues in your workplace who are not dues-paying members of the union. They are instead free-riders (to put it charitably), reaping all of the collective benefits of union membership without contributing a single penny.

At my institution, which is a USS institution in the HE sector, collective benefits include:

· USS pension victory that restored the cuts to the pensions

· Pay rises that, while behind the rate of inflation, have still been higher than what was proposed by employers initially

· Local contracts and employment policies that provide substantially better protections and benefits than the statutory minimums required by law

All of these gains and more were made possible by union members advocating for these issues, and in some cases, withdrawing their labour and foregoing our pay, in order to achieve gains for our members. And non-members too.

In fact, a majority of our colleagues, perhaps up to two-thirds, benefit from every single one of these hard won gains, without ever contributing to the union that has achieved them. I can’t think of any other scenario where we think, as a society, that it is acceptable for some people to shoulder all of the costs whereas others reap the rewards for free. It makes me very angry that people are able to do this, but also that so many people just accept it in the UK without knowing that there is a better alternative.

As a migrant with an international perspective, I think it is important to say this. This is not the norm. To that effect, for my second ever NEC meeting in 2023, I prepared a discussion paper. It was a paper that I had hoped would be read by members of UCU’s elected decision making body, and we would discuss how to address this issue going forward.

Unfortunately, this discussion paper never saw the light of day at the NEC, and neither did other discussion papers prepared by another UCU Commons member, Bijan Parsia. Instead, my frustration with my time on the NEC has been that too many of its members are more concerned about ideological posturing and passing motions that achieve little beyond repeating past failures. In fact, so enamoured have some NEC members been with making their statements through motions, the President had to reprimand the Committee that motions are not the main business of NEC; business is the main business of NEC.

With meetings of the NEC often engulfed in chaos and posturing, there was never any hope for our discussion papers. That said, I decided to stand for NEC again because the alternative was to give up hope. I am hopeful that we will have the decision making body that our members deserve, and one that spends time seriously debating how we can grow our influence and secure lasting victories for our members. And until that day comes, when discussion papers like this will receive serious consideration at the NEC, I am happy that I can share it with you, our subscribers.

Before I leave you to the paper below, please make sure that you vote in these NEC elections and please remind all of your fellow member colleagues to vote for the NEC that they deserve to have.

As for your non-member colleagues, maybe forward them this email if you think you can appeal to their morality and sense of fair play!

Growing our influence (Discussion paper submitted to the NEC in November 2023)

A general election must be held in the UK by January 2025, and it is possible that a general election may be held as soon as May 2024. It is likely that, following this general election, there will be a Labour Government led by Keir Starmer, and it may be a government with a substantial majority in the House of Commons.

Whilst this future government may not be as revolutionary as we desire in fixing the wrongs of society, there is no doubt that it will be a welcome change from nearly a decade and a half of Tory governments, a period of time where we see that a plethora of anti-worker and anti-trade union laws have been and continue to be enacted. As a union, our focus will understandably be focused on lobbying the next UK Government to repeal these anti-trade union and anti-worker laws. These include repeal of the proposed Minimum Service Levels legislation, the Trade Union Act 2016, as well as regulations that require trade unions to ballot members via costly and turnout reducing paper ballots.

To their credit, the leadership of the Labour Party have publicly committed to repealing the legislation outlined above, in addition to other measures such as abolishing the use of zero hours contracts. However, even if we achieve successes on the issues described above, these are relatively low hanging fruit and our ambition should be far greater.

We need to grow our footprint within the sector, which is critical to our ability to negotiate with the employers as well as to ensure that we have the financial resources that can sustain our members when they do take industrial action.

In 2022, at 46.9%, education had the highest proportion of employees who were members of a trade union of any sector in the UK (Trade Union Membership, UK, 1995-2022: Statistical Bulletin). This is a decline from 2010, when 52.3% of employees were members of a trade union (Trade Union Membership, 2010: National Statistics).

The figures above reflect the education sector as a whole, and it is likely that the proportion of employees in further and higher education is lower. This is a fundamental problem. We use the limited financial and emotional resources, as well as the capacity to take direct action of our members, to fight the difficult fights with our employers and win benefits for our members, insufficient as those benefits may be. However, it is a sad truth that more than half of the workforce, and possibly up to two-thirds of the workforce, are freeloading off of the sacrifices of our members. They contribute nothing financially to our union, yet reap the same benefits that our members go out and win for them.

This does not have to be the case, and it is not the case, even in other English-speaking OECD countries.

In Canada, in 1946, Justice Ivan Rand of the Supreme Court pronounced a judgement where he noted that if workers were allowed to opt out of paying union dues, it would result in a free rider problem that undermines workplace order and creates resentment between union and non-union employees. The Supreme Court issued what was known as the Rand Formula, which required all employees of a bargaining unit who benefited from a union contract to pay union dues, not just those employees who had explicitly signed a union contract (Fact Sheet: Union dues and the Rand Formula, Canadian Union of Public Employees).

The Rand Formula is the basis for the most prevalent type of collective bargaining agreements in Canada, and employers in Canada that have collective bargaining agreements in place deduct the dues from the pay of all of their unionised employees’ (all employees within a bargaining unit where there is a collective bargaining agreement) pay and forward the dues to the union with whom they have the collective bargaining agreement in place. The dues levels are set democratically by the signed on members of the unions, and the fact that all employees pay dues minimises the effort that unions have to spend on recruiting members and unions can focus on representing their members (Fact Sheet: Union dues and the Rand Formula, Canadian Union of Public Employees). Due to the Rand Formula, which prevents the ability of individuals to become free riders, significantly more people in Canada choose to be active, signed-up voting members of a union. In the Education sector, 71.2% of employees had signed on as members of unions (Trade union density rate, 1997 to 2021, Statistics Canada).

Even in the United States, which one would think of as more capitalist than the UK, for much of the last half-century, non-members were required to pay dues for benefits derived from working in a unionised workplace. Since the middle of the 20th century, unions in the United States were assessing “fair share” agency fees upon non-members. When these fees were litigated, in 1977, the United States Supreme Court decided in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education with a unanimous verdict that unions may assess upon members agency fees to recover the costs of “collective bargaining, contract administration, and grievance adjustment purposes”. The United States Supreme Court ruled that these fees were necessary to prevent members from free riding on the benefits of union representation in collective bargaining (Abood v. Detroit Board of Education, 1977).

This verdict remained the law of the land in the United States for more than 40 years, until a partisan right-wing US Supreme Court with a new majority appointed by Donald Trump overturned the Abood decision in 2018 in the case of Janus v. American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees (AFSCME) in a narrow 5-4 decision, and issued a new judgement preventing public sector unions from collecting fair share fees from non-member employees; however, even this partisan right-wing Supreme Court left in place the ability of unions in the private sector to collect fair share fees from non-member employees (Janus v. AFSCME, 2018). In the time that the Abood v. Detroit Board of Education was the law of the land, fair share fees were commonplace across the American union landscape.

It is particularly interesting to note that even the right-wing US Supreme Court majority appointed by Donald Trump were not able to defend the principle of non-members free riding on union benefits without paying dues. Instead, the basis upon which they overturned the unanimous verdict in Abood v. Detroit Board of Education was that in the previous decision, the Court had not considered the free speech rights of non-members, and fair share agency fees impinged on their First Amendment right to free speech by requiring them to pay fees to unions forced them to endorse political messages by the unions that may be at odds with their beliefs (Supreme Court Ruling Delivers a Sharp Blow to Labor Unions, New York Times, 27 June 2018). This ruling was factually wrong in many respects, but the point to note here is that even a right-wing US Supreme Court did not argue against the principle that non-members should have to pay for the benefits that they derive from unionisation.

And yet, that is something that we seemingly take for granted here in the UK. And as a migrant to the UK, this is one of those British idiosyncrasies that should be consigned to the bin of history. It is not right that more than half of our fellow colleagues, and perhaps up to two-thirds of them, are free riding on the monetary sacrifices of our members and yet reaping the associated benefits.

As a union, we must lobby the next UK Government to not just repeal the legislation that the Tories have enacted, but to pass new legislation allowing trade unions to recover costs from non-members, as is commonplace today in Canada and even in the United States, used to be commonplace until very recently.

Some key implications for UCU if we can achieve this change in UK law:

1. An additional 100,000+ members paying dues or agency fees, at a level set by the democratically elected bodies of UCU.
2. Non-members paying agency fees will be entitled to union representation for workplace disputes, but with the increase in funds, UCU will be able to expand staffing to accommodate this.
3. An end to a two-tiered system at our workplaces. All employees benefit from our efforts, all employees pay their fair share towards funding the union, and the union backs all employees with regard to employment issues.

Any difference between member dues and non-member agency fees will simply reflect that members pay slightly more in order to have a democratic vote within the union, which non-members paying agency fees would not have. It would be each employee’s individual decision whether to be a dues paying member or an agency fee paying non-member.

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