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A collection of 147 issues

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A New Strategic Approach

This is a (lightly edited) discussion paper submitted by Bijan Parsia for discussion at the 15 December 2023 Special HEC. Such papers are length-limited thus some of the discussion is less fleshed out than would be helpful. Such fleshing shall come in future posts. Note: this is not a worked-out

MAB As Hell*: what are the conditions for a successful boycott?

*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

London and Eastern region NEC casual vacancy: order your replacement ballot papers now!

Please vote Robin Clarke 1 and Michael Abberton 2

Winning - As We See It

Blog post written by Robin Clarke, UCU Commons' candidate for the NEC casual vacancy in the London and the East region. One of the things that I’ve noticed about UCU over the years is that we are not very good (actually we’re terrible) at celebrating our victories.

"Malignant shit funnels" and the sinister surveillance of university staff

Blog post by David Harvie In May 2021 a tweet I had published eight months earlier resurfaced. On 11 September 2020, as the number of new coronavirus cases in the UK started spiking in what became the second wave, prompting a second national lockdown, I was party to a brief

Lessons from Our Higher Education Disputes in 2022/23

by Ben Pope This blog starts from the premise that a healthy, effective trade union is a diverse one, in which there is always space for multiple points of view. There’s certainly no shortage of perspectives on the events of the past year in UCU’s higher education disputes,

Why we don’t want an immediate reballot: a view from the grassroots at the University of Edinburgh

Blog post by Sophia Woodman and Sophia Lycouris[*] After several months of strikes and marking boycott, we are approaching the end of UCU’s current mandate for industrial action on 30 September without having resolved the Four Fights dispute. There are a number of views among members about how to

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