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A collection of 143 issues

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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

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

Nothing about Ukraine, without Ukraine

This post is by Bijan Parsia, NEC Disabled Members Rep (UK) who was a NEC UK wide elected rep during Congress 2023. It is not a UCUCommons document but reflects a strong informal consensus view. First, this post is not a full an analysis of UCU Congress 2023 motion 5:

The Consultation: HEC Recommends, Members Decide

At its meeting on 30 March, HEC passed motions tabled by UCU Commons members (those numbered 2 and 3 in this blog) and began a process of consulting UCU members as a whole on the proposed interim resolutions in both the pay and conditions dispute with UCEA and the USS

Gender-Based Violence: A Call to Action for FE and HE

Content note: this blog post refers to gender-based violence and related issues throughout. The contact details of some organisations that support people who have experience of gender-based violence are listed at the foot of this post. While standing for NEC on a platform of anti-gender based violence (GBV) it was