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A collection of 50 issues

British Trade Unions Oppose the Cass Report. Here’s Why That Matters.

By Matilda Fitzmaurice On the last Thursday and Friday in June, the TUC LGBT+ conference took place at the magnificent Congress House in London. This 2-day event, which brings together LGBTQIA+ members from the unions affiliated to the TUC, was attended by a large UCU delegation. Many important motions were

Reports from June and July HECs

By UCU Commons NEC members 10th June Special HEC A special meeting of the Higher Education Committee was called for Monday 10th June in order to discuss an offer made by UCEA on joint pay negotiations (New JNCHES) with four other unions with members in HE (EIS, Unite, Unison and

Maximising chaos: a UCU Commons report from NEC, 21st June 2024

By UCU Commons NEC members The National Executive Committee of UCU held its first post-Congress meeting on 21 June 2024. This meeting was the first attended by the members elected in the 2024 NEC election held in February. This iteration of the NEC has a comfortable majority of UCU Left

UCU Congress 2024 - a member's report

Several hundred delegates from branches across the four nations and from higher, further, prison and adult and community education, met in Bournemouth last week for UCU’s annual Congress – the peak policy-making body of our union. UCU Commons members were also active over the last week, representing branches, regional committees

Academic freedom and the knowledge commons

By Matilda Fitzmaurice and Dion Georgiou This article represents an attempt to establish some basic, but contingent, principles on academic freedom. It does not put forward a ‘UCU Commons position’ on academic freedom, as this collectivity contains diverse and wide-ranging views on the subject (which we believe should be encouraged)

Facing an existential crisis… we attack our own??

Blog post by Sophia Woodman. Perhaps I am hopelessly naïve, but I imagined that the conclusion of the election for the position of the UCU General Secretary would clear the air, and create conditions for our union to come together to fight what many agree is an existential crisis for

Union Elections 2024: UCU Commons Endorsements

UCU Commons is an organised group and stands a set of candidates in NEC and other union elections. Everyone who stands for election on our slate shares our values. Accordingly, we strongly endorse our candidates as first preferences when voting, and we only endorse other candidates in seats where no

UCU Elections 2024: Candidates Answer Our Questions

UCU Commons asked candidates standing in the forthcoming national elections a short series of questions about their plans and positions. We contacted all candidates standing for General Secretary, all candidates standing for Vice-President, and the three independent NEC candidates. Below are the responses we received, verbatim, ordered by surname. Ballots

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