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. In fact, we seem to do the opposite. We seem to constantly chastise ourselves for not achieving even more, not progressing enough, not immediately getting everything we have demanded. And worse still, being too quick to apportion blame without taking time to reflect. I’m not sure if it’s an institutional culture or if it is just a very vocal minority within our union, but I do think it has a significant impact on our membership, and I don’t think it does us any favours.

We often seem to have an all or nothing attitude to our disputes. It’s only natural that we want to win all of our demands and of course it is disappointing if we don’t. But that doesn’t mean we should see small victories as losses because we don’t think they’re big enough. Rome wasn’t built in a day!

A typical example would be the USS dispute in 2018. While we didn’t get everything we wanted in terms of benefits and contributions, we did retain - against the odds if other sectors are anything to go by - a defined benefit pension scheme. That was possibly the biggest and most important element of that dispute and ultimately enabled this year’s overwhelming USS victory, yet we seemed, in 2018, to focus more on what we hadn’t won than what we had. Even this year’s victory in the USS dispute has been under-celebrated (and I say that as someone who is currently in a different scheme).

Similarly with the current ‘4 Fights’ dispute, we need to recognise that we have moved our employers. Without our action, our lowest paid colleagues would not be getting an 8% pay rise (which isn’t brilliant, but neither is it terrible compared to what colleagues in other sectors have achieved) and our employers would not have agreed to negotiations on workload and equality at a national level - something they have never done before. I’m not disputing that 5-8% is clearly not enough, and of course we need full inflationary pay rises to achieve fairness. I’m not saying that talks on work load and equality are enough, but they are something!

So why does this matter? Well, it matters because our failure to celebrate our small victories - or more specifically our tendency to talk of small victories as failures - is horribly demoralising.  And a demoralised membership means that taking further, bigger steps is considerably more challenging.

Two of our biggest barriers to victories are, firstly, that our membership is tired after months and years of action, and, secondly, we know that we need greater membership density in our workplaces. Constant negativity will not aid us in energising our current membership nor in recruiting new members. A little bit of positivity might.

We need to take some time to reflect upon and celebrate what we have achieved, as well as thinking about what we still need to achieve and how we might do it. It means taking time to explain our achievements to members and non-members alike to inspire and encourage greater participation. It also means giving members a chance to digest what they have achieved and recover (mentally, physically, financially) between bouts of action while we plan our next steps. Most of all, it involves asking them what they want to do in an inclusive-as-possible way.

Winning isn’t all or nothing, and it doesn’t happen all at once. Winning workers rights has been a long, slow process that has taken years, decades, centuries. Victory is more akin to progressing up a telethon totaliser, building step by step to our ultimate goal. And it’s ok to celebrate being part way to the target - especially in an environment that is so hostile, with employers more intransigent than ever and the political environment overwhelmingly against us.

Of course there’s some way to go until we achieve fairness in terms of pay, workload and particularly equality. The fight goes on. But to be in a fit state to fight, we must acknowledge what we have already achieved.