UCU action shows the way

Submitted by Matthew on 23 March, 2011 - 2:22

The University and College Union (UCU) lecturers’ strike on Thursday 24 March is the first ever national strike of UCU members in both further and higher education. The action is over a number of issues. Pay, jobs and pensions in higher education and pay and pensions in further education.

Pensions is the issue that is providing most of the heat in this dispute. The clutch of proposed changes to the University Superannuation Scheme and the Teachers’ Pension Scheme would result in all members paying more, working longer and getting far less.

Hidden away within the recent Hutton report on public sector pensions is evidence that explodes the myth of the “public sector pensions time bomb”. Public sector pensions as a percentage of GDP are peaking now and will decline year by year to 2060.

It is much to the credit of UCU that it has balloted and is taking action now. Activists in other public sector unions should be pressing for their unions to ballot now to link up the fight over pensions.

Apparently the NUT will be balloting over pensions after Easter and this is really good news. The joint strike action in 2008 uniting NUT, PCS and UCU gave a big boost to all our strikes. Members still talk about the joint demonstration in London. Let’s work to ensure that we see more of this in the coming months.

There is no point in unions waiting for some illusory “better time to fight”. There is no point in building towards “one big demo” (i.e. on the 26 March) without any ideas about what to do next.

The Tories are racing ahead with their plans at breakneck speed because they want to create “facts on the ground” which will be difficult or impossible to reverse. You could read it as arrogance — they’re certainly arrogant! But the other reason is because they realise how their unpopularity is going to grow and grow rapidly.

So where does the UCU go after Thursday? While the strike will undoubtedly go well we need a coherent strategy to ensure enthusiasm isn’t quickly burned away. An essential part of that strategy must be coordinated action across the public sector.

The other real and pressing issue is redundancies. The next few weeks will see announcements on proposed redundancies across the sectors. We will soon be fighting on another front and within our individual institutions. This will present even more challenges, but what’s the alternative to fighting? Any union that sits back and accepts a huge tranche of redundancies this year will make resistance next year and afterwards ten times harder.

Students in many places have already been active in organising solidarity with the strikes. Occupations in support of the UCU are underway at UCL and Goldsmiths. The silence from the National Union of Students on the dispute, however, is deafening.

NUS president and notorious invertebrate Aaron Porter has been quoted in the national media in support of the action, but unfortunately Aaron’s support has not thus far extended to even a single article on NUS’s website. Only the union’s LGBT campaign — traditionally to the left of the union nationally — has released a publicly-available statement in support.

Arguably the silence on the issue is an improvement from the situation in 2006, when then-president Kat Fletcher said that her members needed the AUT/NATFHE strike “like a hole in the head”, and SUs like Liverpool organised demonstrations against the strike. But after a period in which it spectacularly scabbed on its own members taking direct action, it is hardly surprising that NUS is incapable of organising any meaningful support for another union’s strike.

There’s a parallel with the early years of Thatcher. The mistake the labour movement made then was not to launch a united fight early on. The Tories’ policies now are designed to create mass unemployment to strengthen their hand. Let’s not repeat the mistakes of the past. For co-ordinated national action across the public sector!

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