Please vote to remit and against USS Motions 5 and 6 at UCU’s SHESC

For those of you who are delegates to UCU’s Special Higher Education Conference on 9 September, I would like to make the case below for voting to remit and to oppose the following two motions:

I. Remit and oppose Dundee’s Motion 5

It is because I fully support a swift move to strong and effective industrial action in the autumn that I oppose Dundee’s Motion 5 and will therefore vote both to remit and to oppose this motion.

Dundee’s Motion 5 “instructs negotiators to: …Defend current benefits for member payments no greater than 9.6%” (my emphasis added).

As an SWG member of our negotiating team, I can assure you that it will not, however, be possible to retain current benefits for anything lower than an 11% member rate from April to October of next year.

It might be possible to retain current benefits at 9.6% after October of next year, under a moderately prudent 2021 valuation. But before then, we will be stuck with the exorbitant costings of the 2020 valuation.

USS will immediately charge the full and very high 2020 valuation price for any changes to benefits during the next 12 months. We are therefore better off defaulting to an 11% member contribution rate for current benefits, when they are relatively under-priced from April to October.

Motion 5 will therefore render it very difficult to pursue a course of action which many regard as the most promising: namely, forcing UUK to revoke their cuts to benefits, thereby defaulting to retention of current benefits at an 11% member rate from April to October, combined with a strike settlement on something much better than the UUK proposal from October of next year.

Motion 5 will license the union’s true believers to force members out on many extra days of strikes in a futile attempt to try to reduce the member rate for current benefits down to 9.6% from April to October as well as after October of next year.

For this reason, I urge you to vote both to remit and to oppose Dundee’s Motion 5.

II. Remit and oppose Lancaster’s Motion 6

Motion 6 is either harmful or unnecessary.

The calls to lobby Parliament are redundant, as UCU is already heavily engaged in such lobbying and doesn’t need a conference motion to continue to do so.

But the call to derecognise UUK as representing the university sector in JNC is positively harmful.

This is because UUK is keen to derecognise UCU as the sole representative of members and to deprive us of at least one of our seats on JNC. This is implied by their latest consultation response.

In the past, we have been in a position to tell UUK that it’s none of management’s business whether UCU is the appropriate union to solely represent the interests of members in JNC. We will no longer be in such a position if UCU butts into their affairs by means of conference motion calling for derecognition of UUK as the representative of employers in JNC.

And it gets worse: derecognition of UUK would actually give employers what they want. UUK realises that their association with serial cuts to member pensions has greatly tarnished their brand. Hence they would love to pass this role on to UCEA, whose brand cannot be tarnished by further associations with efforts to undermine the terms and conditions of higher education workers. The replacement of UUK’s Alastair Jarvis with those in control of UCEA would make things worse for us, as it would be a replacement with people who specialise in trying to defeat the union in bargaining, as opposed to someone who was appointed for his skills in public relations.

So UUK will welcome this motion and say fine, we’ll do what you demand. And now we demand, in return, that UCU reduce its own role on JNC.

For these reasons, I urge you to oppose this motion, both by voting to remit and by voting against.