On Friday 17 February, the General Secretary of UCU announced on social media that there had been sufficient progress at talks facilitated by ACAS for UCU to agree to call of strike action planned for the weeks beginning 20 and 27 February.
Most of the discussion about this announcement has focused on how, and by whom, the decision to “pause” action was made. Not much has been said about what has been agreed with the employers, and whether it represents a significant improvement.
The details are in a statement agreed between the five Higher Education unions and the employers’ body UCEA, which is also available from the Unison Higher Education website. With regard to pay, there seems to have been no movement from the employers and the “full and final pay offer of between 8% and 5%” stands. Remember that this will set pay until August 2024: the employers consider the 2022/3 pay round closed.
At the time of writing, UCU has not produced a written statement on the content of the offer, but the General Secretary’s video message stressed the movement on non-pay elements. These are covered in the employer-union joint statement:
2. Both parties have agreed to proceed to time-limited talks to determine the work necessary on the following issues:
- A joint commitment to time-limited negotiations aimed at agreeing a revised/refreshed pay spine—with detailed aims/terms of reference agreed with the support of Acas in advance. The aims of this review would be to address the pay compression that has developed over recent years.
- A commitment to time-limited negotiations on contract types, workload, and pay gaps—with detailed aims/terms of reference agreed with the support of Acas in advance. With respect to contract type, workload, and pay gaps, the trade unions welcome UCEA’s commitment to use its leadership and convening power to identify concrete steps which employers are able to commit to.
When terms of reference and timescales have been agreed, UCEA will consult its members on the substantive points above in order to establish a firm mandate to return to time limited negotiations on each of these.
3. As a positive first step, UCEA has agreed to consult its members, with a positive recommendation to take action on zero hours contracts. While the contractual arrangements offered to employees will be for individual institutions to determine, we would expect indefinite contracts with a fixed or minimal hours to be the general form of employment relationship between employers and employees in HEIs. We accept that there will be specifically defined reasons in any organisation for offering indefinite or fixed term employment arrangements without fixed or minimum hours where it is appropriate. We would expect these reasons to be discussed between HEIs and their local trade unions.
It is worth identifying exactly what UCEA has agreed to here, outside of the commitment to negotiate on pay scales: the employers’ body will recommend to employers that they take action on zero hours contracts, with the expectation (not requirement) that indefinite contracts with stated hours be the norm. This is with the caveat that there may be reasons for “offering indefinite or fixed term employment arrangements without fixed or minimum hours” and these reasons will be a matter for local discussions: contractual arrangements and the reducing of casualized contracts will be a matter for local negotiation.
On “contract types, workload, and pay gaps”, UCEA has committed itself to negotiations to agree “terms of reference and timescales”. When these have been agreed, UCEA will consult employers to establish a mandate to return to negotiations. This mandate may or may not be for an improvement on current arrangements (see how UCEA interprets is “mandate” for pay offers).
In January 2020, UCU produced a “ten point briefing” (local copy) on the then current UCEA offer, which was published as a “full and final” offer on 1 April 2020. The pay element is not comparable to that in the current pay round, but we can look at what was on the table with regard to the other three of the “four fights”.
With respect to the zero hours contracts element:
5. On contractual arrangements UCEA set out the following main expectations:
- indefinite contracts will be the general form of employment relationship between employers and employees
- staff employed on fixed term or casual contracts be given access to staff development, training, appraisal and careers advice and hold similar terms and conditions of employment to those in comparable jobs with indefinite employment
- HE institutions undertake a review of their institutional policies and procedure for the engagement of individuals on fixed term and casual arrangements
- that institutions be encouraged to hold local discussions with a view to limiting the use of zero hours contracts institution level arrangements for an individual who believes their hourly paid engagement does not provide fair terms for the work expected of them to have this examined
- clarity for post-graduates who are employed as to the work required and the remuneration for the work they perform, including where this constitutes part of a stipendiary arrangement
- all relevant HE institutions become signatories to the new researchers’ concordat and develop plans to meet the concordat’s employment principles
- institutions will have arrangements to identify staff who have held a fixed term contract or succession of fixed term contracts for more than the statutory threshold of 4 years for consideration of a conversion to ongoing employment.
- institutions have policies which seek to avoid an individual, unless to the parties’ mutual benefit, being provided with a succession of fixed term contracts
- a new employer/union national working group that would: undertake an examination of the data on ‘zero hours’ and ‘hourly-paid’ employees, and; produce a report of the sector-level analysis and findings.
There were also “expectations” on pay gaps and workload, which are comparable to those in the 2023 agreed statement, though much more detailed. At this point, we were in the first few months of the Covid pandemic and negotiating arrangements had been affected, as had the holding of HEC meetings.
Negotiations up to this point had been conducted by the union’s usual team of elected negotiators, HE officers, and a member of union staff. In mid May, the negotiators issued a joint statement (local copy), which said
The negotiators believe that the current offer represents significant movement on three of the four grounds for dispute achieved through negotiations backed by solid strike action. The progress made on the three pay-related grounds (casualisation, pay (in)equality, and workload) is notable particularly because prior to this dispute UCEA have continually and resolutely refused to discuss these at the UK level bargaining table. Constructive progress was made on the issues of gender and race pay and precarious contracts, in particular, with some welcome but more limited movement on addressing unsafe, unfair workloads. UCU negotiators have secured commitment from employers to sector-wide expectations on these matters for the first time.
The negotiators added:
UCU’s challenge to UCEA’s assumptions about constraints on its ability to direct sector-level change on the pay-related issues led to a breakthrough which secured their agreement to stipulate expectations of action from employers for the first time. Negotiators consistently pushed to make these expectations as strong as possible in order to bring maximum pressure to bear on employers to implement them.
It is worth looking back to 2020 and considering just what was achieved. The employers were brought to the point of making a detailed statement of expectations on employers. By comparison, the joint statement which was considered sufficient for the current action to be paused contains no detail and precious few commitments from UCEA.
Any UCU member concerned for their own terms and conditions, and for their colleagues’, might want to ask what has been agreed in 2023 that was not already on the table, with details, in 2020.
Michael Carley on UCU HEC 
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