Following today’s ritual insult from the employers’ body, UCU members in Higher Education received an email from the General Secretary. It laid out a “three point plan”: legal action against employers to recover excessive pay deductions for taking part in the Marking and Assessment Boycott; a recruitment drive; preparation for a ballot to continue our mandate for industrial action. In the summary at the end, a fourth point is added to the three point plan: building our fighting fund.
People will have their own opinions on the utility and timing of this plan, but the industrial action mandate is now certain to lapse at the end of September. The General Secretary writes that the Higher Education Committee will meet “in early September and set the dates for a national ballot of every single university in the UK [recte almost every …]” and may decide to have this ballot cover a new claim for 2023/4.
By calling this meeting for early September, the union’s leadership have guaranteed that the mandate for lawful industrial action will lapse. Even if “early September” means Friday 1 September, the time required to call and hold a paper ballot, and give notice of industrial action, means that there will be no mandate for at least the first few weeks of October.
If our industrial action had consisted only of strikes, this would not matter too much. The lapse in the mandate, however, will mean that loyal members of UCU, who have done everything their union asked of them, at great personal cost, will be left exposed to punitive management without the legal protection of a valid strike mandate. Their employer will be legally entitled to demand that they do their marking, and to discipline them, or worse, if they refuse. There appears to be no plan to deal with this situation.
Michael Carley on UCU HEC 
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