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Summary of key pledges

As General Secretary, I will:

  • CREATE A NETWORK OF UCU ORGANISING HUBS to foster mutual learning and support between branches and across sectors, with structured organising support for branches to improve the continuity, coordination, and cumulative development of campaigns at local and sectoral levels. This will particularly benefit smaller branches that may not have access to local funds for paid organisers.

  • INCREASE UCU’S INDUSTRIAL RESEARCH CAPABILITY through expanding and developing in-house expertise. This UCU Research Unit will provide access to detailed industrial, financial, and political analysis to underpin targeted and effective strategies at local and sector level.

  • CAMPAIGN TO IMPROVE LOCAL RECOGNITION AGREEMENTS AND FACILITIES TIME: Organising work, recruitment, and campaign building takes time. One of my earliest priorities will be to build a cross-sector campaign with branches to address the insufficient (or non-existent) paid time for elected officers and reps who carry out union duties during working hours (backfilled ‘facilities time’) including for paid ‘time-on’ for reps employed on fractional or hourly paid contracts.

  • DEVELOP AND MONITOR RECRUITMENT SUPPORT FOR BRANCHES by undertaking an analysis of branch recruitment challenges across our branches and sectors. This will inform work to systematically develop strategies and practical support to overcome them, facilitated by Organising Hubs.

  • OVERHAUL UCU DATA MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS to improve the efficiency of administrative processes and enhance our ability to interrogate membership data, which will free capacity for more effective organising and campaigning. This work will include a review to update UCU’s casework handling system.

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Coordination and support: UCU Organising Hubs

The most powerful organising distributes our skills and knowledge, to empower more members to use them. Coordinating campaigns and branch development with the support of Organising Hubs will create opportunities to bring members, ideas, and best practice together. This will empower branch officers and activists by facilitating the development of campaigns with the benefit of shared experience, insights, and access to specialist advice, guidance, and structured organising support.

Organising Hubs would be important drivers of our work to secure binding collective sectoral bargaining where we do not yet have it because the coordination they promote will enhance our leverage on employers’ representative bodies to enter into sector wide agreements that raise the bar for all employers, and in negotiations to implement any sector level deal at branch level.

This approach is also designed to reinforce key agreed recommendations contained in the 2023 PGRs as Staff campaign report, which highlighted lack of staff capacity as a major limiting factor for organising members. It will also help direct the support of regional and UK level capacity towards branches in a more structured way. Detailed campaign resources produced in advance by working with branches and appropriate elected committees can be adapted for sharing more widely. Coordination will maximise regional opportunities for building solidarity and support with local trades councils, political representatives, and working with other unions.

For more about how these hubs might specifically be deployed in improving our work please see Industrial Strategy and Job Security.

Research to support organising

Organising in an effective way requires us to understand a broad, interrelated set of financial, industrial, legal, and political interests. To improve UCU’s ability to anticipate and challenge employers’ responses to the changing legal and regulatory landscape, the centrally coordinated UCU Research Unit will systematically gather, analyse, and disseminate financial, industrial, legal, and political data relevant to our organising and campaigning work. This data will be made available publicly where appropriate, while taking care to protect industrially sensitive material.

Research to unravel financial and political relationships

Widening the scope of our analytical work via the Research Unit will help us to identify and challenge patterns in financial and workforce data. This will include examining the financial and political relationships at stake between external consultancies and employers, and the increasing engagement of private providers to outsource areas of work to external organisations. The increasing reliance within the sector on costly external consultants is implicated in countless restructures and department closures, particularly in post-92 Higher Education institutions.

These processes are often opaque, and by the time formal statutory mechanisms are announced, branch reps often find themselves presented with a fait accompli by management. A widening separation between senior management teams and the daily reality of staff across post-16 education is reflected in a managerialist culture and erosion of internal governance. Better data and the more horizontal coordination of organising across the sector via Organising Hubs will empower branches and our industrial committees to comprehensively challenge poor decision-making by employers.

For more about how increased research capacity will support our work please see Equality, Health and Safety at Work, Industrial strategy, and Influencing the Wider Political Landscape.

Recruitment support

Building our membership and improving our density of coverage is vital and must be understood as an ongoing project. Branches vary greatly in capacity and confidence across UCU and therefore may need more tailored support, but all branches will benefit from opportunities to share problems and resources. I will ensure that comprehensive support for branches is developed, including materials that identify targeted strategies for approaching a range of issues. For example, an early piece of work will be to develop clear guidance for branches to rebut employers’ incorrect deployment of GDPR concerns when trying to avoid sharing with UCU the contact information for staff in our bargaining group who are eligible for membership.

Recent reliance on short duration campaigns and social media has not and cannot achieve success in this area. Members need to feel engaged with UCU, and that it is relevant to their everyday working lives. Demonstrating our relevance as a union must involve understanding that recruitment drives will need to differ according to context. A very different approach will be needed to recruit across ‘atomised’ workplaces where (for example) adult and community educators work across numerous locations, versus a college department with high existing levels of membership, versus a team of IT specialists in higher education who work in hybrid arrangements or largely from home.

Recruitment and organising must go hand in hand. I will make sure that good guidance is developed alongside sharing of resources and ideas across branches and through rep networks. This, along with access to advice from UCU staff, will help structure campaigns around the needs of members in a unit or branch, to promote recruitment to UCU alongside organising to win tangible improvements to members’ conditions.

Assisting branches to develop or expand local networks for reps will be key to increasing confidence and therefore organising capacity, and connection with members. Guidance and practice will be reviewed regularly via feedback from branches. I will also work with UCU staff and members to overhaul and review UCU’s practices with physical media and single use materials, to better reflect our green bargaining agenda.

Increasing organising capacity and improving systems

Organising and the representation of members take time but access to employer funded paid time for union work (backfilled facilities time) is often inadequate for branches’ needs, or even denied altogether. To increase our organising capacity, I commit to:

  • coordinating cross-institutional networks of reps at region and sector level
  • developing centrally provided campaign resources, developed together with members via the new Organising Hubs
  • launching a union-wide initiative to support negotiations for increased facilities time and for paid ‘time-on’ for members on hourly paid and fractional contracts
  • Initiating a project to thoroughly review and update UCU data management systems to improve the efficiency and accuracy of many administrative processes we rely on and to empower branch committees to get on with organising.