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Summary of key pledges

As General Secretary, I will:

  • DEVELOP A UCU SECURE JOBS CAMPAIGN to bring together elected committees, staff, and members across post-16 education, supported by the UCU Organising Hubs and UCU Research Unit (described under Recruitment and Organising).

  • CONSOLIDATE OUR SKILLS AND RESOURCES to strengthen, further coordination and resourcing of our anti-casualisation work, including an analytic review of casework trends and legal strategy.

  • SIMPLIFY MEMBERSHIP OPTIONS for members working on multiple contracts and/or across multiple institutions, and with changeable incomes.

  • ORGANISE IN OUTSOURCED, PRIVATISED AND NON-MAINSTREAM WORKPLACES, drawing lessons from successes to instigate a systematic approach to recognition and bargaining.

  • EMBED PARITY FOR PGR MEMBERS and the principles of our ongoing ‘PGRs as Staff’ campaign in UCU’s representative structures and internal culture.

  • PRIORITISE IN-HOUSE SECURE WORK OPPORTUNITIES and career development pathways for our union’s staff, because as a union we must also exemplify our values as a trade union employer.

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UCU members must never be asked to put job security on the back burner

Job security is fundamental to our bargaining strategy. The increase of precarious, insecure, and atypical contracts across the sector is a direct result of marketisation and the introduction of a business model to education but it is not inevitable. Short-term and insecure contract types enable employers to cut costs and weaken workplace rights, extracting more from us for less job security and less pay. Casualisation includes increased use of outsourcing, agency staff, and worker (rather than employee) contracts with fewer rights.

Reduced access to career development and progression, and increased pressure to undertake unpaid additional work are common experiences across a range of job types. This contributes directly to the decline in pay and conditions for staff employed on a permanent and salaried basis. Insecure contracts exacerbate unsafe workloads and disproportionately affect minoritised members. Casualisation often strains personal relationships, constrains life choices, and has a negative impact on parents and carers. Tackling job security is essential from both a social justice perspective and an industrial perspective, in terms of our fight for equity, better pay and conditions across the board.

Insecure employment models also contribute to the climate crisis, for example through excess carbon produced by workers forced to commute long distances for short contracts, or regular travel between multiple employers, and through reduced opportunities to train in and practise lower carbon techniques.

UCU must refute any notion that job insecurity is ‘inevitable.’ Our employers choose to ‘Uberise’ the sector, reducing secure and decent jobs in favour of short-termist gig economy solutions which fail education workers, our students, and our wider communities.

Improve resourcing and support for anti-casualisation work

UCU Organising Hubs will make structured support more accessible for branches to tackle casualisation and facilitate mutual learning between branches, and across further and higher education, prison education and adult and community education. Support from peers and UCU staff will particularly benefit branches with fewer resources to identify and recruit insecurely employed members, and branches with more transient memberships owing to high levels of casualisation. The union will improve branches’ access to our collective expertise in negotiating technically complex issues of casualisation and precarity. I will reinstate and update support structures for branches negotiating agreements involving hourly paid staff. This will help branches to avoid the known traps and pitfalls that arise when negotiating improved contracts, including the process of converting hourly paid to fractional contracts. This experience has been hard-won and needs to be disseminated to branches much more effectively.

Improve coordination of casework information and legal strategy

Branches will be equipped to more effectively locate and support members who have a case for permanency. I will also initiate work to identify trends in casework for members employed on insecure contracts as part of the UCU Secure Jobs Campaign. Input will be sought from our elected committees, Organising Hubs, and UCU staff across the UK, to collate and coordinate appropriately anonymised casework information. Analysis of these trends will facilitate data-driven improvements to our guidance and training for branches and caseworkers. It will also inform work connected to a wider review of UCU’s legal scheme (described under Equality, Health and Safety) and proposals to develop our legal strategy including the identification of test cases designed to expose employers to risk of sanctions.

Parity for PGRs

I will work with the NEC to fully implement recent policy for PGRs, and to embed the principles of our ongoing ‘PGRs as Staff’ campaign in UCU’s representative structures, practices, and wider culture. I will work with committees and PGR groups to ensure the diversity of PGR experiences are reflected in the work of the UCU Secure Work Campaign, including the reduced access to funding and lack of access to parental leave for many migrant PGRs. We will explore mechanisms to promote accessible opportunities for mutual learning and support, and for wider UCU to learn from the notable successes won through PGRs’ organising methods.

Simplify UCU membership options

As part of my commitment to support PGR members and members on insecure contracts, I will initiate work with our NEC and staff to engage with members who work on multiple contracts at one or more institutions, or whose pay varies significantly across the year. The output of this review will be recommended proposals to simplify membership for members in this position. This will ensure they are fully protected in all relevant workplaces and improve membership density. I was involved in creating UCU’s policy for transitioning to subscription levels proportional to income and will continue to support ongoing work to implement this.

Organise in outsourced/privatised and non-mainstream workplaces

Increasingly, private providers and bogus subsidiaries of larger institutions employ staff on worse pay and often hyper-casualised conditions. Similar conditions are often found in adult and community education which may be provided directly by local authorities or delivered in non-mainstream institutions (including third sector provision). Working with elected committees, I will instigate a systematic approach to recruitment, branch formation and securing recognition in outsourced and privatised workplaces. This work will be directly informed by successful in-sourcing campaigns, and successes in recognition campaigns and subsequent bargaining in several existing outsourced UCU branches across post-16 education.

Secure work and improved career development opportunities for UCU staff

As part of my commitment to rebuilding relationships between UCU leadership and the staff union, UNITE, I will work with UNITE to ensure that all staff get the opportunity and training to develop their skills, interests and expertise via in-house secure work opportunities, training opportunities and better career development pathways.

I commit to work with the staff union to honour UCU’s policy objectives for our own members within our employment arrangements for staff, including making permanent roles the norm and respecting UCU’s policy that (apart from in very specific circumstances such as maternity cover) contracts should not be shorter in duration than 24 months. I will also do all I can to fulfil UCU’s duty to develop specialist expertise in-house. On occasions where our staff need to partner with or commission external work (for example in the engagement of actuaries) this will follow fair and transparent tendering procedures agreed with UNITE.

Finally, I will ensure that all recruitment procedures within UCU are transparent, fair, and conducted according to the full letter and spirit of the policies we pursue for our members. I believe that our union must be a bastion of good practice, so we can securely tell our employers to do the same.