Tag: All-Member Email

Below is the text of the fourth of four emails which I am entitled to send to all members of UCU as one of the candidates in the General Secretary election. It will be sent on Sunday 19 May. To read the first, second, and third emails, click here, here, and here.

Dear colleague,

Further and Higher Education are part of a social context which we cannot ignore. Both sectors have been shaped in the last decade by a series of crises: from the financial crisis, to the human and macroeconomic crisis of austerity, to the ongoing crisis of Brexit. Governments have cut some costs, and shifted others to us and to our students.

Managers of universities and colleges have, at best, failed to protect us from politicians and the private sector. At worst, they have actively conspired to undermine public education. Universities and colleges could be part of the solution, but they are becoming part of the problem. It is up to us to turn things round.

You have a few days left to vote. The pre-paid envelopes in your ballot papers are Second Class, so you need to post them by Monday to be sure that they will arrive in time. Today is the last day you can order a First-Class replacement ballot.

The USS crisis: what we have learnt

Last year’s USS dispute showed how far managers’ priorities have diverged from our own. It brought out the worst in them. But it brought out the best in us. Our students supported us. We gained thousands of members. Our collective expertise and experience overturned more than a decade of conventional wisdom about the supposed decline of good, guaranteed pensions. We taught each other what is possible when we take collective action.

Building an open, democratic, proactive union

The fight for USS is not over. As I point out in my manifesto, we still need to secure our pensions for the longer term. But we also need to turn UCU into a union that can confront all the challenges I have mentioned above, and bring about sector-defining change.

We need a plan for Further Education. We can convert local action into a return to meaningful national bargaining, and rebuild the union’s FE membership in the same way we have for HE. But we also need plans to protect our international staff and students; combat climate change; repair the damage done by the Brexit Referendum; eradicate sexual harassment from our workplaces; and replace irresponsible and harmful metrics with meaningful standards for evaluating what we do.

There are no shortcuts. Nobody will do these things for us. I stood up from the ranks of university staff to stand for General Secretary because I know that we are the answer. We can turn UCU into a union that reflects the full diversity of our workforce and represents the very best of tertiary education.

We can reach out to casually employed staff; take action to support our colleagues in professional services; and advance the cause of equality in our annual bargaining.

We can make negotiations more transparent, so that our members can make informed decisions and hold their representatives to account.

We can form member ‘task groups’ to develop new campaigns, and convert our understanding of what is going wrong in each sector into meaningful action against it.

Use your vote, give me a mandate for change

My website now contains an extensive list of my responses to questions from members on a range of issues, and I continue to welcome your inquiries via , Twitter, or Facebook.

For all our efforts over the past decade, UCU has struggled to find a way forward. This election gives us an unprecedented opportunity to do so.

If I win this election, I will have the honour of being the first General Secretary to come from the membership. I hope to see a record turnout, and a strong mandate for change.

Dr Jo Grady

Image from Scott Hurrell

Below is the text of the third of four emails which I am entitled to send to all members of UCU as one of the candidates in the General Secretary election. It was sent on Sunday 12 May. To read the first and second emails, click here and here.

Dear colleague

In my last email I talked about campaigning for sector-wide agreements, starting with job security. Sector-wide agreements are vital. Without them, our employers keep undercutting each other, playing one part of each sector off against another in a race to the bottom.

I want UCU’s campaigns to be inclusive. Pay and pensions are not the only things we need to have fulfilling lives, and our demands to employers should reflect that. I also want those demands to be backed by real leverage, in the form of a plan for industrial action our members can get behind.

Inclusive campaigns, inclusive subscription rates

In Further and Higher Education, I will push for wide-ranging agreements that cover:

• Professional services staff
• International staff, non-EU and EU
• Freedom of speech and academic freedom
• Issues of racial and gender equality—not just the race and gender pay gaps
• Climate justice. I will enact UCU policy by pressing employers and USS to divest from environmentally damaging holdings

To mount inclusive campaigns, we need an inclusive union. That means reforming UCU’s regressive subscription rates. Currently, members earning £60,000 pay a lower proportion of their salary than those earning £20,000. The pace at which rates are being made fairer is glacial. But making membership affordable for those on lower pay is not enough, especially in the Further Education sector, where membership has plateaued. I have proposed elsewhere to consider rebuilding the union in that sector through special initiatives to make membership affordable for all FE staff, just as we’ve done for PhD students and sections of the FE workforce.

We need to redeploy our resources to encourage low-paid and casualised staff to join UCU and take action, and we need to do it sooner rather than later.

Effective industrial action

To make our workplaces fairer, we need to be able to take effective action. In the past, we have under-utilised the leverage at our disposal. For example, if we include our professional services colleagues in our demands, we can increase the pressure on our employers by withdrawing crucial administrative labour.

Members need to be confident that action will benefit, rather than hurt them. The available options, including strikes, have to be resourced and supported properly. That is why I propose to make the UCU strike fund transparent, easy to access, and less conservative in the support it provides.

UCU has accumulated large reserves without passing enough of them on to members who take action. I have heard from members who felt short-changed after suffering docked pay, applying to the Fighting Fund, and receiving less than they needed or expected. It does not have to be this way. We can do better, especially in Further Education, where members have faced massive pay cuts thanks to austerity, and sometimes have trouble taking action for more than a few days at a time.

Some trade unionists complain about the 50% turnout threshold imposed by Trade Union legislation. But while the law is in place, we can see it as an opportunity to organise and build support for new forms of collective action. When members take sustained action, we win. Winning is our best recruiting tool, and a larger membership galvanises all our campaigns. UCU should provide the resources to make this happen.

Accessible support for members

Some problems require personalised as well as collective solutions. I want UCU to develop versatile ways of addressing problems our members face every day. UCU has been spending more of your subscriptions on professional development courses which members struggle to find time to attend. I want to shift our focus to issues which our employers can’t or won’t deal with themselves, including:

• Reporting workplace harassment and bullying
• Reporting on workload, stress, and other health and safety issues
• Access to and control of personal membership data

We can use new technology and overhaul UCU’s online services to make these things easier than they are at present. Other unions are already doing it. So can we.

My campaign has revealed the appetite for change in UCU and started an unprecedented conversation about our future. Over 12,000 people have visited my website, and I’ve received endorsements from members across the union, from Prison Education to Higher Education.

My fourth and final email will say more about my long-term vision for UCU. Until then, please continue to contact me via , Twitter, or Facebook, and subscribe to my mailing list. But above all, use your vote.

Dr Jo Grady

Below is the text of the first of four emails which I am entitled to send to all members of UCU as one of the candidates in the General Secretary election. It is scheduled to be sent on Monday 29 April. It is identical to the email which will appear in members’ inboxes, except that full-text links to websites have been replaced with embedded ones.

---

Dear colleague,

My name is Jo Grady and I’m running to be UCU General Secretary. This election is a historic opportunity to transform UCU into a force for positive change in education, and I am the candidate to do this. You can find my election address here, and my manifesto here. But before I discuss my platform, I want to explain why this election matters.

The General Secretary is an important figure in the union. They are the only officer who is elected by members and works for the union full-time. They shape the union’s strategy by implementing policies passed by UCU Congress. But to me, the role is more than that. I don’t want to be a name you only recognise from emails. You’ll see from my manifesto that I want to establish regular ways to meet and listen to members.

Turnout is usually low in GS elections. We need to ensure that’s not the case this time. Voting is probably the most important thing you can do as a UCU member in the next five years. This is a crucial moment for our union, with the sector under a lot of pressure. You have a rare opportunity to vote for someone who works in the sector, understands what that pressure is like, and is an industrial relations expert.

If elected, I will be UCU’s first General Secretary with first-hand experience both of the world of trade unions and of the tertiary education sector. I am a Senior Lecturer in Employment Relations at the University of Sheffield, where I teach and research pensions; employment regulation; trade union organising and industrial action; and causes of labour market inequalities. In UCU, I have served for years as a branch rep and committee member. On a national level, I have served on the USS National Dispute Committee, and was recently elected to the National Executive Committee. I have over a decade of experience of UCU, of trade unions in general, and, most importantly, of what it is like to work in teaching, research, and administration in this sector.

Since I announced my candidacy I’ve had messages of support from across the UCU membership. I was nominated by hundreds of ordinary members like you. As an independent candidate not supported by any faction, my expenses are funded by individual donations. In my previous two elections to national posts, I stood as the only non-aligned candidate and was elected above other candidates with widespread support.

I want to open up spaces for all members, not just activists, to participate in and shape the union—however much or how little of their time they are able to commit to it. I am particularly keen to find ways to increase membership and participation among FE members, low paid, migrant, BME and disabled staff, and those without secure employment. My manifesto shows how we can do this, from comprehensive reform of UCU’s subscription rates, to the creation of special ‘task groups’ that make the most of members’ expertise and experience.

I am determined to rebuild the union so that we can launch effective campaigns on the issues that shape the day-to-day experience of staff in Higher and Further Education—not just press releases, reports, and web pages. These issues include the fight against the Hostile Environment and Brexit-related immigration controls; the imposition of irresponsible metrics such as the TEF; and the lack of job security for staff in all sectors.

I’ll be sending more emails during the ballot period, sharing my ideas about how to do this. If you have questions, email me at , contact me via Twitter or Facebook, or subscribe to my mailing list. But the most important thing you can do in this election is vote.

The ballot runs from 29 April to 23 May. You will receive your ballot papers by post and you need to return them by post: you cannot vote online. Because there are three candidates running, rather than two (as in the last two GS elections), the ballot will operate on a Single Transferable Vote basis: you can indicate an order of preference, rather than picking one candidate.

A career in education is more than just a job, and education is not a commodity. Use your vote in this election so we can become a union that shapes policy, rather than reacting to it, and fights for public education. Vote for me.

Dr Jo Grady
Grady4GS.com