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Members of the UCU union have backed industrial action at Cardiff University and 39 other institutions, but activists are frustrated that strikes may not go ahead until next year. 

By SC Cook. Cover image: Cardiff University workers on strike, 2020, copyright voice.wales. 

Workers at Cardiff University have voted overwhelmingly for strike action over pay, working conditions and against an attack on pensions. 

Two seperate strike votes were held and in both cases members of the University and College Union (UCU) at the university backed industrial action by an 80% margin or more. In total 40 universities across Wales, England, Scotland and the north of Ireland could now strike over pay, working conditions and pensions. 

“We did it! We beat the anti-trade union laws and reached the 50% turnout thresholds,” Cardiff UCU branch said following the result. “This means we can now act on the very strong strike mandates our branch has had from the start.” 

However, just a day after the results came in, many activists have been left feeling angry over an announcement by the union’s leadership that strike action may not go ahead this year at all. 

Jo Grady, the union’s general secretary, wrote to members saying she would push for the union’s higher education leadership to call off the strikes and instead hold a fresh ballot over the two disputes in 2023. She cited the number of institutions legally able to take strike action (40) as the reason for her decision. 

Outlining three potential options of indefinite strike action, a marking boycott or suspending strike action and holding another ballot in 2023, Grady said that the final option provided the “best chance of winning.” No decision has yet been made on the strikes, but union activists on the ground have expressed their dismay at the announcement. 

Renata Medeiros-Mirra, a Cardiff UCU activist speaking in a personal capacity, said she felt  “very frustrated at the prospect of wasting the strike mandates that many branches, including ours, have secured.” 

“Getting the 50% turnout threshold required by law in a postal vote is extremely challenging and requires a great level of organising and mobilising,” she told voice.wales. 

“Paradoxically, this can be particularly difficult for a broken workforce dealing with excessive workloads and high levels of precarity – each strike mandate is itself a great victory and should not be dismissed.”

Cardiff University UCU narrowly missed out on securing the legally required 50% turnout in a previous ballot, prompting the branch to push harder this time around. 

Medeiros-Mirra said that even though she understood that it was better to strike with a majority of universities, the 40 which could take action was “not negligible.”  

“We must keep up the pressure instead of backing down,” she said. “Those who will be most pleased about the decision to halt the strikes will be our employers and that says a lot.” 

There was a similar reaction online, with academics from various universities using the hashtag #nocapitulation. 

“Terrible email from my union general secretary today,” read one academic’s post. “40 branches ready to strike…but we’re going to mothball the dispute and return with a pay claim in 2023-24! This is not a “radically ambitious” strategy. It’s capitulation.”

The background to the strike votes is a combination of falling pay, erosion of working conditions and a major attack on worker pensions. 

The UCU says that workers’ pay is down by more than a quarter in real terms since 2009 and that over 70,000 academics are employed on insecure contracts. Meanwhile, the gender pay gap in UK universities sits at 16%, whilst the disability pay gap is 9% and the race pay gap is up to 17%.

In the strike vote over these issues, dubbed the ‘Four Fights,’ 80% of Cardiff University workers in the union voted for strike action. 

In the second ballot over pensions, held following the decision by Universities UK to cut pensions by around 35% and wipe thousands of pounds off workers’ retirement income, 86% of UCU Cardiff members voted to walkout. 

On both ballots, turnout in Cardiff narrowly crossed the 50% threshold required by anti-trade union laws brought in 2016.

Overall, 36 universities passed the threshold in the ‘four fights’ dispute over pay and working conditions, and 24 got over the line in the ballot over pensions. 

Even though many institutions, such as Swansea, saw a large majority of their members vote for strike action, they narrowly missed the required 50% voter turnout this time around. Under anti-union laws, this means that workers are prevented from acting on the mandate. Many union members, however, feel that this is no reason to put the breaks on the dispute. 

Jonny Jones is a UCU activist at Queen Mary University London branch who has been involved in organising strike votes and walkouts over the past year. He told voice.wales that now was not the time for the UCU leadership to step back from industrial action. 

“Obviously it’s very disappointing to see fewer branches reaching the turnout threshold this time on both the Four Fights and the USS pensions dispute,” he said. “However, we need to be careful in how we interpret the numbers.”

“In USS, we had a turnout of 49.9% on a national basis, compared to 53.3 percent in the last ballot. So we haven’t seen a collapse in support for action, and we still have a significant number of union members mobilised around the disputes.”

Jones said that given the tight nature of the results, the leadership of the UCU made a “major miscalculation” in only allowing three weeks for the ballot to take place, and branches should have had more support in getting the vote out. 

“But it’s not just a question of tactics,” Jones said. “There has been a real lack of strategic vision from the top of the union, and that has been enough to lead to a small layer of people who supported strikes last time round not seeing a way forward this time around.”

“I think the worst thing we can do is now throw our hands up and admit defeat, especially if we hide this behind a facade of “pausing” for more radical action next year, as the General Secretary is suggesting.”

“The Tory anti-union laws are designed to suppress votes for industrial action, and especially national action… we cannot let a fatalism about the numbers creep in.”

He called for the union to involve the membership in a serious discussion about next steps, such as a marking boycott and non-cooperation with management: 

“Of course, we need to discuss what happens next year, but that can’t be at the expense of acting now and finding creative ways of leveraging members’ willingness to act and disrupting the normal workings of the colleges.”

Jones pointed to the cost of living crisis and the fact that in higher education, wages have fallen by 20 percent since 2009, something which will only be accelerated by rocketing inflation. 

“Many of our lowest paid and most precarious members, disproportionately women and people of colour, are at the sharp end of this. Many of these same people are the backbone of union activism and are at the forefront of our efforts to build up branch organisation.”