Marco Tesei, London UCU member
This year’s elections to the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the University and College Union (UCU) run from 27 January to 3 March.
I am standing for a UK-elected Further Education (FE) seat, and look forward to promoting a fighting, pro-worker strategy for our sector. The severe funding crisis affecting us, combined with the union leadership’s unwillingness to lead a bold fightback, call for one urgently.
UCU’s recently launched campaign, wishfully named New Deal For FE to echo Labour’s New Deal For Working People, has aims I support. Besides demanding a 10% pay rise as a start to reversing the 35% loss in real-terms value of FE salaries since 2010, it calls for parity of pay with schoolteachers within three years, and a binding national bargaining framework for the sector to ensure the same improvements in pay and conditions across all colleges.
Endless austerity and inequality
Since the removal of colleges from local authority control and their incorporation in 1992, local UCU branches have had to fight independently against endless austerity from unelected corporate directors and fat-cat CEOs. And the absence of aggregated national balloting and sector-wide action has impacted heavily on pay and conditions in many colleges.
Today, there are not only huge disparities in pay between colleges, but FE teachers earn an average of £9,000 a year less than their colleagues in schools. Winning binding national bargaining would therefore, firstly, help us fight for levelling-up across the sector. But also, both campaigning for it and winning it would greatly strengthen our members thinking and acting collectively.
We should also demand full funding and an end to marketisation and casualisation. FE should be under democratic public control.
But ambitious aims call for a bold and consistent fighting strategy to achieve them, or they remain only wishful thinking. Despite the opportunities for an immediate campaign offered by a new Labour government making it clear it is going to deliver next to nothing for working-class people, UCU’s general secretary, Jo Grady, is following a tenaciously acquiescent strategy of ‘wait and see’, or rather, ‘wait and hope’.
No time to wait
But wait for what? FE students and staff cannot wait any longer after decades of devastating neoliberal austerity policies and marketisation! And for what should we hope, when the warning signals have already been so clear?
In September, the chancellor awarded a funded 5.5% pay uplift (itself inadequate) to schoolteachers, but nothing to FE teachers. The Autumn Budget then announced additional funding for FE of £300 million, but with none of that already paltry amount (a bare 4% more to existing funding) ringfenced for staff pay. Now, as a result of strike action by sixth form teachers in the NEU, the government has said £50 million of that existing amount can be used to fund pay.
The demand for binding national bargaining has also had a muzzle put on it. A majority of the union leadership, abetted by the unelected officials, is intent on undermining many members’ determination to fight for it via an aggregated national ballot. Instead, it is promoting a strategy focused on local campaign work, asking reps to ‘build up’ branch confidence first, and that we all wait until the time is ripe – ie potentially indefinitely – before taking action. At a moment when staff anger is red-hot and crying out for bold solutions, this sort of restraining approach can be damaging to the development of our collective strength.
FE members in UCU must prepare to act, just as schoolteachers in the National Education Union (NEU) have done. It was the chancellor’s fear of a repeat of their national action that pushed her to award 5.5% in 2024 and, when a measly 2.8% was offered for 2025, the union has responded with an indicative national ballot. Likewise, let’s follow the lead of our sixth form college colleagues in NEU!
No to partnership
The Department for Education’s recent overtures of ‘social partnership’ between unions, employers and government, should be opposed. We need to face the reality that this is an austerity government.
Similarly, the idea now being floated of bringing FE teachers’ pay within the remit of an ‘independent’ pay review body, possibly even the schoolteachers’. We want to negotiate directly with the government, without the intermediation of a sham ‘neutral’ body disguising the wishes of the capitalist class!
A number of candidates are standing in this election across FE and HE who want a more democratic, fighting union; some are members of different left groups. I have appealed to work with all serious activists to build a strong, genuine broad left within UCU.
- Vote Marco Tesei #1 and use your other preferences for other left candidates.
