By Amadea Hofmann
Photographed by Rayyan Furreedun
While strike action has dominated public discourse, the focus has largely remained on rallies and teach-outs. Few are aware of how action may escalate in the new year, potentially resulting in a marking and assessment boycott. The Beaver spoke to UCU President Janet Farrar for an inside look into what is at stake, the failings of LSE leadership, and the 2023 escalation strategy if current negotiations are unsuccessful.
“Nobody wants to take strike action,” Farrar said. “It is the hardest thing, especially when you care about students as much as we do as members … we are doing it as an absolute last resort.”
Indeed, higher education is in a dire situation. Due to inflation and a lack of proportionate pay rises, university staff pay has decreased by an estimated 25 percent since 2009. Moreover, the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) cut guaranteed pensions by 35 percent, based on an analysis conducted at the height of the economic crash in March 2020. These factors are compounded by the cost of living crisis, which UNISON Head of Education Mike Short said has ”pushed many to breaking point.”
For Farrar, this dispute is about something more than pay rises; she views the conflict as almost existential. “The amount of insecurity, the huge workloads, and the cuts to the pensions are still pointing to a very broken sector,” she said.
“And that’s why we say – without any kind of apology in this dispute – we are trying to save higher education.”
Farrar argued that while “education is a hugely transformative force,” it has been “turned into a marketised profit-making machine.” The stark realities of the financial strain on staff are difficult to reconcile with the fact that the UK private university sector has seen a £3.4 billion surplus in 2020/21. Ultimately, “this is about priorities, not a lack of money.”
Notably, LSE announced the construction of a new building at 35 Lincoln’s Inn Fields in July 2022 – six months after opening the Marshall Building. At a student Q&A hosted by the LSE Directorate, LSE Director Minouche Shafik remarked that due to the ongoing construction costs, “we have to make profits because we have to pay for all those buildings.”
Farrar criticised universities “engaging in vanity projects,” such as “shiny buildings,” arguing that “if you ask your average student, what they would prefer to have: a committed lecturer … or a shiny building, I’m pretty sure I know what students would prefer.”
At LSE, the student body voted in favour of the LSE Student Union lobbying LSE to accept UCU demands.
The perceived mismatch of priorities has caused LSE leadership – and particularly Shafik – to face strong criticism. Farrar said that university directors are “on the most ridiculous salaries that you’ve ever heard,” quoting Shafik’s £507,000 pay in 2019-2020, while there are staff members “who are highly casualised, who are using food banks, who are burning out with stress, who are experiencing race, disability, and gender pay gaps for work of equal value.”
UCU members view Shafik, along with the wider LSE leadership, as having leverage on the national stage that they are refusing to utilise. Farrar claimed that “Vice-Chancellors are really powerful people and if they – even on an individual level – were to say to the UCEA [Universities and Colleges Employers Association] or UUK [Universities United Kingdom], ‘This is not right and I won’t stand for it,’ they would have to be taken seriously. There are only 150 Vice-Chancellors in the national bargaining unit.”
This sentiment was reiterated by the Chair of LSE UCU Committee, Joanne Taplin-Green: “Where [is LSE] ranked right now? Three or four or something in the country [the Complete University Guide 2023 ranked LSE #3 in the UK] … [LSE is] very prominent and [Shafik] is one of the highest-paid directors as well.
“She absolutely has a responsibility for advocating for her staff.”
An LSE Fellow was particularly critical of Shafik’s public agenda contradicting her decisions at LSE: “There’s a lot of things she writes [in her book “What We Owe Each Other: A New Social Contract”] about ‘what we owe each other as a society’ at various scales, with these intersecting axes of oppression and disadvantage, [saying] ‘everything is so unfair … we need to make society work for everyone.’
“So that’s what she writes on the weekend, meanwhile she is very happy to keep everyone underpaid for the sake of satisfying fossil fuel-gobbling banks and building more buildings.”
At the student Q&A, The Beaver confronted the LSE Directorate, including Shafik, with concerns of their allegedly limited involvement. The Directorate disputed the claim that LSE has not lobbied with the UCEA and UUK, saying that they “absolutely do feedback to our national negotiating body,” but cannot always make these submissions public.
Shafik also said that “one of the challenges for us with this strike is that it is not a local issue, it is a national issue … so the LSE is, I’m afraid to say, a very small part of these discussions.”
Due to the national nature of the dispute, the Directorate claimed that “a variety of institutions all negotiating within the pay framework” with different financial constraints, makes it difficult to reach a compromise.
In response to the £3.4 billion surplus in the UK private university sector, the Directorate argued that LSE is “not a for-profit organisation. We don’t have shareholders or anything like this. Any money that comes into the institution stays within the institution, and essentially gets re-invested either for staff, or for facilities, or for scholarships, or new buildings, and so on.”
Pointing to the difficulties of negotiating on a national level, the Directorate said that “if we moved to a system whereby institutions had a bit more flexibility … going forward … that might help a lot, because then those institutions that can afford to reward staff in different ways would have more autonomy.” But currently, they are resorting to “participating actively in those negotiations and making our point of view known.”
The past lack of successful negotiations is what spurred the UCU to engage in a historic aggregated ballot this year. Farrar explained that the strategy the UCU embarked on was “a completely different approach, balloting everybody and trying to get 50 percent overall.”
“It was quite a risky strategy in a lot of ways,” Farrar said, admitting that she was faced with “a lot of nay-sayers.” But ultimately, the “level of anger in the sector mobilised people who might have been quite passive trade union members before.”
Farrar believes that this year’s strikes are different from the ones preceding them, “in the sense that this is 150 universities being brought to a standstill. At the same time, the UCEA have actually asked the Vice-Chancellors for a mandate to renegotiate with us, which they didn’t do last time. So that indicates to me that they are serious about reopening negotiations and ultimately, our door is open. We want to have those negotiations. We want them to be meaningful.”
In terms of what would constitute meaningful and successful negotiations, Farrar said that while there is a degree of flexibility, the UCU’s baseline is “an increase to all spine points on the national pay scale of at least inflation, so of at least RPI [Retail Price Index] plus 2 percent, or 12 percent, whichever is higher.”
If strike action does not result in successful negotiations, Farrar disclosed that a marking and assessment boycott is “certainly something that is part of the escalation strategy for the new year.”
The UCU mandate covers both “strike action” and “action short of strike.” It expires in April 2023, meaning that while UCU members would need to be re-balloted for the boycott to affect end-of-year exams, the mandate could affect January exams and summatives for Michaelmas Term.
Farrar’s rationale behind the boycott is that “industrial action is about the biggest impact and biggest disruption.” Students receiving delayed feedback on assessments would lead to widespread outrage and calls for universities to take action.
“In a marketised model, ‘students as customers’ culture is very strong,” Farrar said. “Employers are much more interested in listening to students than they are to staff, rightly or wrongly.”
However, the potential boycott would impede on the promised academic experience for students, which could ultimately threaten their support for the UCU. Student solidarity remains vital in the decisive moments of the dispute. As such, Farrar implored students to remember that the dispute is about “the greater good … and benefiting everyone.”
In order to prevent action from escalating, student action is key in galvanising universities to meet UCU demands. “The best thing students could do right now would be to directly contact whoever their leadership is,” Farrar said. “So that could be via social media … or it could be in a more formalised way, where they write a letter to the Vice-Chancellor to say, ‘this is completely unacceptable and here’s why, here’s our perspective.’”
“Any student voice is powerful.”
Ultimately, the UCU strikes are about “changing the system because higher education is broken for staff and for students. That is literally the crux.”
While UCU strikes have historically resulted in little administrative change, Farrar sees light at the end of the tunnel: “I’m incredibly optimistic about 2023. I do believe that the employers are going to be forced to listen to us this time because we’re too big to ignore, really.”
