The Key Issues at the UCU’s Second Congress: Israel, Aadministration or Pay?

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http://education.guardian.co.uk/egweekly/story/0,,2282231,00.html

“There are people who want to see us fall out over Palestine and do nothing else,” says Sally Hunt, general secretary of the University and College Union, currently preparing for the UCU conference, which starts tomorrow.

And you can see her point. There is no call for a boycott of Israel on the agenda. The nearest you get is a proposal that “colleagues be asked to consider the moral and political implications of educational links with Israeli institutions”. But that will not stop most media attention from focusing on it, she says, and it will not keep furious delegates on both sides of the argument from each other’s throats.

And it has not prevented Stop the Boycott, a group of eminent Jewish lawyers and intellectuals, from gathering legal advice and sending it to Hunt with much fanfare, on the grounds that the proposal “appears to encourage an academic boycott of Israel”. There are single-minded pro-Palestinians and pro-Israelis who have devoted much energy to fighting the Middle East war on British campuses. The result has been much bitterness and a stream of motions to UCU branches, student unions and the NUS. “If you’re called the Stop the Boycott campaign,” grumbled one activist last week as he shuffled his conference papers, “then if there’s no proposal for a boycott, you have to invent one.”

The debate over such matters will generate great heat, both at the conference and in the media, but whether they are passed or rejected will not make a scrap of difference in the real world.

Hunt would like to get the conference talking about UCU’s core business, and about matters over which it stands a chance of changing something. That is why she is releasing today a survey of university lecturers which shows that more than half of them (53.6%) spend more than 15 hours a week on administration, compared with one in five who spend that much time on research, and just over a quarter who spend that much time teaching. More than half of them say they spend more time on administration than on anything else.

Still, it has to be said that these bread-and-butter issues are not always safe ground for Hunt. Negotiations on lecturers’ terms and conditions – her union’s core business – have not gone smoothly. Back in February, her union decided in a ballot not to accept the proposed new arrangements for pay bargaining in universities, which all the other unions accepted. UCU complained that the deal makes industrial action harder and more cumbersome.

Leaders of unions representing other university staff – Unison and Unite – were, and are, furious, and have gone ahead with the employers and without UCU. Inside UCU, there are claims that Hunt did not campaign properly for acceptance of the deal that its negotiators had agreed.

The Universities and Colleges Employers Association refuses to make special concessions for UCU, and there is stalemate. In an effort to resolve it before the conference, Sally Hunt wrote last week to Professor Bill Wakeham, chair of the UCEA. “Irrespective of your unwillingness to agree procedures acceptable to our members, UCU remains the main representative of academic and related staff in the sector,” she wrote.

She told him that the credibility of the negotiating forum “rests at least in part on UCU’s full participation… It is therefore in my view extremely unfortunate that we are unable to agree a new bargaining machinery, particularly when there is clearly room for further negotiation.” But the letter has not produced any movement, and seems unlikely to do so.

“We are completely committed to national bargaining,” she says. “But if you have a ballot and your members tell you there are crunch points, you observe those.”

The first general secretary of the merged union is not without her critics, many of whom will be at the conference. There were rumblings that, internally, it felt like a takeover by Hunt’s previous union, the Association of University Teachers, rather than a merger between it and Natfhe, the FE partner. Hunt beat a candidate from Natfhe for the top job. There was a bitter row over her proposed new structure, and she had to modify it radically to get it past her executive.

Hunt says: “There will always be people who don’t want to accept that the members voted, not just for me, but for others – it is easier to hold on to the past than face the future.”

She says that, for the most part, these problems are now over. “Look at what we’ve achieved this year. The staff have all taken a step back and are now one staff, not two. We’ve achieved a new building, a new structure, and activists from both former unions are now engaged with each other. I’m so proud to be general secretary of this union.”

Hunt admits that dealing with further education has been a steep learning curve for her – at the AUT she had no FE members. It has also come as a shock. “Things are so ridiculously bad in FE. The education professionals there have a commitment to their work, but they get no commitment to long-term funding, they cannot even plan three years ahead.”

The collapse of Carter and Carter, the training giant, will be seen in UCU as confirmation of what it has always said about marketisation of education. The debate will not get the sort of headlines that the Palestinian debate will have, but it will have far more to do with what the union will spend its time on for the next 12 months. Delegates will complain that funding “is increasingly allocated for business-focused projects, while access to education is reduced through proposed cuts”. Hunt will talk in her address of the need for long-term planning in education. And she will probably not even mention Israel.

The Key Issues at the UCU’s Second Congress: Israel, Aadministration or Pay?

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