The HE Ballot failed, now what?
If you’re reading this it is because today the UCU’s 2025 national ballot over pay and conditions in universities has failed. The last time a national ballot failed was in 2023 (on 42% turnout), and it was called along the same timelines as this one. I think it’s fair to say that quite a large number of people involved in the union at all levels expected this 2025 result. I also think the 39% turnout really sets this result apart, this isn’t just another near miss. I certainly expected the failure to hit the threshold, and I was disappointed and worried by the choice to run the ballot in this way, at this time. I remain disappointed by the lack of willingness to consider alternative ‘targets’ for action, particularly the possibility (understandably difficult!) of balloting directly against the Education Secretary. I thought the inclusion of the rather ambitious pay claim while the sector is shedding 10,000+ jobs a year was tin-eared at best and seriously undermines our credibility at worst. Doubtless a blame game will start soon, perhaps in the hallowed WhatsApp channels of the union’s self-described ‘left’ it already has. Perhaps us doubters are in for some stick in there. And I am sure that attempts will be made to lay blame squarely at the feet of ‘HQ’, full-time staff and union leaders who, somehow, bear the ultimate responsibility for a failure to mobilise members to take an action they clearly do not support. This will be despite HQ and union leadership having no agency at all in the decision-making process which produced those failures.
We cannot afford to let people weasel away from their responsibility for this failed ballot and from its very significant consequences. This stuff keeps happening. Accountability is due for the bare majority of representatives (a 20–19 decision), elected to the union’s higher education committee, who voted for this ballot, at this time, and in this configuration. They were explicitly warned about the risks. This is their mess, and now it is everyone’s problem, but will there be any consequences for the 20 ‘ayes’ who have put us all in this position? I have my doubts. When I look at UCU’s internal politics and at its decision-making structures, what I see is a tangle of perverse incentives, bad faith acting, virtue farming, and detached representation. A range of folks post real hard about ‘the membership’ as if only they know how to truly reach or represent them, and in particular they post as if the subset of members who show up religiously to branch meetings are the One True Voice of union democracy and opinion. This ballot result quite emphatically demonstrates how incorrect that understanding is and how out of touch they are.
A significant portion of elected union representatives are disconnected from the current needs, priorities, and importantly the collective ‘emotional state’ of workers in universities and this ballot result is obvious and painful evidence of that fact. Activists want to be ‘union heroes’, leading the densely massed power of labour over the top in a victory for worker’s rights, saving the sector. That’s potentially a good thing to want (beware of self-appointed leaders though), but in practice, folks are materially damaging our chances of getting anything done, are prioritising their own in-group cachet and political following over actual, incremental gains for, or successful defensive actions by, university workers, and are doing serious damage to the national union as they proceed.
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In the wake of this result there are several positions people emphatically do not get to take. The first is blaming UCU branch members and branch GTVO (get out the vote) efforts, no one gets to do that. Second is attempting to shift all the blame on to the General Secretary and various presidents and staff members, you don’t get to do that either, it’s proveably wrong and appallingly bad faith to suggest them. You definitely do not get to blame the union membership as a whole, people are up against it everywhere in our sector and if they are not able to immediately see the upsides of national action for them and for their situations at work, they are well within their rights not to vote for it. You do not get to blame staff who designed the GTVO campaign for this ballot, which was running at the exact same time as a Further Education ballot as well.
Me personally? I think the 20 people who voted for this action at HEC are the most responsible for the result. I think, assuming they understand themselves as ‘union leaders’, they should explain their thinking publicly, particularly those 6 who chose to vote with the 14 UCU Left members on this motion. Although some factions in UCU’s intramural politics often change name, form, and even membership, it is pretty easy to determine which groups and even which individuals voted against running the ballot now (UCU Commons plus fellow travellers), and which pushed heavily for it (UCU Left plus fellow travellers). I think that decision should have national electoral consequences and I’d be delighted to see it have branch electoral consequences too.
Because otherwise we genuinely are stuck, and we have definitely been here before. HEC has repeatedly gone rogue over the years I have been active in UK union politics, making decisions profoundly out of touch with ongoing strike actions, and attempting to gallop the membership into forms of action and durations of action that they clearly do not support. Describing the strategy as “striking for the sake of strikes” is perhaps unfair, but more often than not the shoe really does fit. This approach wastes one of the most precious resources in union activism: the willingness, hope, and energy of your membership, as well as their ability to take action, which are all spent during strikes, and which are not inexhaustible. The only thing worse than failing to cross a ballot threshold is managing to do so, and then wasting all that energy and effort with poor tactics, infighting, yelling about e-surveys (remember that?) and profoundly unrealistic claims. To understand this ballot result, one needs to understand how the last national strike action in HE was run, and particularly how long it was run (well into summer with various branches holding out with marking boycotts while the remainder of the sector was out), when anything less than full capitulation on the employer’s side was seen as insufficient to call it off. When I’m called out of course I down tools and of course I stay out and let me tell you that gets real isolating where I work, but the difference is I am at least aware that how I interact with industrial action and the union as an activist and former branch officer is not typical of the wider membership, who are more conservative with their time, labour power, and money than I am, particularly when it comes to national action.
What Now?
This is the second time in about two years that a major national ballot has fallen short. It is a perfectly precedented thing to have occur, but boy I hope it’s a wake-up call to, at very least, the people who so militantly insisted on calling it. This time the shortfall in turnout is punishingly clear and this time the decision was taken despite a very weak return in the consultative e-ballot. Members told HEC pretty clearly that they did not think this was the right call, and HEC made it anyway. Action to defend jobs and conditions this year against some pretty heinous cuts will now necessarily be local and branch-led. I am very, very worried about what I see coming out of Solent university in Southampton, which appears to be attempting to fire and rehire all of its staff who currently have a TPS pension. If that was replicated nationally, particularly piecemeal, how the hell would we respond in UCU? By volume most of the sector’s workers have a USS pension I believe (500k+ compared to 60k or so in TPS), so to see this off we would need to ballot every majority TPS institution, and we might see years of necessary action similar to the USS dispute, but would we have the size to get it done? Because that is way past PLO ferries and into a brutal new territory, where senior managers feel themselves unilaterally capable of completely reshaping working conditions for their entire staff base, inevitably for the worse, and through an egregious attack on their deferred pay and security in retirement. The brutally entrenched logic of a ‘lost decade’ in higher education, and this government’s apparent eagerness to see institutions merge, shrink, wither away or fundamentally transform, will furnish senior leadership with their arguments for such radical changes. It’s a shame this ballot was called when it was, but I don’t think for a minute that this is the end of the national story when it comes to the HE omnicrisis and UCU’s involvement.
