Most people who read NEC members’ blogs will probably be very aware of the heat that’s been generated by this issue. It has, by its nature, effected thousands of NUS members and is rightly seen as an issue of great importance by SUs on campus and the NUS nationally.

As a member of a faction that has consistently and unconditionally supported our lecturers’ dispute, I’ve been disappointed if not surprised at the level and scale of hostility directed towards these workers in struggle by student movement officers. If nothing else, it has highlighted how pitifully low the current level of political culture in our movement is. Clearly, many officers do not see the NUS as politically part of the broader trade union movement but simply as an association to articulate what they see as the immediate sectional interests of students.

Given the gravity of this issue, I thought I’d write this blog to expand a bit on my thoughts on this issue, but also to chronicle NUS’s response to the dispute. Hopefully it will be of some use.

The dispute

Although more than £2,000,000,000 is being injected into the HE system (through a combination of taxes and increased fees), lecturers remain chronically underpaid. Despite commitments from the government and Vice-Chancellors that at least 33% of the new funds would be allocated to increasing lecturers’ salaries, the employers’ current pay offer stands at a meagre 3.5% increase for the next three years. At the heart of the dispute is a question about the very nature of the HE sector – whether it is to be a marketplace in which every concern is subordinated to the needs of profit. This dispute is part of the struggle to see that this does not happen.

For more information on the pay claim, see:

www.natfhe.org.uk

www.aut.org.uk

8/11/2005: NUS NEC meeting

An NUS National Executive Committee meeting in early November debated our attitude to the unions’ pay claim. At the time, several NEC members argued that – while we should remain totally committed to fair pay for our lecturers – the claim was problematic as it focused specifically on demanding the redistribution of top-up fees money and thereby implicitly accepting top-up fees. However, I believe now as I did then that we must unconditionally support workers’ struggles for better pay and conditions even if we disagree with the precise political demands under which they are orchestrated.

For a report of the 8th November NEC meeting, see:

www.free-education.org.uk

7/3/2006: The action begins

In March, the dispute began in earnest with a one-day national strike. There was no guidance from NUS about how to respond to the strike – no briefings about not crossing picket lines, no information about how to organise solidarity, nothing. Some members of prominent Constituent Member unions crossed AUT and NATFHE picket lines.

Only a few SUs were involved in actively supporting the dispute. If NUS had given some leadership nationally, this number could surely have been increased. When the NUS finally did get round to issuing an official response, its headline slogan was “End it today!”

For more information, see:

www.free-education.org.uk/?p=164#more-164 (a report of a solidarity action organised by a pro-strike SU)

www.nusonline.co.uk (NUS’s official response)

www.free-education.org.uk/?p=166#more-166 (an entry on my blog from mid-March. Scroll to the bottom for more on the NUS’s response to the dispute)

28/3/2006: NUS Annual Conference

Unfortunately, the Emergency Motions submitted to conference on the issue of the dispute fell off the agenda. It is a lamentable reality of NUS Conference that a lot of things don’t get discussed (due, in no small part, to years of anti-democratic slashing of conference’s length). Following conference, some sabbatical officers began to claim that, because conference had not had the opportunity to discuss the dispute, it was undemocratic and unrepresentative of the union to continue to support the dispute when it had no such mandate to do so from its sovereign decision making body. This was the start of an anti-strike backlash which, in the face of NUS vacillation, has only gathered pace.

20/4/2006: The backlash and NUS’s response

Towards the end of April, presidents and officers from a number of significant HE unions (such as Bristol and Nottingham) sent a letter to the national media (and to the leaders of AUT and NATFHE) expressing their explicit opposition to the means – if not the ends – of the dispute. There was even rumours of a right-wing split from NUS. The arguments were the same as ever – NUS is too political, and should representing students as students, not bothering with supporting striking workers.

Admirably, pro-strike officers responded with a letter of their own, but despite helping this letter gain signatories, it became clear that the NUS leadership was looking for ways to cover its right flank from hostile sabbatical opinion.

For more information, see:

http://education.independent.co.uk (the anti-strike letter to the Independent)

www.free-education.org.uk (the text of the pro-strike letter)

April-May 2006: NUS’s demands

It was always the case that NUS had “expressed concerns” about the inevitably negative impact that a boycott of assessment and exams would have on our membership. But following the increased hostility and anti-strike sentiment from sabbatical officers, the union began to make much more explicit and high-profile “demands” not on the bosses and their club, UCEA, but on the unions. In press-releases and weekly updates that it circulated (available online), the NUS “condemned” the unions and “demanded” that they began setting exams “immediately.” These demands began to outweigh the official position of support for the dispute, which had yet to be overturned by any democratic body.

The chronology made it very obvious what was going on; following a backlash from sabbatical officers, the NUS leadership tried to fend them off by making it appear that it, too, was making the same demands as them and that it, too, was focusing its fire on the unions. Those in the leadership who thought that the emphasis of NUS’s propaganda was just right claimed that it was a question of “listening to them members.” Others of us thought that it was in fact a capitulation to the right-wing in our union and effectively a call upon workers involved in a dispute with their bosses to get back to work.

For more information, see:

www.nusonline.co.uk

8/5/2006: NUS NEC meeting

Predictably, the first NEC meeting after National Conference voted to reaffirm the NUS’s “demands” for the “immediate” setting of exams. Despite expressing righteous anger at the anti-strike politics of some sabbaticals, hardly any NEC members were prepared to stick their heads above the parapet and take a stand in support of workers in struggle.

For a report of the 8th May NEC meeting, see:

www.free-education.org.uk/?p=193#more-193

Late May 2006: The reaction worsens

Vice-Chancellors at universities all over the country had threatened the docking or suspension of pay for those lecturers involved in the dispute since it began. In late May, bosses at Northumbria, Essex, UEA, DMU and elsewhere carried these threats through and introduced various forms of pay cuts, docking or suspension. But NUS’s statements continued to emphasise the “demand” for the lecturers to get back to work.

Worse still, some SUs (such as Northumbria) came out in active support of the pay cuts. Others (such as Liverpool) organised anti-AUT demonstrations, which drew hundreds of students.

The fact of an NUS Constituent Member explicitly supporting anti-union bosses in their efforts to dock pay from key workers is a sobering and depressing indication of how abject NUS’s political culture has become. The majority of the blame for the deterioration of this culture must lie with decades of mis-leadership which, sadly, show now signs of abating.

For more information, see:

http://education.guardian.co.uk (a report of the anti-AUT demo at Liverpool)

>The issues

What is NUS for?

The debate in the movement around this issue poses this question rather sharply. If NUS is simply an association to represent the immediate interests of students (and then only specifically sectional ones relating to their position as students) then it would have been entirely logical for NUS to have opposed the action outright from the start.

If, however, it is a union – part of a broad union movement and engaged in political struggle for a better society – then this leads to different conclusions. The AUT/NATFHE dispute is part of a fight for a better education sector, a fight of which NUS is also a part. This means that opposing the dispute – in any way and on any level – means we are opposing an element of our own struggle.

NUS activists know that many SU officers do indeed take the first view – the phrase “students as students” is universal shorthand for the kind of officer who wants to see an apolitical, service-provision based NUS. But by first being mealy-mouthed and then explicitly opposing elements of the AUT’s action, NUS is trying to balance or reconcile the two conception of what it is for. Unfortunately, there can be no reconciliation. The ideological debate between whether NUS should be a service provider for “students as students” or whether is should be a democratic, fighting union will ultimately have to won by one side or the other. Currently, the wrong side has the upper hand and NUS’s response to this dispute has hardly harmed their cause.

Representation or mouthpiece?

Many anti-strike officers have complained that NUS’s official support for the dispute flies in the face of what they have somehow divined to be the majority of student opinion – that the lecturers are bang out of order and should bloody well get back to work. Quite how they are able to make such a judgement I am not sure. In reality, there is no real way for a union of 5.3m members to find out what the real majority opinion is on an issue like this.

But let us imagine, for a minute, that a majority (or at least a significant proportion) of NUS’s members do oppose the dispute. Should the union, therefore, switch its position to bring it into line with what appears to be the majority consensus?

No. Unions exist to represent their members’ broad interests, not simply be a conduit for their view. Shifting political positions to tail what appears to be majority opinion would be neither representative nor democratic and would see the NUS reduced to a mouthpiece.

It is unfortunate that this issue was not discussed at Annual Conference. However, this ill-fortune notwithstanding, the idea that the NUS should have adopted an anti-strike position without even the most rudimentary democratic mandate simply because some officers felt that this was the majority opinion amongst the union’s membership is ridiculous.

Again, the fact that prominent figures in the union have such a bankrupt conception of what representation means is a clear indication that there is some serious work to do in terms of rebuilding political culture.

Interests versus Interests

Sometimes, the interests of groups of people clash with each other. This is an unfortunate reality of life and particularly of political struggle. When tube workers strike, this impacts negatively on other workers whose travel is disrupted. Unfortunate, lamentable, but inevitable. Should tube workers be condemned for using the only weapon available to them – the withdrawal of their labour – because some people had to take a bus? No.

The history of the labour movement is full of such examples. It is also full of instances of workers taking action in solidarity with other workers even though it directly harms their own interests. The baggage handlers who struck at Heathrow in an attempt to save the jobs of catering workers risked their own livelihoods for what they saw as the greater principle in the broader struggle. It’s never easy to do something like that and such decisions aren’t taken lightly. But sometimes sacrifices like that are necessary.

Such a sacrifice was necessary in response to such a dispute. SUs needed to stand up and say that, even though it impacts negatively on the immediate interests of our members, we support this dispute because it is part of the same broad struggle in which we ourselves are engaged. Sadly, very few did this, preferring to maintain an analysis that saw no broad political struggle but only competing interests to be played off against each other. In other words, the exact analysis that Vice Chancellors wanted them to adopt.

NUS as part of the labour movement

In France in 1968, even the mainstream student organisations were clear in their analysis that the organised working-class was the fundamental agency of social change, and that the role of student organisations was to support them in their struggles. I had thought that we were a good long way from winning the mainstream student movement in this country round to such a view. The response to this dispute suggests that we are actually light-years away.

But until the NUS does situate itself within the broad labour movement, and until it does understand that organised workers hold the power to change society, we will simply not be able to win a free education system – let alone a better, more just and more equitable society.

Leftists, radicals and class struggle activists in NUS have found ourselves swimming against the current on this issue. Refusing to give in and continuing to stand up for the principles of workers’ struggle and solidarity is our first achievement. Winning an NUS that upholds those principles too will be our next.

In solidarity –

Daniel Randall

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