On 21 August, I was able to interview executive members of the Sussex branch of the University and College Union (UCU). I spoke with Jo Pawlik (Associate Professor of Art History, President of the Sussex UCU branch) and Danny Millum (UCU Caseworker Officer and Librarian).
The interview was conducted after union members at the University of Sussex had the highest recorded turnout for a ballot, with 81% voting in favour of a mandate to secure industrial action. This followed a general consultation held by the university, after further restructuring following financial difficulties puts up to 192 jobs at risk, following two voluntary redundancy schemes that saw over 500 staff members leave last year.
[Marni Lippin]
From the student perspective, we’ve been seeing a lot of distressed lecturers and professors. My first question would then be, what’s the mood been like amongst staff, amongst the union members at the minute? Do you think we’ve hit crisis point now – or have we been there for a while?
[Joanna Pawlik]
We have a lot of members who are very worried about their own job, and they’re also worried about what’s happening to Sussex, or what might happen to Sussex, because our members are so committed to the university and to the students here, and so anything that might threatened that also was a great source of worry for our members. [After the voluntary leavers’ schemes] in May of this year, 192 people were told that their roles are at risk of redundancy, and since then [we have seen] an uptick in people feeling very, very worried.
[Danny Millum]
Where I work in the library, a lot of people have worked for a long time here at Sussex. They have a great deal of identification with the university and see it as a special place, and love working with the students as well. And so, I think that [they’re] both nervous about their own jobs, but they’re then concerned about what’s going to happen next with the university in general. They also want to make sure that they can still carry on doing a good job for students. In our case, students rely on the library. That’s the same with lots of professional services as well – they don’t want to be in a position where we can’t offer things to students we had done previously, because we just don’t have enough people.
[ML]
I recently saw the announcement that the ‘buddy scheme’ has been suspended due to budgetary reasons at the SU. It has been a really challenging time as a student because we can start to see what resources are going first, perhaps going the quickest. Would you say that there has been departments or professional services that have been hit first and hit hardest – or do you think [there is] a university-wide, ‘equality’ to the resources that are being stripped back?
[JP]
I would say that we have been heartened, in as much as we’ve been heartened by anything in the last few months, that management have committed to, as best as they can – no course closures, no program closures, no department closures. You may have seen at other institutions like Nottingham, for instance, where they are shutting down a lot of courses and closing whole departments. We welcome Sussex management’s approach, which is not to close departments and courses. So, in that sense, we welcome that commitment, which is good for staff, students, research, and good for academia more broadly.
In terms of which faculties have been hit harder than others, no faculty has been exempted or immune from having to find savings under the university’s current proposals – no faculty has been immune from any cuts, and the way that the cuts have been calculated. We’ve been told that [factored] in is a number of different issues, such as the number of students in the department, the amount of research income coming in, and they’ve worked with some of that data to arrive at a savings target for the faculty.
[DM]
We’re not saying as a union that there isn’t a financial issue here at Sussex, and that there aren’t savings and adjustments that need to be made to that. I think that our response would be that it can be done differently.
Our commitment is, on behalf of our members, to try and avoid anyone being made compulsorily redundant, anyone losing their job who doesn’t want to. And I think that what we have done, led by [Joanna] and the negotiating team, is put together a comprehensive set of alternatives that the university could pursue instead.
Executive pay is also somewhere where savings could be found – there’s definitely a trade-off. Obviously, we don’t we don’t want to see anybody’s pay go down, we’re a trade union [that] represents workers. But at the same time, if the alternative for that is someone loses their job completely, then we think that that is a fair trade-off, and that the people who earn the most should also carry the heaviest burden. And we’ve also been very supportive of looking at alternatives, [encouraging] the university to set up structures where if people want to propose to work part time or to fractionalize – work different hours to save on jobs – the university should do everything it can to facilitate that as well.
We want students to know that we’re presenting a whole series of constructive alternatives here, not just saying, no, you can’t do any of this.
[JP]
For the most part, management have been responding and engaging with us constructively as well. In the last few years, industrial relations have really improved – management do listen, we can get meetings with them. They do take our proposals and our suggestions seriously. Negotiations have been constructive and productive to date [because] we’ve just secured a mandate for strike action. But strike action is an absolute last resort, and we need to make sure that we have in good faith explored every single opportunity through negotiations and talks before we would consider using that mandate.
For any trade union, a red line is compulsory redundancies, you [must] push back against that.
[ML]
Absolutely. Everyone is at Sussex because they like the university, their courses, lecturers, classmates. Everyone wants [to see] Sussex prosper. In that vein, being transparent with students about the alternatives to strike action and compulsory redundancies, what has [UCU] been suggesting?
[JP]
From the union side, when the collective consultation opened at the very end of May we spent [over] six weeks, nearly seven weeks, in regular dialogue with management as part of collective consultation. UCU and UNITE, another campus trade union, submitted a joint response to collective consultation, in which we responded to management’s proposals for what a new shape of the university might look like.
The headlines from that collective consultation response were, as Danny said, to revisit non-pay bill related savings. We can see that the university has already gone to quite considerable lengths to cut non-pay bill before moving to pay bill. […] Again, we welcome management’s decision here to prioritize non-pay savings before reluctantly turning to pay-bill-related savings. Nonetheless, we would like them to have another look at those non-pay related costs and see where any more can be squeezed out.
As Danny said, the other alternative is to improve the financial offer for people willing to take voluntary redundancy. If somebody says it suits their personal circumstances to no longer work for the university, we would like a fair deal for them, for them to have a good package when they leave.
There’s such a genuine sense of solidarity of people who might not be at risk or still be at risk volunteering to reduce their hours – if it means saving one of their colleagues’ jobs. There are a not insignificant number of people who would like to demonstrate that sort of solidarity, and they genuinely wish to go part time. So, we are hopeful/confident that some roles can be saved through the solidarity of UCU and other campus trade unions members!
[DM]
In the medium term, as well as cutting costs, we need to grow income at the university. And so again, what we want to be looking for are proposals which allow the university to improve recruitment and allow it to find other ways of generating income – that might be by increasing the use of the site and the facilities in terms of conference or expanding the use of like accommodation.
We’re thinking of [alternatives] that in the longer term would provide a more sustainable financial bedrock for the university. As a broader picture, we are also trying to work with the university and the vice chancellor in terms of their lobbying in the bigger higher education picture. From a UCU perspective, until the funding model for higher education is changed, improved, and addressed, these crises are going to recur, and they’re not limited to Sussex either.
[JP]
We do understand that the VC is already doing quite a bit behind the scenes to try and influence higher education policymaking, so we would like that to continue, but also to inform some lobbying of the sector. The [UCU] branch will also be potentially reaching out to local figures, to help them recognize the importance of a university to the city, and the enormous benefits of having two universities in Sussex.
[ML]
That point you make about solidarity is particularly interesting because there certainly is a collective feeling about the state of higher education in the UK, especially in comparison to countries like Scotland. As you say, many UK universities are facing the same financial issues as Sussex, so what do you see as being the main reason for the higher education crisis?
[JP]
The answer that I would give to that, is the moment at which [universities] just became completely surrendered to the free market when fees were raised in 2011, and then in 2014 when they lifted the student number caps, which used to place limits on the number of students that different universities could recruit. Once that cap was removed in 2014, universities saw students like pound signs and ‘over-recruited’ some universities, which is why I’m sure you’ll know people at some universities where there aren’t enough room in the lecture theatres for the students because they’ve taken more students than they can actually teach! […] Then, the freezing of the student fees so that it didn’t rise with inflation – I would say those are the main policy decisions with catastrophic impacts on universities, like Sussex in particular.
[DM]
It was a double whammy in recent years, and I think what has provoked the acute immediate crisis, which has been building up in any case, was the changes in visa regulations for international students – which particularly impacted students from India and Nigeria, who now can’t bring their families into the country. [International] numbers go down at all universities, but because the number caps that each university can take have come off, what Russell Group universities have done is essentially taken ‘our’ students to compensate for the international students they lost. [This means] a university like Sussex loses out twice – it loses international students and domestic students.
[…] UCU would hold the position that higher education is good for the country as a whole. Economically, but not just in such narrow terms – it’s good culturally and [for civilization] to have an educated populace. There’s no reason, if you can have free education up to the age of 18, you can’t have it up to 21 and beyond.
In the long run, to resolve this crisis, higher education, like other education, would have to be funded on a taxpayer-based model. Other countries can do it. There is absolutely no reason why we can’t, but it’s going to take agitation by students and staff together, in order to make it happen.
[ML]
I would be remiss not to talk again about the strikes, as UCU have recently secured a mandate. If it were to happen, as a last resort, could you walk me through what that would look like in practice for staff – what that would look like for students – on both ends of industrial action?
[JP]
When [mandates] only lasted six months, there was perhaps a bit of pressure, [like] you’ve got to use it. I say this to reassure, to say that there will be no knee jerk reactions. There’ll be no rush to do anything – it has to be a collective decision, and we’re a union of nearly 900 members, so, it requires careful thought, planning, discussion, and debate.
Because within the membership, there’ll be a variety of different views on what’s the best route to secure job security. Nothing can happen overnight – it’s always a collective branch approach to deciding when we would take action.
[DM]
The purpose of having a strike ballot for an industrial action is not to take that action, but to have leverage so that we are not just asking management to agree with us, but we are able to make demands, and they know that there’ll be consequences if those demands are not met, or if a compromise is not found.
The way we would lay it out to students would be this – we think we’ve put together a credible alternative that keeps Sussex financially sustainable, one that also means jobs don’t have to be lost in the way that were initially proposed.
There is another way of doing things, and therefore the ball is very much in university senior management’s court here. It’s not a question of striking for no purpose. We would say that if it comes to strike action, really, that would be the responsibility of management. They could have acted differently, and they chose not to.
I also hope that students would be sympathetic that what we’re trying to defend is a workplace that you guys will go into at some point, and we want it to be a workplace where people don’t lose their jobs, have decent terms and conditions, have pensions, have good pay, all of those things.
[ML]
[..] We’ve circled back to it many times, but the idea of solidarity between staff and students, I think is not only possible, but is already functioning to some degree.
If you had to give a short message to students about where you think [the financial situation] is heading, what would that message be?
[JP]
My focus is just on keeping talking to management and just trying to figure out a way that through these talks, we can agree something, an offer from management that we can put to members that’s acceptable to them, and [that] this academic year can continue exactly – give or take! – as normally as possible.
[…] If both sides keep talking, and we keep talking in good faith – let’s keep trying. [Sussex is] an institution that [UCU], management, students, and staff, profoundly care about, and so we take this very, very seriously.
[DM]
Obviously, if it was strike action, it would be needing to disrupt management, but we would be seeking, and we’re always trying to think of innovative ways of doing this, ways in which the students don’t suffer in the end.
But the other thing I would say is we really love the opportunity to speak to students more as well. If there are if students are holding meetings or if the student societies or if the student groups that think, all right, we’ve got questions for staff, we’ve got questions for the union as well. We would be super keen to come out and engage.
We want you to help us with this to make Sussex a better place.
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