The University and College Union (UCU) is running out of time to convince its members to back plans to take industrial action over pay, amid fears that the national ballot is detracting from local fights against job cuts.

A wave of university unions – including Dundee, Nottingham, Sheffield, Sheffield Hallam and Edinburgh – have announced local strikes in recent weeks, while the UCU’s wider campaign has been running.

The union wants members to vote in favour of a national strike over the pay rise offer of 1.4 per cent from the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (Ucea), in a ballot that runs until 28 November. To succeed the union must ensure 50 per cent of members participate, and a majority of them vote yes. 

Other sector unions, including Unison and Unite are also balloting members over industrial action with a view to launching a coordinated campaign of action. 

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As part of its demands, UCU has called for “a national agreement to avoid redundancies, course closures, and cuts to academic disciplines across the sector” – a move Ucea has said is out of the scope of its negotiations.

But there are also fears the national ballot on pay could compromise local branches’ ability to take action over redundancies.

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David Hayes, UCU branch chair at the University of Sheffield, told 51�Թ� that “there’s always a question about the intersection between national and local action”, but added: “I think a lot of our members are a lot more committed, quite frankly, to our local action than they are to the national action, because the issues there are a bit more relevant.”

He said the issue was “divisive” among staff, adding, “I think a lot of our staff think it’s the wrong time to be asking for that sort of thing with the state the sector’s in.” But, on “the flip side, we do have a lot of members of staff, especially professional services and technical staff on lower pay grades, who are really struggling”, adding that “there are compelling arguments on both sides”. 

Hayes said he had held concerns that “the threat of national action in the spring might make it harder to convince the university to meet with us on local action” but “we’re not necessarily seeing that”.

An announcement from the Office for Students (OfS) earlier this year that students should be given “fair compensation” when a university fails to offer “contingency plans that fail to deliver teaching” during staff strike action has made the university more open to discussions with the union, Hayes believed.

“That’s something that I think is having a big impact on the university’s willingness to enter into negotiations with us, and at the very least, try and talk to us and negotiate a long-term solution to this,” he said.

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Gregor Gall, an industrial relations expert who is a visiting professor at the universities of Glasgow and Leeds, said it was “unusual for so many branch-level strikes on one issue to be taking place during a national dispute on another issue”.

The difference between the two, according to Gall, was that “branches have decided to take action on an issue of grave and present danger to their members whereas the national ballot has been driven by the activists on the [UCU’s higher education committee] in terms of what they see as important”.

However, Melissa D’Ascenzio, co-chair of the UCU branch at Dundee, which has experienced some of country’s most severe cuts, said she was in favour of the national ballot.

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The university has raised its job cuts target from 632 full-time equivalent staff to 690, she said, with the scale of Dundee’s “crisis” leading her to believe that national action is required.

“We’ve been fighting on our own on this for a year…leaving individual branches on their own is extremely demanding on the local branches,” she said. “Just like a virus, we need to take a collective approach to it, because we can’t fight it patient by patient.”

Lopa Leach, branch chair at Nottingham’s UCU, said although she had initial concerns over how the national ballot would sit alongside local action, she now believes it strengthens their local case and has provided new energy for their campaign.

“I thought everybody would be fatigued but this has sort of rejuvenated things. This is the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity we have to stand up, and that’s what we’re getting from people when we speak to them,” she said.

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juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com