2024 UCU Elections

It’s that time of year. Yay.

TL;DR

UCUCommons is running a slate. Please vote for them. It would make my life easier. They are very good and sensible folks. We don’t always agree but we try to work together to make things better.

We asked questions and got (some) answers. On this basis we have endorsements. (It was not a slam dunk for anyone outside our slate except maybe Mark Taylor-Batty. I’m not saying we’d have endorsed alternatives, but there’s a general mood which is wary of endorsements in Commons.)

I endorse Jo Grady for GS and it sort of follows (not entirely) that I think voting her slate is a good idea. Some of our slate appears there…maybe all of it? I know some of the others directly and can vouch personally for Ann Gow and Janet Farrar. I believe on fiscal and industrial matters Andrew Feeney and our former Honorary Treasurer, Steve Sangwine for trustee are good picks. I’ve worked with these folks on HEC and NEC and for industrial dispute strategy they seem fine.

Background

UCU has so many elections. We have significant ones every year which can shift the direction of the union profoundly. Vice-president (alternating FE and HE) and about half of NEC every year. These generally are super low turnout elections and NEC can be highly gerrymandered with the regional seats. (For example, some seats…such as the disabled members rep for HE had ≈6000 votes to make quota while some regional seats make quota with <500.)

Every 5 years we also elect the General Secretary, for which turn out goes higher. Last time it was about 20%. GS is an important but not paramount role. The GS is often a focus point for people’s feelings about UCU and how things are going but a lot of the praise or blame is not grounded in the actual facts in part because the public face of an org gets loads of praise or blame, UCU’s structures are complex (the fact that the sectoral “VP” we elect has as much or more influence over sectoral negotiations than the GS is not very well understood), and some folks actively promote the misunderstanding. Not great.

But the GS role is important and we should try to elect a good one. Or at least the best of those running.

Big picture

The most important point to realize is that there are deep and fundamental divisions in UCU. I can mostly speak from an HE perspective, but one divide seems to span both sectors: what’s a good strategy for our disputes.

To simplify, we have the maximalists and build-and-bankers. (Note, I’ll present the views in a super simplified form.) The maximalists believe that maximal demands couple with maximal (declared) action is the way to go. Last Congress, we had motions and speeches in favor of indefinite, continuous strikes. Indeed, some speakers asserted that the mere threat of an indefinite, continuous strike would end most disputes before they started. (The evidence is quite against them, fwiw.) Build-and-bankers believe that action must be guided by expected utility and that realistic assessments of resources is critical to success. They tend to think that partial wins and harm minimization help build strength whereas lots of calls to action with little progress is demoralizing.

Historically, in HE, maximalists have favored disaggregated ballots because that maximizes the chances of some action happening. Build-and-bankers have favored aggregated ballots on the “longer the picket line, the shorter the strikes”. Maximalists tend to think that action in itself build momentum and is the locus of organizing (“snowball theory”) where as build-and-bankers think that loads of action without progress demobilizes (“snowman theory”).

I’ve lots more to say about this in detail, but, I think it is obvious that I’m a build-and-banker. I think we need to analyze the power differentials, the psychology and red lines of management, and our own resources carefully. I think we need to build toward smart action and go from win to win rather than massive winner takes all campaigns.

Given this divide, the election (as most UCU elections) comes down to a choice between a maximalist or build-and bank approach. (It might be different in FE, but I see some similar currents there.)

Jo Grady is a consistent build-and-banker and the only one running who’s even close, as far as I can tell. Thus, she gets my wholehearted endorsement. This is probably the most important issue for UCU,. So vote for her and vote for her slate. Both are important.

Vicky Blake and Saira Weiner are in the maximalist camp albeit in different positions. UCULeft is deeply and often weirdly committed to snowball theory which extends to claims that “we can always raise money for. the fighting fund” which, speaking as someone who was on the local hardship fund committee just isn’t true. Blake is not UCULeft (though their second choice) but a lot of her closest allies on NEC seem friendly to Socialist Alternative or seem to be “UCULeft adjacent” (on industrial action approaches…UCULeft has some views many find abhorrent). They are firmly in the maximalist camp though less bonkers about it. I did not find Blake to be a helpful moderating force last year whether on indefinite strikes (or the weird escalating strikes) or on the decision that led to the MAB (which I campaigned against). [ETA: On USS, as Mike Otsuka helpfully notes, Blake was a useful moderating force and made the right call. Weiner and McGaughey did not. This seems like a low bar as the decision to accept the USS deal seemed so easy but it’s definitely worth noting that two of the candidate failed to meet that bar. Credit to Blake that she did.] We could have had what we’re going to get wrt the 4Fights for a lot less of our pain and suffering and lost income and we really could have gotten no better. This was knowable and the maximalists never gave any evidence to the contrary.

Grady pushed early on for aggregated ballots, for well timed ballots, for long ballot periods with good lead in. She also pushed against indefinite, continues action with no prep, to her cost. I don’t think I’d made the same tactical moves that she did but she was in a tough situation. She made some hard choices and this enraged some maximalists. Her “smart” move would have been to let HEC go its own way and let the failures clearly belong to the narrow majority which pushed through an unworkable “plan” with little prep. I try to stick to my collective responsibility obligations and did so, with pain, at the time. But, it’s election time so a bit of airing of linen is reasonable. (Note that many of my fellow HEC members do not adhere to collective responsibility at all.)

Grady has been analytical correct at every step of the way afaict. She does not dodge responsibility and does not shy from doing what she thinks is best for the union. HEC has sent her on many of fools mission over the past 5 years and she has done what’s required. She has also sought to give a voice to the broader membership including to smaller and less well organized branches. These are very good things in a GS.

But if you want a maximalist, Weiner is the most reliable there, but Blake is likely to be swayed by a maximalist dominated N/HEC. It’s your right to prefer such a strategy. I’d encourage you to think hard about it, though. Tough times are coming and we need to be very smart about how we fight.

You’ll note that Ewan McGaughey doesn’t appear above. That’s because the only thing I’ve seen of him especially at a national level was a boondoggle, lost lawsuit that he wanted UCU to back in spite of its rules. He doesn’t seem to be a serious candidate to me.

UPDATE: This morning (5 Feb 2024), I read in McGaughey’s email to UCU:

“Vote by record and conscience! Here are my picks:

• General Secretary, second or third, vote Vicky Blake or Saira Weiner – they’re organised + work with other people.

•Vice President, vote Peter Evans – easily the most experienced + qualified.

To the degree that this is coherent, it, in essence, endorses a maximalist position. Who knows where he’d come down, but his second choices for GS are maximalist and he doesn’t care what flavour. This just seems mindlessly anti Grady. The reasons for the endorsements are embarrassingly vacuous.

Doesn’t seem serious to me.

Finally, it’s important to remember that experience actually does help. The GS is a big administrative and political job with a lot of constraints. Someone “new” might seem better but they’ll face a learning curve wherein they will find that things are hard to do that then were to imagine. Grady may have blemishes on her track record in your eyes but that’s because she has a track record in the job. Adjust your anticipations appropriately.

And The Rest

I don’t think splitting your ticket makes a whole lot of sense unless you know some particular person you like a lot. Even then…if you are a maximalist, you kinda want your votes to go for maximalists. If you are a build-and-banker, I’m not sure voting for a maximalist you’re pals with is going to give you outcomes you want. For the last year, HEC, at least, has been on a knife edge for votes. The year before was more heavily weighted toward the maximalists. (The reason we didn’t do indefinite continous was the overwhelming results of the survey and BDM. Even there, the hard core maximalists (i.e., UCULeft) still voted for it but suffered defections from the soft maximalist (which seem to be Friends of Vicky; some who designed the escalation alternative are her endorsers).

Each side of the divide has to work with the other side, at least some of the time. Neither side is going away soon: There is strength of feeling and reasonable numbers on both sides. There’s no magic independents that can harmonize this at all. It’s not even clearly factional. There are declared factions which are strongly on one side or the other (e.g., UCULeft for maximalising; UCUCommons for build and banking) but there are a range of individuals, antifactionalites, crypofactions, loose groupings, friend groups, etc. who fall on one side or the other. These might be in bitter disagreement on other matters (e.g., what’s left of IBL is way too TERFy and TERF tolerant to ever get my vote; though they have internal division there) but dispute strategy is cross cutting.

In Conclusion

I’m a harm-minimisng, good-maximizing, radical democrat with a strong technocratic bent with, I think, a strong moral compass. My considerations may not chime with you. I encourage you to vote and to vote your perceived interests.

This post is all my own doing. I didn’t show it to anyone. It is not supported by UCUCommons in any way or by the Grady4GS campaign. I’ll probably give the Grady4GS campaign an endorsement, but this is the “grumpy” version.

It’s obviously ok to disagree with me, but I’m not terribly interested in being abused or getting into a long debate about these views. If you found this helpful great. If you found this helpful to bookmark for next year’s NEC elections in case I run so you remember to vote against me…also, fine! If you have a sort of technocratic question that might help inform your vote, please feel free to contact me.

Update: There’s been a few (anonymous) queries/challenges about whether Socialist Alternative is on NEC etc (see comments or Twitter for details). I’ve softened those claims as getting conclusive, direct evidence even when I recall there being some is proving elusive. I believe those claims and don’t think they are objectionable per see but given that people might object it’s better to hedge a bit.

Also, I’ve have had personable, friendly interactions with Grady, Weiner, and Blake in the course of N/HEC and Congress/Conferences. I’ve had disagreements and agreements with each on a variety of topics. But I think the core strategy divide is clear and if you care about it (either way) you choice between Grady vs Blake or Weiner is equally clear. Any of the candidates will have to face the realities of the job including the political divide in UCU.

Update Codicil

I’ve updated the post in a few places in response to feedback. I think these are mostly nuances which don’t affect the main point. I welcome factual corrections always.

(Note that I may or may not see a post on various social media for a variety of reasons. So feel free to put a link to something as a comment or cut and paste a challenge from elsewhere. Thus far, most of the corrections have been anonymously given so feel free to continue that trend! For judgment disagreements I think it’d help if you presented a stable identity with a track record but it’s up to you.)

And of course you might disagree with my judgments and preferences. This is a personal view and a brian dump of my thinking. I did not do a detailed analysis of votes, speeches, posts, etc of each candidate. Nor do I think it’s incumbent on me to do so. I don’t think any personal endorsement I’ve seen rises to that standard. I’d be interested if there were one! So pointers welcome.

NEC 2022-2023 Record

This is an overview of what I did or tried to do as a UCU NEC UK wide elected HE rep.

[Argh! Life and UCU stuff ran away for me and the ballots are dropping 🙂 Gonna try to get it done this weekend (he writes on Fri 27th Jan). OTOH, there’s been 2 recent views…so 🙂 Did some updating today.]

[As of 30 Nov 2022, this is rather incomplete but I have to get my address in and want this live before then. So it will be updated over time. And it will be incomplete because that’s the nature of things. If you have a specific query, please ask and I’ll do my best to answer.]

Basic Stuff

To my recollection, I attended all HEC, NEC, conference, and congress meetings. I did not attend all Branch Delegate Meetings, but I did several (as an observer). This was not easy, as there were a lot and many were highly stressful with the clock ticking. I did do one partially while teaching which was…interesting!

I tried to be a good citizen as an N/HEC member. I believe I only had time called on my speaking twice. I aimed to use as little time as possible when speaking so as not to obstruct business. In general, I tried to help the flow wherever possible (e.g., formally seconding whenever needed).

I also called out, as required by a congress motion, problematic comments or behavior. I’ve been accused of policing, but personally I still think that things like extremely graphic transphobic rhetoric, accusing people of “betraying” members if they don’t vote a certain way, or insinuating that the officers would craft surveys for undemocratic ends are not civil. And we are called on to be civil. Either we adhere to the congress motion or we change it.

I think I abide by confidentiality and collective responsibility requirements, though it can be tricky. I’m not really fond of either. Some confidentiality is required to avoid legal issues with giving notice. Collective responsibility is tougher and…confusing. I’m not sure why we are so bound but I suspect it is a hangover when UCU was less divided. There are a lot more internal politics now and that makes some things a bit odd.

People complain about “factionalism” but…I never got that either. Some folks in in UCU Commons are or were anti-faction, but I pushed for us to accept the fact that we are a faction. Affinity groups are perfectly normal ways to organize. It’s not wrong to organize around shared values and strategic inclinations. In point of fact, the union membership is not all of one mind. Nor does it work by consensus. Pretending otherwise makes things more confusing.

However, I am enough of an institutionalist that I try to adhere to the rules and norms as best I understand them, and try to change the ones I don’t agree with. I’m not saying I’ll never go rogue (esp against a norm being honored only by some), but I prefer not to. Institutions are complex and their patterns exist for a multitude of reasons.

Motions & Speeches

I’m putting select ones on a separate pages with links here. It’s definitely not exhaustive, but I think it gives a clear understanding of what sort of N/HEC member I am and would be.

• Motion: Cost and Fund the Fighting
• Speech: On timing of 2021/22 strikes (iirc, it was whether we fix the dates or let HEC decide).

Votes

There was so much voting, often chaotic. So I didn’t keep a good record, alas. But I can give you a feel. (If UCU has the records and the bandwidth to share, I’d be happy for them to share all my votes.)

(Part of the problem is for the voting record to be meaningful we’d need all the motions and context. That’s not easy to assemble.)

To give you a feel for my voting pattern and indicate how I’d vote in the future (mostly about action strategy since that’s the hot topic!):

• I’ve voted for aggregated ballots consistently, and will probably do so in the future.
  (I do have some ideas for how to use local disputes to build toward national action, but that’s not going to be agreed to soon.)
• I’ve been of the “make haste, slowly” camp. I want longer ballots. I want action timed to meetings. I don’t think fast escalation is a good idea. I’m ok waiting to do things more effectively rather than rushing to get something done.
  For example, I tried to get a slower pattern of escalation for the current action, e.g., 1 day/week in Feb, 2 (as appropriate) in April, with extra days as appropriate for key meetings. Our disputes are mostly marathons and we have to take a long view.
• I’m cautious about random changing of structures. I’ve voted against suggestions that BDMs should have decision making force (as opposed to supplying information). BDMs are not formally constituted nor are their delegated selected by a rule or bound by anything.
• I’ve voted for care with the Fighting Fund as I’ve understood its state, which has inflected my action votes. I’m against surprises like the levy, so I’ve argued that if we are projected to take action that will exhaust the Fighting Fund that we pre-fund it.

I believe in effective action, but I also believe that there are limits to our power. To be more effective, we have to build our power and that requires long term organizing and taking wins when and where we can get them.

I’m a voting pragmatist. I will support the least bad option (from my perspective). I try not to vote futilely.

Transparency, Education, Mobilising

One thing many fresh faced NEC members think when they start is “I’ll help make UCU and how it works more accessible!” and then write some explainers. Only to find out that people explained things before 🙂 I am no exception! I did try to do a “TL;DR” format for things both structural and substantive.

There are also various proposals to publish N/HEC minutes in a timely fashion as well as publishing N/HEC voting records. I’m not against these things, but I’m less enthusiastic about them than I was before I became an NEC member. This is mostly because I don’t think they will have the effect that their proponents (including former me!) imagine. The primary mechanisms of accountability for NEC members are complaining to them and voting against them. NEC terms are 2 years so connecting votes to candidates is challenging (given, as I point out, that there are hundreds of votes!). Now published votes could allow third parties to assemble scores, or highlights, etc. that would allow candidates to say things like “I’ve got a 100% voting record for ZZZ”. I’m skeptical this would happen and it’s really hard to do well.

Too much information can inhibit transparency as much as too little [I write iin the middle of of a multi-thousand word description of my track record].

In the end, procedural fixes for political disputes tend not to work.

TL;DRs

The goal of these is to be short, reasonably neutral infosheet/explainers for various contentious topics. People seem to find them helpful. I find them an an interesting format.

• Why did the UCU Leadership “decide…”
  This traced some particular decisions through the UCU structures. I think it demonstrates that “transparency” isn’t easy or simply a matter of publishing votes or minutes. Complexity introduces obscurity!

Blog posts

Tweet threads

Local

As an HEC member, I’m ex officio on my local branch exec. I’m also ex officio on the regional…er…thing. I spent a lot of time working on the branch exec. I spent no time on the regional level. (Sorry, it was just one to many things. I’d like to get space to do that as I understand a lot of cross HE-FE stuff happens there.)

Factions and Other Oddities

I think factions and other affinity groups are generally a good thing. Indeed, when UCU Commons started up, a number of the people involved were still “faction shy”, but I am a faction enthusiast and have pushed for us to be comfortable with the label.

In principle, a faction is simply an organizing tool. It is a way for people to come together and provide mutual support toward various goals. I see complaints that UCU or HEC is a mess “because of factionalism” or members being turned off “because of factionalism”. But UCU’s membership as well as various levels of elected leadership is deeply divided on basic issues of strategy and tactics. Having factions which roughly but clearly represent various perspectives in the union is a good thing! Even candidates who don’t want to be part of any existing faction or to form their own can say things like “On strike strategy, I’m largely aligned with faction F.” That’s helpful information!

Also, I think the common independent line of “I can work with all factions being of none of them” is misleading at best. To a first approximation, everyone, in or out of any faction, can work will all the others. If we broadly agree on an issue, there’s little problem in working together! If we fundamentally disagree, then whether one is a member of a faction or not doesn’t matter at all. It’s the disagreements, not the factions, that drive the contentious politics.

And for the 5 millionth time, UCU Commons is not “the General Secretary’s faction” in the sense that many people insinuate. There’s no relationship formal or informal between us except some members of UCU Commons are personal friends and some others worked on her campaign. These form a pretty small minority of UCU Commons total and highly active membership. I think it is fair to say that I’m a fairly active member and you can see my influence all over UCU Commons activities and yet I’ve never met the GS nor had a personal exchange with her.

That being said, I quite like Jo Grady in the role. From what I’ve observed she’s done a very good job. She’s quite excellent in the media. Her management of UCU Staff seems to have been great. (She’s certainly made some excellent hires.) Her strategic vision seems quite good, even if I don’t agree with every last bit. Under her leadership, FE has seen a lot of success and revitalization. Finally, she won by a pretty substantial margin. It is not surprising that a lot of members agree with her broad perspective and thus a faction capturing that would emerge.

So, if by “GS’s faction” you mean “a faction which is broadly aligned with the GS’s vision and approaches” then fine. A little infelicitous, but fine. If by “GS’s faction” you mean “a faction controlled by or working closely hand in hand with or…whatever other problematic arrangement you’d care to name” then no.

Fun Deontic Logic Stuff

I’ve started a paper on translating various deontic (logics of obligation and permission) and related logics to description logics and OWL. I’ve been beating my head against some stuff all week and did a shared head beating with my great pal Uli Sattler today.

One fascinating thing about it all is the culture shock. Philosophical modal logic writing, mathy modal logic writing, and description logic writing are all enormously different. When you have mathy modal logician building on work by philosophical logician work…it tends to be more like the philosophical stuff (e.g., heavy on the axiomatics) which is just weird. Plus we don’t care about the same things, certainly not in the same way.

For example, logics with a sees to it that (stit) operator are usually defined with complex branching tree models. Except, when we look at the axioms for various stit they say “S5” (where the accessibility relation is an equivalence relation). But this makes everything directly accessible to everything else…not what I’d usually expect in a branching tree model! (E.g., I don’t expect the “next” relation between moments to be symmetric or reflexive or transitive! even “after” shouldn’t be symmetric or transitive!)

So there’s work to do! And a lot of learning.

And, apparently, I need to learn to press “publish”.

Reality check on posting schedule

Well that went poorly 🙂

It’s been a busy couple of months. Balloting for UCU and wrapping up stuff from the prior year.

But now it’s pretty much wrapped up and I’m feeling a bit less tense..amazingly!

My sabbatical year is 1.5 months over but…I’ve laid some groundwork (and I’ll have some extra time due to not having to grade MSc stuff at the beginning of next year). I’m feeling ok!

I’m gonna try to write more, more regularly. I want to average a submitted thing a month. I started a new paper on deontic logic this weekend and I have a couple things needing a bit of clean up.

I’m also interested in migrating from WordPress. I don’t like the UI at all esp if I go just a little bit beyond a brain dump.

Posting schedule

A few years back I made a resolution to post everyday (or nearly so, i.e., on average with a pretty flat distribution).

I did it but it was exhausting 🙂

So I’m going to aim for 3 times a week as the goal. If I can get it up to 5, yay. But I’m not going to push it.

Why to vote and to vote Yes

UCU is balloting on two disputes under the #UCURising umbrella: the pay and working conditions dispute (read our claim) and the USS dispute. The UCU FAQ is excellent and I commend it to you to get up to date.

Posting my ballot! #UCURising

Why vote?

As a UCU member, you should always vote but especially on dispute ballots. For elections, we routinely have turn out around 10%…so if you don’t like how disputes are run you should vote and campaign for Vice-President (every year with alternating FE and HE candidates), General Secretary (every 5 years), and the National Executive committee (every year). While guided by policy set by Conference and Congress, make no mistake that the democratically elected executive runs the disputes. (I speak as an NEC member.)

Due to very regressive anti-trade union law, we have onerous conditions on establishing sanctioned industrial action: We need minimum 50% turnout across the dispute unit, we need to reballot every 6 months, we must use a postal ballot (with harsh conditions on how things are framed and conduct…don’t share a photo of your ballot!), and we must use a sanctioned electioneer, of which there is only Civica.

UCU is a democratic organisation and the decision whether to allow for industrial action is a referendum moment. If you don’t vote, that counts against the threshold. It’s more than a “No” vote…it’s effectively a vote to disenfranchise your fellow members.

My personal guess is that most non-votes are due to disengagement of various forms. If you are nervous about voting, it’s really quite safe and anonymous. If agree with the action but think you aren’t personal in a position to take action so don’t feel entitled to vote, it’s better for you to vote No. Not voting hurts us much more than you voting No.

Why vote Yes?

The main reason is that the employers are not negotiating in good faith and with any regard to our legitimate interests.

It’s complicated as the umbrella organizations (UUK and UCEA) are the key problem. However, they are member organizations…so our VCs can’t escape responsibility here.

Given that our negotiating partners aren’t engaged in friendly, constructive negotiations, either we try to up our leverage or we get treated badly. Rather badly!

Especially given the hostility of the government, we have few avenues to increase our leverage than threat of taking and actually taking industrial action. There are others! I ran for (and sadly got elected to) my universiity’s senate in hopes to influence its behavior. But action and threat of action remains central.

Voting yes potentially gives us leverage.

Why vote Yes when past action hasn’t worked?

Archimedes opined that with a long enough lever and the right fulcrum he could move the world. With enough leverage we can move the employers. But just as practically speaking, Archimedes can’t get a long enough (or stiff enough or…) lever, we may not be able to get enough leverage. Losing is always possible! Losing this round is always possible.

But if we don’t try we’ll definitely lose. Voting gives us leverage and thus a chance at winning in some way to some degree.

And past action has worked. The fact that USS has a defined benefit aspect at all is the result of our action. We’ve improved pay rises and won other important things both locally and nationally. Is it enough? I don’t think so and I think most people agree with me.

But this sort of work is always ongoing. Unless and until universities radically change their governance, ongoing, often furiously frustrating efforts will be required.

With aggregation and a longish ballot window, we have a real chance at making a big threat. Every university would face action.

As tired as we may be, I don’t think universities have strong appetite for strikes again. It’s a PITA. Plus, we’ve seen various unravellings. UUK and UCEA haven’t been as good at the propaganda game as they need to be to keep confidence of unis. Breaking UCU surely is part of the game here and if we demonstrate we are not broken, I think that will have an effect.

Vote. Vote yes. Help GTOV. If we go in with a 60%-70% turnout, that is real leverage.

Let’s get there and show them what we can do.

SQLite’s JSON support

I finally have a reason to poke at SQLite’s JSON support. It looses implements a set of functions common to various other SQL databases. But…the docs are rough for me. In particular, there are few examples at the end of how to use a couple of functions in the context of a query, but the rest are stand alone. Moreover, I don’t get the intent of a lot of these, like when do I use the -> or --> operators over json_extract?

Moreover, the implementation of the path language only allows explicit paths without wildcards. One of the things I’m wrestling with is that the JSON I’m using often has lists to hold sets of records at nested positions. I kinda want them to “explode” into individual results, but that’s not how it works.

(I always have trouble with composing SQL queries so this may just be a “me” thing.)

It’d be nice to have a good tutorial which helped inculcate a good mindset for these functions.

I hope I don’t end up writing one!

A new ballot

Today, UCU starts a new round of balloting on USS dispute and the pay and working conditions dispute. The GTVO campaign has the slogan UCU Rising and has a pretty impressive lead in campaign over the summer.

We’ve been fighting these disputes for a looooong time (I’m working on a timeline) and I know there are people who are wondering if anything will be different this time around. If you’ve encountered me at all, you know that I’ve not been a fan of our action strategy since the pre-pandemic strikes (indeed, the levy needed to deal with that launched me into this much higher level of activism!).

Furthermore, I keep pointing out that the civil disobedience literature suggests that 50% of nonviolent campaigns fail (vs. 75% of violent ones!). We are working against a hostile Government as well as quasi governmental bodies (UUK and UCEA). It’s not just one university, but all of them. These are tough tough opponents! UUK and especially UCEA have gone in on trying to break us. They aren’t just fighting these disputes but fighting us.

HOWEVER!

There is reason for optimism as well as trepidation.

The ballot this time is on an aggregated basis. That means, in order to make the 50% turnout threshold, we need to make it across all branches. The upside is that if we make it (and the YES vote wins), all branches can take action. The downside is that if we don’t make it, no action until we can muster another ballot.

Thus, GTVO is more important than ever. The nice thing is that your vote matters even if your branch routinely doesn’t make threshold. Your vote matters!

We have a longer ballot window that we’ve recently had and and decent lead in. I think we can do it. The bigger the turnout the better. Indeed, we might get some negotiating movement just on the strength of the turnout.

Leverage from industrial action is roughly a very non-linear function of 1) coverage, 2) intensity, and 3) time. Given that we are in dispute with two organizations of universities, we need to move at least a strong majority of the member univerisities of those universities. If enough unis are “safe” from industrial action because their associated branches didn’t make thresholds, then it’s much easier to for the organisation to wait us out. Conversely, if all branches can take action, no uni is safe. That changes their calculus.

By “intensity” I primarily mean the effect of action on a uni which is roughly a function of the number of people taking action and the kind of action. A massive turnout for the ballot (e.g., 60-70%) suggests more intense action.

We have a chance to significantly increase two of those inputs to leverage. That doesn’t mean it’ll be over, but we’ll be starting from a stronger position.

Furthermore, the USS situation has utterly unraveled with the goofy deficit turning into a surplus by…the rebound in the markets. We’ve gone from 95% of UUK members voting for the cuts to 32% calling for the cuts to be reversed with no action. USS is ripe for the picking.

The the pay and working conditions situation is more mixed. It’s inherently more complex. It involves more universities. And the energy price crisis will be a much more credible rationale for unis to cry poverty.

On the other hand, having coverage will change our situation. That plus the general union activity in response to the cost of living crises has us swimming with a wave rather that being isolated. Everyone is feeling inflation and that makes demands to improve pay more widely relatable and salient. There has been other, local movement, including the amazing de-casualisation win at the Open University.

I know UCU members who have tuned out or are demoralized. It’s an incredibly tough time.

But this is worth a shot. Aggregation is a fundamentally different framework which will open up new strategies. So vote. Vote no if you must, but vote. I recommend voting yes. I can’t promise victory, but I think we have a better shot than we’ve had in years.

Consider Heterogenity

Principle 1 of Joyce Treblicot’s Dyke Methods is “I speak only for myself”.

I think about this principle all the time and often try to adhere to it. When I give advice to students, I try to tie it back to my own perspective rather than leaving it as a rule, e.g., “I found this to be helpful” or “I know people who have found this helpful, but it may or may not be so for you.”

Similarly, when talking UCU stuff, I try to avoid “members want” or “members think” in favor of “some members I’ve talked with have said” or “I’ve seen members say” or “in my experience, some people have…”

Treblicot says that her principles largely from her anger at being controlled and a desire not to control other wimmin. I obviously don’t have the same experience of attempts to be controlled as she did but I share an overlapping value of not wanting to control others. I don’t like people getting my views and experiences wrong so I don’t want to get their’s wrong.

Even when it wouldn’t directly affect others, it helps me to keep check on my fallibility and to keep me from jumping from inadequate data. (I also often think of the evidence particles in Láadan. I think they help with this as well.)

The slogan “Let people enjoy things” is also helpful. People are different than me. Things I like they may dislike and the reverse. Many things just aren’t for me. I don’t have to engage people for who those things are for especially not negatively. I can be glad that they are for someone. I can be glad that other people got something for them.

Sabbatical Year Number 2!

It’s that time again!

I’m grateful to my generous colleagues for approving my sabbatical year.

I’m declaring today the start day! My plans are rather inchoate at the moment so This Is Not My Plan Post.

However, I do have the resolution to blog again. So here we go!