Unions

About unions in academia

What is a union?

In brief, a union is a group of people looking after each other’s interests. Particularly, they help each other in a work environment regarding the unbalanced hierarchical powers where the employees alone have less power than the employer but together (e.g. in a union!) they can balance this dynamic or even sometimes reverse it! In practice, unions act across two different scales: helping the individual workers and helping the workers in the trade or the industry at a global level.

Global level (industrial actions)

At a global level, for example, when the union raises a concern (e.g. retirement rates, salary re-evaluations, better working conditions), the union would start by engaging negotiations with the employer to try to fix these concerns. If the employer doesn’t follow up on the concerns and the negotiations, then the union can start industrial action.This is decided among the members of the union by voting on the action or not. Under UK law, in order for a strike ballot to be successful, more than 50% of union members must vote and a majority of voting members must vote in favour of the action. If successful, the union then gives 2 weeks notice to the employer and runs the action with their members. As long as this process has been completed, then the industrial action is legal and any staff member can join the action, even if not a union member.

These industrial actions can vary in intensity but always involve not doing a part or the entirety of the role the workers were hired to do. For example, the union can call for a strike (not doing any job for a set duration) or they can do some actions short of a strike (e.g. doing the minimum that was written in a contract, or not doing a specific part like marking boycott). Employers will withhold pay for non-fulfillment of contract. If the contract is only partially fulfilled, the employer may still withhold all pay, although this is seen as an aggressive decision. This then hopefully leads to a renegotiation with the employer.

The current big struggles the academic unions are involved at a national level are pay rise, fighting against casualisation in academia (e.g. demanding 2 years minimum contracts and regularising teaching assistant work), equality at work (e.g. salary gap for gender or racial ethnicity) and workload.

Individual level (protecting individual workers rights)

At the global level, the union is there to protect individual workers if they feel their rights have been violated or if the employer is not respecting their contract. This involves the worker contacting their union if they feel they have been wronged and the union can then take action directly with the employer (e.g. to make them respect their contract) or escalate it at a legal level if required. Unions can provide representatives to be present at any meetings staff have with HR that are part of a dispute. Initially, this would just be the local union rep but if necessary the union can provide representatives with specific training on employment law etc.

Legally the university is not supposed to know which one of their workers is part of a union and is not allowed to “punish” members for any of their actions (either industrial actions or protecting their individual rights). However, in practice it can be hard to tell whether the university respects that. For regular union members it is very often the case that the university respects their union rights but it can be more ambiguous (or straight wrong) for members more involved in the union who can suffer indirect consequences from their actions with and for the union (e.g. being passed over for promotion, being first in line for redundancy).

Aside from these two main activities, unions also provide resources for their members, for example training sessions on transferable skills (e.g. job interviews) or equality and diversity.

When to join a union?

Joining a union can be beneficial at any career stage, however, the union’s main focus is to protect workers (i.e. people with a contract with the university). Depending on the union, workers at different career stages can have different advantages. For example, for UCU, postgrad students who are not also university employees (i.e. not GTAs) can have free membership and access to all the training provided by the union (but they cannot vote on industrial actions unless they are also workers - GTAs). Postdocs can have varying levels of contribution (depending on their income) and get to participate in voting etc. This can be especially useful for knowing your rights and getting them protected as a precarious worker. For staff, the rates vary with income and they get to fully participate in the union’s decisions.

Which Union to join?

At the university, there are three recognised unions more or less targeting different types of jobs. For example UCU is targeted for most academic staff (research, teaching and senior professional services staff - more info here). If you have any questions about UCU at Sheffield and in Biosciences, you can contact Ian Sudbery, our local representative! Unite (more info here) which represents technical staff and Unison (more info here) which represents managers, administrative, clerical and less senior professional services staff. Anyone can join any (or all!) of the unions. Finally, you might want to consider internal politics as well as a reason to choose one union over another one!

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