What the USS strike of 2018 tells us about the union today
Introduction
When Higher Education becomes a market, every Vice Chancellor and Senior Management Team see every other university as their competition. When they invest in campuses speculatively, and risk fortunes won and lost in the Great University Gamble, the sector enters a period of turmoil.
In the late summer of 2017, once the ink was barely dry on the Higher Education and Research Act, this war-of-all-against-all began to be felt as pressure on the old pre-92 universities’ pension scheme, USS, which reported an alarming valuation which claimed the scheme was unsustainable in its current form.
In response, Universities UK demanded all future pensions to be calculated as ‘Defined Contribution’ (DC), or more accurately, Undefined Benefit. You would pay in a defined amount on a regular basis, and the pension scheme would pay out whatever scheme managers decided they could afford to pay back.
The USS scheme was under pressure for one simple reason: it was a private sector Defined Benefit (DB) scheme set up under rules which said that every university bore the pension risk for everyone else. It was a ‘last man standing’ arrangement.
Risk was thus ‘mutualised’ – shared – between employers. This meant that every pre-92 university would in theory have to contribute to pay the pensioners of any university that went bankrupt – which was now permitted. But the whole market system was pulling in the opposite direction towards instability and distrust between employers.
To her credit, in September 2017, UCU General Secretary Sally Hunt recognised the necessity to organise hard for strike action. She told members of the HEC that strikes were necessary. She told the right-wing ‘IBL’ members (who tended to dominate USS discussions up to that point) to stop stalling, and united with the UCU Left members on the HEC to make sure that branches would be balloted for strike action.
One complication was that this was the first ‘national’ ballot under the new Trade Union Act 2016 rules that required 50% turnout, so ballots would have to be conducted ‘disaggregated’ branch-by-branch rather than risk the whole ballot going down. This meant there were some UCU branches which failed to get the required turnout. But when the results were announced in January 2018 most had crossed the line, and prepared to strike.
Developing the argument
In my branch, University College London (UCL), we rehearsed the arguments in meeting after meeting with members. Working with colleagues, I drew on the work of UCU’s excellent actuarial advisors, who had pointed out that provided the sector retained roughly the same number of staff paying into the pension as currently the scheme would just run and run. There was no ‘deficit’. We wrote a leaflet which was much copied around the sector.
As UCU branch president at the time, I debated with the Chief Negotiator for UUK (who happened to be UCL’s Finance Director) in a university Town Hall meeting. He lost the argument – a vote in the meeting called from the floor recorded just one vote in favour of the management position – in a room with many senior managers! Our branch secretary, Tony, then humiliated him in a rematch!
Making the case for the alternative
In the Alternative White Paper, we had not even thought about USS. So I wrote a piece called Made in Westminster for the HE Convention blog, published in February 2018 as we were preparing to strike, which explained how Government policy had created the valuation crisis.
Among other things, I pointed to a number of obvious fallacies in the way that risk of default in the USS scheme was estimated. One university’s bankruptcy would be another’s gain. Risks even out across many actors. This is statistics 101.
But the main point was that USS could be rescued, ‘Defined Contribution’ was not inevitable, and staff were right to fight.
If the USS crisis was the result of Government HE policy, as I argued, then the Government of the day should be pressured to step up as lender of last resort. Traditional Conservative rhetoric had it that you owned the consequences of your decisions. What could be more moral – or logical? The Blair government had renationalised Railtrack in 2002, recognising that privatisation had its limits.
A group calling itself ‘USS Briefs’ put out think-pieces that further widened the debate.
These kinds of arguments were not academic or abstract. They had practical consequences. If you are to take hard-hitting strike action – and when UCU reps agreed to calling 14 days of strikes, every member held their breaths! – you need to impart a strategy, a clear vision that the ‘crisis’ you are disputing can be averted.
Lessons for today
The rest, as they say, is history. There are many lessons, including don’t believe those who say striking doesn’t achieve anything!
But to me, the main lesson was that with the right arguments it was possible to create a massive mobilisation of union members onto picket lines, and then to sustain the dispute you needed open democratic organising to give every participant a say.
If I compare photographs of picket lines in 2017 and 2018, they are radically different. For the first time in our union’s history, we saw a flood of new members joining the union to go on strike. Our experience was common. All of the pre-92 universities who struck over pensions in 2018 saw their membership increase by about 50%.
At UCL, we held daily strike committee meetings open to all strikers which took reports from picket lines, took reports from national negotiators (when they could come), and discussed initiatives. So when we heard that UUK had agreed to negotiate on the third strike day, we took 100 members to where they were meeting, while maintaining pickets.
Those who argued that strikes could not change the outcome of negotiations were (of course) proved wrong by events. The strike caused a huge political crisis for Universities UK, forcing them to reverse their imposed Defined Contribution change – something that more conservative sections of the union thought impossible.
Why the employers lost
It is important to understand why the employers lost.
First, they lost the argument about the inevitability of pension cuts. They lost political authority to ‘speak for the sector’. They lost control inside the university, and senior managers began to speak out. The political work preparing the ground ahead of time now came to fruition. UUK belligerence was seen as self-destructive.
Second, the longer the strikes went on, the clearer it became that the union (and the staff) were not going to give in.
At UCL it played out like this. When strikes began at UCL, the Senior Management Team imagined that ‘it was just Tony and Sean and a few loyalists’ who would be on the picket lines. Fourteen days? Unthinkable! They’ll fold, so wait them out.
But after two days of pickets over 300+, with every entrance covered, by the weekend, UCL management began to realise this was not like previous strikes.
Mass participation changed the picture. The same pattern was repeated in university after university. UUK was ‘ratioed’ on Twitter over their refusal to negotiate, and over the weekend they were forced to concede they would.
The strikes had a political and economic impact. As we have seen, the strikes revealed how politically isolated the employers were. Then the Chinese Government started to make statements about potential decline in student applications to the UK, threatening future income.
Lessons in democracy
From that point on, the issue became how far could UCU push home its advantage. Picket lines exploded into anger when members heard about a possible ‘deal’ which would slash the benefits that members received. At UCL, thanks to negotiators, we had wind of this deal the day before, so our strike committee called a lobby at the union’s Carlow Street HQ of the UCU branch delegate meeting arranged for the next day.
We publicised the lobby across London, and some 300 pickets attended the next day, demanding no sell-out, and to ‘revise and resubmit’ the offer. Inside the meeting, delegates reported how their branches were contacting them after emergency meetings on their picket lines. Nobody wanted the deal.
After the delegates’ meeting, the union’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) met. Sally Hunt, visibly shaken by the anger of members, told the meeting she was recommending UCU reject the employer’s offer. She did not even put it to the vote.
There were still 200 picketers or so outside the Carlow Street offices when I and other left HEC members came down to tell them that we had won the argument, the deal was ‘off’, and the strikes were continuing.
The defeat of the first ‘deal’ caused a rethink from Sally Hunt and officials. It was obvious that UCU members would not accept a different kind of cut based on the same specious reasons justifying the 100% ‘Defined Contribution’ attack. Members believed our actuaries, and did not believe USS officials or UUK mouthpieces. Why would we suffer a pension cut when there was no deficit?
The next deal pushed by Sally Hunt involved a ‘Joint Expert Panel’ (JEP) that would meet to discuss how the scheme might be safeguarded. Such a JEP would take months to set up, so further strikes would need to be postponed while we awaited the outcome.
This time the branch delegate meeting was not sure. There was not a clear concrete outcome. Could we trust the JEP? What safeguards would we have? On the other hand, UUK was forced to repeal its imposition of Defined Contribution, and no changes would be quickly made in the scheme.
HEC narrowly voted (by one vote) to put this offer to members, but expressly without a recommendation for or against. Sally Hunt then used her position as General Secretary to promote it – with three messages plus a preamble to the ballot paper, all advocating for the deal. Only one contrary message was (reluctantly) put out to members. Despite UCU branch meetings around the UK mainly calling on members to reject, the deal was sold to members. (This led to a flurry of votes of No Confidence, a crisis at the Congress in May and Sally Hunt’s ultimate exit.)
The vote was 2:1 in favour of the offer, which ended the dispute at that time.
The strike revealed an essential truth about trade unionism. The biggest difference in interests in the union is between the ordinary membership (the ‘rank and file’) and trade union officials employed by the union to negotiate on their behalf. As anyone who has ever negotiated on behalf of members knows, the pressure is always to ‘do a deal’. If you are not personally invested in the outcome, and if you are worried about the union’s funds being spent on a prolonged strike, you feel under pressure to find an ‘exit strategy’. By contrast, members were fighting for their futures.
The left, the right, and accountability
The fact that union officials and members have different interests does not mean other differences do not matter. Candidates of the left orient themselves on taking on the employers, defending members and building the confidence of ordinary members to take industrial action. Those of the right orient themselves on the union machinery, seeing their role as trying to do a deal.
The term ‘left’ and ‘right’ in a trade union context is not the same as left-wing and right-wing politics more generally in society. Many of the trade union ‘right’ can sound progressive and radical, sometimes even more radical, than those on the left. The real distinction concerns how hard they are prepared to fight, and whether they believe themselves to be accountable to active members.
In some cases, these two political positions partially reflect a change in culture inside the universities (comparable experiences are found in other workplaces). Thirty years ago, when I first joined UCL, I was reliably informed it was possible for a well-connected union rep to do a deal with the Dean to sort out a problem for a member. Now it often requires a tough-minded well-briefed rep to be prepared to support them through a grievance in the teeth of managers and HR staff hired to create obstacles.
But when an employer goes all out to make redundancies (or a group of employers seek to smash up the pension scheme), a position that starts by seeking to negotiate has already conceded half the ground!
So ideas matter.
But when the chips are down, it is not clever negotiators who win disputes. Take it from me: 99% of the argument is won outside the room. A perspective that focuses on independent organising among ordinary members seems to me to be the best way to maximise the chances of winning and to prevent future sell-outs.
Conclusions
That is why I think the ultimate lesson of the USS dispute of 2018 is that ordinary members mobilised in collective industrial action and organised in strike committees have the capacity to stop any sell-out (however well-meaning) from ‘the leadership’. The job of leaders is not to substitute for members’ self-activity but to encourage it.
It is essential that elected negotiators are not left to their own devices! They must be continually kept accountable to members. Industrial action, strikes and MABs must be run democratically by strike committees, organised at branch level, and those tasked to negotiate must see themselves as accountable to them.
The two MAB campaigns of 2022 and 2023 led to a different outcome because, whereas in both rank and file organisation kept the MAB going, in 2022 locally-run MAB committees and branch meetings heard from (local) negotiators and could decide when to call a halt to the action as a result of negotiations. But in 2023, we had local organisation of the MAB, without a mechanism to hold the HEC and negotiators accountable to the members who were taking the action.
Nonetheless, the 2018 USS dispute was a highpoint for the union, and the lessons are just as pertinent today. In fact, since the Miner’s Strike of 1984, there have been few occasions where the leadership of a UK trade union has been so remarkably overturned by the actions of rank and file members while on strike. Sally Hunt’s sell-out ultimately led to her political demise.
A postscript
One final comment is in order. Don’t believe anyone who tells you that strike action makes no difference!
If the 2018 strike had not forced UUK to abandon its plan to impose 100% DC, it would have been Game Over. Every USS member has benefited enormously from UCU members’ decisive strike action that year.
- The Defined Benefit part of the scheme (i.e. the actual pension) would have been closed.
- USS would have to run it on a closing-down basis (i.e., as the valuation method assumed). This would have generated further estimated costs because the scheme would start drawing down its capital without new contributions to rely upon.
- The cost of providing benefits would increase to both employees and employers, with more members likely to opt out of the new risky Defined Contribution scheme.
- And over time, fewer members would have a stake in Defined Benefit.
Had UUK succeeded in imposing 100% DC on future accrual, it would have represented a major and almost certainly irreversible defeat for members of the scheme. No private sector employer that managed to close its DB scheme has seen a campaign to reverse it get off the ground, never mind prove successful.
The USS strikes that followed allowed UCU negotiators to hold the employers to a political position of defending Defined Benefit, and, when the long-term gilt rates recovered, agreeing improved benefits and reduced contributions.
This is worth thinking about in a context where ‘DC-lite’ conditional indexation proposals are beginning to circulate.
