Sally Hunt has been an unmitigated disaster as General Secretary of the University and College Union (UCU). The latest industrial dispute has only exposed her incompetence and lack of basic democratic instincts. For the good of the union, she should step down immediately. If she will not go willingly, branches need to pass votes of no confidence and use a special sector conference to demand her resignation.
To be clear, this is not a “sour grapes” post about the USS ballot result. I started writing this days before the ballot closed. I do not blame the result entirely on Hunt — there are many reasons people voted “yes” and, while I disagree with their reasoning, as a democrat, I respect their choice and the outcome. This post is about the manipulative and, above all, ineffective way that Sally Hunt leads UCU. Regardless of how you voted, the overwhelming evidence of her unfitness for office should lead you to support her removal.
Hunt’s Atrocious Record
Let’s review the evidence prior to the current pensions dispute.
The 2006 pay dispute was Hunt’s first major test — back when she was joint GS of the Association of University Teachers and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education, which merged to form UCU. This was in response to a long-term decline in academic salaries — about 40% over 20 years — and was the first time academics had taken industrial action. Employers initially offered 12.6% over three years, but UCU rejected this, demanding 23%. Employers subsequently increased their offer to 13.1%. UCU successfully ballotted for industrial action and a total assessment boycott was declared in March. In early June, Hunt announced a deal with employers: 10.37% over two years and 2.5% in the third year, amounting to… 13.13%. (This subsequently worked out at 15% but only because the first year’s increase was pegged to inflation and this was unexpectedly high.) Hunt called off the industrial action without even consulting members, putting the deal to ballot without any alternative. Disoriented and demoralised, 71% of members reluctantly endorsed the deal. Months of industrial action were totally squandered. The dispute was lost, to the outrage of many members, some of whom called for Hunt’s resignation. The pay increase was barely higher than inflation, did not recoup previous losses, and ended in 2009.
The post-2009 pay rounds were another unmitigated disaster. A pay offer of 0.3% in 2009 initiated a decade of wage suppression and real-terms pay cuts amounting to 15–20%. Hunt had no strategy to deal with these losses. There was not even any industrial action over pay until 2013, when real-terms pay had already fallen 13%. Reflecting Hunt’s total lack of strategic nous, this comprised a few partial and full-day strikes, lacking any real efficacy. A Higher Education conference, called to take charge of the dispute and provide some vision, laid down guidelines that Hunt simply ignored; the action was not escalated into sustained strikes or a marking boycott. By summer 2014, members were left confused and demoralised, and employers made a “final offer” of 3% over two years, including a previously-rejected 1% for 2012/13. This was below inflation, again. And, again, Hunt presented members with no alternative in the e-ballot, bouncing members into accepting this shoddy deal by 84%.
Attacks on pensions were Hunt’s next test. In 2011, a so-called “deficit” was identified in USS, leading employers to demand that the final salary scheme be closed, new entrants be shunted onto an inferior “career average” scheme, and employee contributions went up. UCU members were ballotted for industrial action — but again the union folded after some pretty minor tweaks, leaving new entrants substantially worse off than school teachers in the Teachers’ Pension Scheme (TPS). Predictions that union weakness would only encourage the employers to come back for more were borne out in 2015, when another “deficit” was discovered and proposals mooted to close down the final salary scheme altogether. The members again voted for industrial action, following which Hunt threw the union directly into a marking boycott. This was not part of any strategy. UCU had not made any proposals for USS, nor did Hunt convene any conference to agree a position or strategy. Members were left dangerously exposed to employers withholding 25–100% of pay.
Then, without consulting anyone, Hunt capitulated on final salary, proposing a slightly better “career average” scheme than the employers were offering, but one still inferior to TPS. This prompted outrage and demands for a special sector conference to reassert democratic control over the union. However, UCU’s Higher Education Committee, dominated by Hunt’s Independent Broad Left faction, suspended the industrial action at employers’ request. Bizarrely, Hunt then asked UCU members to sign a petition to convey to vice-chancellors their “strength of feeling” over USS — as if industrial action is not a way to convey “strength of feeling”. Those of us serving in branches at that time (like me) detected a real gulf between Hunt and the members, with nearly half taking a “no detriment” position and only a quarter supporting the need for USS “reform”. However, too few branches demanded a special sector conference. The HEC put a “revised offer” to members, offering no real improvement on UUK’s opening gambit. Again, Hunt offered no alternative to members in the e-ballot, leaving them confused and demoralised. 67% of members opted to accept the deal, since continuing the fight seemed not to be an option.
On Hunt’s watch, precarity has also become a watchword of British academia, with 53% of staff now on insecure contracts. Nationally, UCU has done little to arrest this alarming rise, leaving it to anti-casualisation activists in branches to do the heavy lifting.
Unsurprisingly, given her inability to defend our basic terms and conditions, Hunt has shown herself unable to contest the worsening policy environment that is destroying British higher education and further degrading our working lives. UCU has done virtually nothing to address the Research Excellence Framework, the Teaching Excellence Framework, and most recently the proposed Knowledge Exchange Framework. Fees have tripled twice on her watch, and Hunt’s idea of resistance was to address a march of students and staff and tell them to bounce up and down. UCU’s response to the disastrous Higher Education and Research Bill (now Act) — which dramatically accelerated marketisation — was actively obstructionist to the academics fighting it. When the Higher Education Convention, which led the fight against the Bill, asked UCU to distribute our campaign materials to members, so we could whip up widespread opposition to the bill among parents, teachers, local councils, legislators, local trade unions and employers’ associations. UCU refused, saying they had their own campaign materials. This comprised a template letter to write to MPs.
Unsurprisingly, Hunt’s disastrous “leadership” caused a steep decline in UCU membership, from about 120,000 in 2006, when UCU was formed, to under 107,000 by 2015.
Groundhog Days: The Current Dispute
Anyone can be forgiven a feeling of deja vu when reading the foregoing. That is because there is a clear pattern to Hunt’s behaviour that has been repeated, like a moronic template, in the 2018 pensions dispute.
Step 1: mobilising the stage army. In January 2018, members were ballotted for industrial action, managing (mostly) to surmount new restrictions on strike ballots requiring a 50% turnout. (Ironically this restriction may have energised activists to ensure a higher turnout. But the limit could also be used by conservatives, like Mike Otsuka, who advised LSE colleagues opposed to strike action not to vote —suppressing the turnout below 50% and allowing a minority to win.) To everyone’s surprise, the leadership then announced a 14-day strike period. Members were nervous but impressed — finally, a tough line from UCU! But they also worried about the lack of strategy. What were we fighting for, exactly? What would we be willing to accept? Hunt’s lack of strategy at the outset of industrial disputes has been deliberate, since the 2006 fiasco. If she states an opening position and fails to meet it, she can be called an outright failure. If she doesn’t, she can take a crap deal and sell it as a “win”.
Step 2: cuting a crappy deal. True to form, Hunt emerged from a few days of talks with employers with a cruddy offer, involving a third cut in our pensions, summoning the HEC to meet the very next day, clearly hoping to ram the deal through like last time. The reaction from members — who had endured days on picket lines in blizzard conditions — was apopleptic. Many naive liberals who do not understand the union’s internal politics thought this was some kind of clever ploy on Hunt’s part, trying to calm down those of us outraged by the deal with soothing pleas for “unity”. This was soon revealed as nonsense as Hunt defended the “good deal” on the steps of UCU HQ when confronted by large crowds, and subsequently said in an email that the deal was “as far as employers were prepared to go”.
On previous form, the deal would have gone through — but this failed to reckon with the nature of the 2018 action. Most basically, the HEC met on a strike day: members were not working, many were already mobilised, available and riled up, and it was easy for branches to divert pickets to Carlow Street to fight their own union bosses. There was a massive backlash from ordinary members, too, swamping HEC members’ inboxes. But beyond this, the strike had also been transformative for many. For reasons I still do not fully understand, the 2018 pensions dispute has been the straw that broke the camel’s back. Dozens of previously timid academics have written articulately and movingly about how participating in the action had affected them, psychologically and politically. People’s anger about so many things — pensions, yes, but also pay, casualisation, precarity, sex and ethnic disparities, marketisation, VC pay and the atrocious mismanagement of our universities — had mobilised them in an unprecedented way. They were not willing to settle for some shoddy deal. Opposition on social media surged around the #NoCapitulation hashtag. Facing a massive backlash, Hunt was forced to retreat, withdrawing her proposal from the HEC.
Late on Friday 23 March, Hunt tried again, this time succeeding in manipulating the situation towards de-escalation. Following secret talks with UUK’s Alistair Jarvis, she sent what is best understood as a UUK press release to the UCU membership, with UCU’s elected negotiators having no input and being shown the document only one hour previously. Again, Hunt’s communications followed her standard MO: this was the best we could get, etc. As I’ve discussed at length, this document had many crucial ambiguities and was unfit to be sent to members. Nonetheless, Hunt summoned branch reps to Carlow St on Wednesday, providing just two working days for consultations. Crucially, these were not strike days. The residual mobilisation was such that around half of UCU branches were nonetheless able to hold meetings and pass motions, but there was no rally outside HQ this time. In the branch reps’ meeting, roughly 75% of branches present expressed a demand for further clarifications and reassurances (25%) or more thoroughgoing revisions/ guarantees (50%), with only 25% backing an immediate members’ consultation. Hunt subsequently lied to the membership about this, claiming that a majority of branches wanted a ballot. She was assisted in this by unelected national official Matt Waddup, who bizarrely announced a tally of branches’ positions at the meeting before most reps had even spoken. HEC then voted narrowly, 10–8, to put the matter to ballot.
Step 3: bouncing the members. Having circumvented the branch reps, Hunt moved to bounce the membership into accepting her deal, using a tried and tested method: promote her position as the only possible way forward, offering either no alternative or one that is depicted as ludicrous and inviting disaster. The method of an e-ballot also assists Hunt’s conservative agenda, since it prompts members to make a decision in isolation, without discussing the issue collectively with colleagues to improve one’s understanding and gauge the reactions of others. The timing was particularly problematic: the Easter Vacation had just begun, with many staff away from workplaces to pursue research, go to conferences, or take holidays and care for children, rendering it very difficult to engage in democratic deliberation. E-ballots on ending strike action also give equal weight to members who did not take industrial action or even opposed it from the outset. Indeed, ultimately this ballot had a higher turnout than the original strike ballot. All of this stacked the decks in favour of acceptance.
However, Hunt made sure of this by bombarding the membership with highly skewed propaganda supporting her line and distorting reality. Hunt’s initial 1,100 word email opening the ballot on 4 April was incredibly misleading, as USS Briefs have pointed out. She continued to lie about the position of branches, painting those who opposed an immediate ballot as a minority (untrue) who all demanded a “no detriment” guarantee (also untrue). This was a cynical attempt to minimise the “no” vote by equating “no” with the hardest line possible, which had actually been expressed by only a minority of branches; those wanting further assurances and clarifications were being bounced into the “yes” camp.
Not content with this misleading nonsense, she sent out an additional four emails during the ballot period: one on April 6 (debunked here), a second on April 11 (debunked here), a third on April 12, and a final one-line reminder to vote on April 13. The third email — sent long after post members will have voted — was the only communication to contain any alternative perspective to Hunt’s own, in the form of a shoddy cut-and-paste from a UCU Left document suggesting “revise and resubmit” changes to UUK’s offer. This was written for those closely engaged in the dispute, providing no argumentation or context at all — unlike Hunt’s lengthy propaganda, and therefore failing to address the request from an HEC member which ostensibly prompted her email. Moreover, scandalously, the last two emails were sent only to members who hadn’t yet voted. This suggests that UCU HQ was monitoring the ballot in real time; at the very least, they knew who had not voted and could target them directly. This raises the possibility that the proportion of votes was also being monitored. Either way, Hunt had clearly sought to manipulate the ballot by repeatedly emailing members with her one-sided propaganda. Even the link to vote in her last two emails took readers through to her initial 1,100 word message before they could vote. And we know from exercises like the National Student Survey what the constant reminders are for — to encourage the disengaged to participate in order to shape the result. Under these circumstances, the overall vote to accept the deal is not surprising, even if it is not, as noted earlier, entirely attributable to Hunt.
The strikes have now been suspended, converting a political struggle into a technical one, in a format stacked against us. The very strong risk now is that UCU and UUK will constitute a Joint Expert Panel to address the USS valuation that is so constrained by existing actuarial methods and regulation that it will develop a deal very similar to the one rejected under #NoCapitulation — as show in this visual modelling of the decision, based on various expert commentaries.
This risk is compounded by the fact that Hunt is dominating talks with UUK on the JEP, excluding our elected negotiators.
Based on past form, Hunt will present this outcome — likely to be announced around Christmas — as a fait accompli: since we already agreed to the JEP, we cannot reject its outcome, and this is the best we can get. She will put the final deal to members, using the same biased methods as always, offering no alternative, bouncing members into accepting a deal that —as in the 2006 pay and the 2015 pensions fiascos — is almost identical to one that we rejected and went on strike to oppose.
What Is To Be Done?
Sally Hunt is an embarrassment to the labour movement. She is a poundshop Machiavellian who embodies the worst traditions of conservative, bureaucratic trade union leaders. She has led UCU from one disastrous defeat to another. She has no respect for basic democratic principles. She constantly seeks to circumvent the most active and engaged layers of the union, appealing to the most inactive and disengaged. Her tactics demoralise and disengage members, producing the passivity and resignation that she then uses to justify her conservatism. She is willing to lie to and manipulate members to pursue her preferred agenda, and she uses unelected officials in the union to help her do this, alongside her supporters in the Independent Broad Left faction, who share her conservative, pessimistic vision of the membership and the purposes and strategies of the union. One has to question whether UCU would perform more poorly if it was led by a representative of UCEA or UUK.
There is only one way to rebuild UCU as a democratic, fighting organisation capable of struggling for the kind of workplace we want to see, and that is to remove Sally Hunt and her supporters from office, and replace them with people fit to lead our union.
Sadly, the UCU constitution does not provide any means for removing sitting officials from office. Branches can pass motions calling on Hunt to resign, as Kent and Exeter already have. They can also pass motions calling for a Special HE Sector Conference to reassert democratic control over UCU and call for Hunt to go. UCU members also need to consider wider democratic reforms of the union to strengthen internal democracy and ensure leaders can be held properly to account. And, if Hunt will not go, there needs to be a vigorous campaign against her in the next election cycle (sadly not until 2022). Remember that she was elected on a 13.7% turnout, securing only 59% of the vote (only 8,318 members — 4,000 fewer than voted “no” last week), in a campaign marred by absurd red-baiting and pledges from Hunt that, particularly in retrospect, were misleading and laughable. (Go on, read them and weep.) The union is transforming beneath her, with thousands of new members and a vastly expanded layer of activists — many of whom have seen Sally Hunt’s shenanigans for the first time, and are angered and disgusted by what they saw. Unlike previous betrayals, when anger gave way to resignation and passivity, this time it may be channelled towards internal renewal.
