UCU national negotiators’ analysis of the ACAS offer on pay gaps, contract type and workload
We are writing to update members on our analysis of the ACAS offer. Colleagues will have seen the recent ‘e-ballot’ asking members to decide whether they wish to be consulted about this offer.¹
To fully appreciate what is at stake we need to step back and consider where we are in the current dispute.
The role of the elected lay pay negotiators
The role of UCU elected lay pay negotiators normally has several aspects: to contribute to the development of the joint trade union claim, to negotiate as a team with the employers’ representative body UCEA, supported by UCU officials (including attending dispute resolution meetings) and carefully to explain the employers’ offers to members in order to furnish them with the information they require to vote to note, accept or reject an offer. Our role includes submitting reports to committees, such as the Higher Education Committee (HEC), and conferences, principally, the Higher Education Sector Conference (HESC).
This year has been rather different.
As lay negotiators, we were involved in negotiations up to the 25th January. However, we have not been permitted to participate in the ACAS talks to-date. Our analysis of the three framework agreement proposals is therefore based on the wording of the text, our experience of previous working groups and the revised April 2020 offer that three of our current number were involved in negotiating.
If, as the e-ballot suggests, there are moves to put the proposed offer to UCU members in a ballot, negotiators would also need to advise about our assessment of the consequences of a vote to accept, reject, or neither (‘note’). But before we discuss this, we must evaluate what exactly is on the table.
Pay
The unions received two pay offers from the employers, the second (received on February 6) was slightly better than the first. For our members, the first offer was 5% for scale points from 26 to 42, and 4% above that. The second offer was for 5% for all points above 26. (Some low-paid members may just be on point 25 or below and receive an additional 1%.) Both offers are for next year (August 2023), and expect members to accept that there will be no movement on last year’s 3% imposed offer (August 2022).
A snap e-poll of members at the start of February saw a rejection of this offer on the recommendation of the General Secretary by a ratio of 4:1. The decision was then made to forego the scheduled dispute resolution meetings in order to enter into formal ACAS mediation.
This meant that further negotiations over pay would not take place through NEW JNCHES. Instead UCU entered ACAS talks without the lay negotiators’ involvement. These negotiations were apparently confidential, but on 17 February employers declared an ‘impasse’ in negotiations on pay, which the unions accepted. The General Secretary announced a pause on this date to create ‘a period of calm.’
What does the pay offer mean?
On 24 February, UCEA announced the early imposition of the 23/24 pay offer backdated to 1 February. This is 2% or £1,000 (whichever is higher). As noted above, they signalled that as far as they were concerned, the pay round was concluded.
This means that UCU members on point 26 and above will receive 5% for 2023–24, and if inflation remains at February levels, can expect to lose 15% of the value of their salary over two years against RPI.
Staff such as teaching assistants who may be paid below this level might expect to lose 14% of the value of their pay against RPI, but they tend to spend more of their income on heating and eating, and are therefore exposed to higher personal inflation costs. Our analysis of the second offer remains unchanged in the light of the most recent inflation data (in fact, the situation has at the time of writing become, if anything, worse).
Review of the UK HE pay spine
The review of the UK HE pay spine is not expected to bring any significant additional improvements to UCU members. The pay spine was first negotiated in the JNCHES Pay Framework Agreement of 2003. It had increments of 3% for every spine point, replacing the previous 10 separate scales, which had rather uneven increments ranging from 3.5 to 5.5%.
However that agreement came with a substantial additional government budget. The current proposals are taking place in context in which UCEA has repeatedly claimed that several institutions describe the pay offer as at ‘the limits of affordability’. (Note that these institutions could substantiate such claims by ‘opening up their books’. They could then defer implementation of pay rises for up to 10 months.)
As a result of higher percentage increments in recent years at the bottom points of the spine, largely as a response to increases in the national minimum wage (or, more accurately, the failure of UCEA to increase pay in line with inflation), some increments have shrunk. Thus the difference between points 5 and 6 is now 1.2%.
It is likely that the employers will propose the deletion of some points and agree to ‘smooth out’ pay differentials at the bottom of the pay spine. But due to the absence of any new money, it is difficult at present to see how this might make a difference to scale points substantially further up the spine.
Some colleagues have expressed uncertainty as to whether a reformed pay spine will apply to pre-92 and Academic Related and Professional Services Staff, which is discussed here. This is something that needs to be clarified.
UCU’s three demands on casualisation, workload and pay gaps
The proposals here all involve the establishment of working groups of 10 trade union representatives (one full time officer and one lay rep) and up to 10 Employer representatives (including UCEA officers and representatives from HEIs).
In previous pay rounds, the trade union side has expressed significant concerns about the efficacy of JNCHES working groups as they have tended to produce reports without action. Again, it remains to be seen whether the involvement of ACAS will produce the kind of concrete outcomes and meaningful change that our members deserve.
Review of contract types
The statement that ‘UCEA has agreed to consult its members, with a positive recommendation to take action on zero hours contracts’ is welcome, but is not a substantial shift from the following 2020 statement:
The parties encourage that local discussions take place between HEIs and trade unions with a view to eliminating or phasing out the use of zero hours contracts where possible by establishing alternative flexible employment arrangements.
A true ‘zero hours’ contract is relatively rare in Higher Education, but hourly paid ‘as and when’ worker contracts are widespread. For example, many universities use them to pay PhD students to teach tutorials or take lab classes (‘teaching assistants’ or GTAs).
The proposal is to
develop, agree and promote principles at a UK- level which employers are able to apply through the appropriate local consultation and/or negotiating machinery on the following contract types:
Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs)
Fixed-term contracts
Post Graduate Researchers (PGRs)
Hourly-paid contracts
Note that hourly-paid contracts are listed separately, and therefore we can safely assume that UCEA do not consider these to be ‘zero hours’ contracts. Moreover, in many institutions (and in particular post-92s), zero hour contracts have been replaced by ‘minimum hours’ contracts (in some cases as low as five hours per semester). These also need to be urgently addressed.
The differentiation between ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ zero hours contracts has been noted by many and justified by some on the basis that people who work outside HE are sometimes invited in to share their professional expertise on an ad hoc basis. It is not clear why work of this kind would necessarily involve a zero hours contract type. We are also concerned about the potential to entrench precarity by way of the creation of ‘voluntary’ banks of casualised staff.
We note also that the proposal paper on contracts refers to ‘employees’ and not ‘workers’, a distinction that is often deployed to selectively reduce rights at work.
On paper, this working group proposal appears to make fewer concrete commitments than the employers made in 2020. Had it begun by endorsing the outcomes of that paper as a starting point we might be able to be more confident at this point that this group will not become another talking shop.
Review of pay gaps
The fact that UCEA is proposing to engage in a review of pay gaps is welcome, but it is not exactly new.
Pay gaps should not be confused with equal pay audits — they concern career-long discrimination, and often intersect with job insecurity and unequal promotion opportunities.
The proposed review is unclear as to what factors it intends to review and address. But we can look at the past. In 2011, JNCHES undertook a review of gender pay gaps in HE. This reported institutions claiming that around half of the contribution to identified gender pay gaps was ‘objectively justified’. But it applied a generic analysis to gender pay gaps based on work in other sectors and failed to evaluate the impact of HE-specific factors such as occupational segregation in the sector.
There are good reasons to believe that occupational segregation is a major factor in Higher Education. The term refers to a set of practices where some career paths are more prestigious, better-supported and promoted, and possibly more secure than others.
Thus in 2018, the Guardian reported that Oxbridge colleges had a particular problem. Pre-92 research-intensive universities often have parallel track academic career structures (research only; teaching only; and research and teaching), where the most prestigious research and teaching academic track tends to have a higher proportion of male, white British or non-disabled staff. This creates a source of indirect discrimination due to job insecurity (‘greasy poles’) and additional promotion barriers (‘glass ceilings’) that are found in the research only and teaching only tracks. In Oxbridge, the college system creates another layer of occupational segregation.
The 2020 offer proposed specific programmes of work to be conducted at local level. The new statement could add to this (adding the disability and intersectional element), but the working group does not appear equipped to address the scale of the problem. Again, this working group has a limited composition. The danger is that it simply produces nothing more than another report. Seriously addressing pay gaps also requires new money: proper investment in promoting and supporting staff. HESA data on the ‘personal characteristics’ of the HE workforce can be accessed here.
Review of workload
Since 2020, UCU found that workloads have worsened, partly as a result of lockdown and working from home. Financial pressures on employers, increased student recruitment and relative isolation has tended to lead to an increase in working hours.
One of the problems that UCU negotiators have had to address with respect to workload is that the employers appear only willing to engage with the question where it intersects with Health and Safety legislation. This requires that individual staff report excessive working time to their line manager, something that many are loathe to do for fear of being accused of being incapable, possibly leading to performance management or similar action.
This is also the principal framing of the new offer. Hence it says that ‘the parties will jointly:
Provide guidance and good practice examples in relation to workload management and reduction of work-related stress for all groups of staff, to enable HEIs to develop local action plans, in consultation and/or negotiation with recognised local trade union representatives, whichever is appropriate, to reduce the incidence of work-related stress/ill-health;
Promote the HSE’s Management Standards as a sector-wide minimum…’
However, excessive workload is also a matter of contract breach, because staff are routinely being expected to work partly for free for the employer, and it may also be indirectly discriminatory. Managers should be monitoring workload in terms of hours worked, but in many institutions and departments managers look the other way. Part time and fixed-term staff often feel that they are unable to say no to excessive workload.
The bullet point ‘develop and promote principles at a UK-level which employers are able to apply using the appropriate local consultation and/or negotiating machinery on workload management’ could be helpful, but managers have become used to a practice of ‘staff self-management’ whereby work is allocated at the start of term. Anyone who fails to complete work by a deadline is seen as inefficient rather than overworked. And demands keep rising.
Many institutional practices fail to even measure workload properly. Often, workload is treated as an aspect of ‘job allocation’: managers simply allocate departmental responsibilities or teaching duties on the basis of a benchmark number of ‘teaching hours’, or lectures, instead of hours of work per day or per week.
For a workload audit to be meaningful it must involve an actual measure of hours worked both on a daily and weekly basis, as well as per term/semester, and contracts should explicitly state the total number of hours expected each day or week. Explicit contractual terms, as for example in post-92s, need to be respected.
Again, this working group may generate a meaningful set of recommendations, but the fact that the employers are already legally required to address excessive working and yet have done nothing about it for decades should be a cause for some concern.
Conclusion
We wrote this explanatory note in order to set out our assessment as to what has been achieved so far. This document is not intended to replace advice to HEC or members that would be appropriate if it was decided to put this proposal to member consultation. Were this to happen we would need to be in a position to ensure that HEC could advise members with respect to the outcomes of yes or no votes under each heading.
It is our view that the proposal could be strengthened very simply by the employers committing to the 2020 offer as a baseline underpinning this offer. That would at least remove the ambiguity as to whether or not this proposal was intended to strengthen or weaken commitments made in 2020.
At this point therefore, we simply note the interim reports and frameworks.
However it is also clear from UCEA’s most recent statement that the employer wants the trade unions to stand down all action until at least 24 February 2024 as a condition of entering further talks. This is a condition that the joint trade union side has made clear we cannot accept.
At present, therefore, we would have to argue that at the very least the proposal should be revised to remove any such requirement before it could be put out to consultation with members.
We are committed as a group to fulfilling the role to which we were elected and getting involved in further negotiations. We are at the disposal of the Higher Education Committee, the Special HE Sector Conference and the membership for any further clarification.
Note
¹ This blog was produced by the following members of the negotiating team: Lucy Burke, Maria Chondrogianni, Deepa Driver, Marian Mayer, and Sean Wallis. Due to personal circumstances Robyn Orfitelli was not able to contribute to the production of this report.
