Vote Sam Morecroft №1 for Casualised Members Representative (HE)
I am Branch President of UCU at the University of Sheffield International College, where I work as a tutor on a zero hours contract. I am standing for election to the National Executive to represent casualised members in HE. I am not a member of any of the existing electoral groupings in UCU, but I am a member of Socialist Alternative and want to work with all genuine and serious activists to build a strong grassroots left within UCU that can provide real leadership in our disputes and campaigns.
In recent years, our union has taken huge steps forward in terms of building stronger branches and developing our industrial power and capacity to take strike action. However, we still lack a serious collective leadership, with a clear perspective on the nature of the current crisis and a strategy to turn the organisation we have developed at grassroots level into concrete wins for our members, for students and the wider working class.
We are living through possibly the worst assault on the living standards of workers in living memory, facing sky high inflation, a cost of living crisis and public services devastated by underfunding, understaffing and privatisation. Furthermore, while the current bigoted and viciously anti-worker, anti-education Tory government may seem to be on its last legs, we know that we can expect very little in terms of change from the Starmer-led Labour Party. Universities, colleges, and the wider education system have been brought to their knees by decades of cuts and marketisation. More than ever, we need a clear industrial and political strategy to defend education and end casualisation.
I also believe that we need someone on our National Executive who can act as a spokesperson for casualised education workers, and a real source of support for casualised members in branches organising and campaigning for secure work. I believe I have the experience of organising and leading necessary to be able to do this, and be more than just somebody who turns up to meetings. This is why I would love to have your first preference vote.
Experience
I first got involved in UCU as Anti-Casualisation Officer at the University of Sheffield between 2014–2019 while studying for my PhD and teaching part time. Previously I had been an organiser for both CWU and GMB in both unionised and non-unionised call centres. At Sheffield, I led on winning victories for casualised members, including securing employment contracts, marking pay and preparation pay for hourly paid and fixed term staff. I played a leading role in organising the incredible 2018 USS strike in my local branch, and during that dispute I also worked to highlight the university’s use of casual worker agreements, which we finally won a ban on later that year.
I have also served on UCU’s Anti-Casualisation Committee for several years and am currently co-chair of the committee. In this role, I have supported grassroots anti-casualisation campaigning and developed our union’s approach to fighting casualisation within and beyond our sector. I have used my position on the committee to support the work of grassroots anti-casualisation campaigns such as Corona Contract and Pandemic PGR’s/PGR’s as Staff, and built links between the committee and campaigns against insecure work outside the education sector.
I was elected secretary of the USIC UCU branch at the beginning of 2020, and have since served as Anti-Casualisation Officer and now President. Our branch is significant because it is one of the only recognised Private Education Provider branches; while the college operates under the branding of the Univerisity of Sheffield, in fact it is outsourced to a private corporation called Study Group. Casualisation is endemic in private providers and large numbers of our members are employed on zero-hours contracts. The student body is entirely international, and all of our students are subject to the horrors of the Tories hostile environment policy. The part of our sector which I work and organise in represents the most extreme reality of marketised education today.
In 2020, I was involved in extending our recognition agreement to include student support staff in the college in the middle of the first lockdown, which enabled us to face down the threat of compulsory redundancies and protect members’ jobs. In 2021, I led on winning our first ever statutory industrial action ballot and leveraged this to win a pay increase for our members, and supported UCU members at Sussex International Study Centre to form a UCU branch and win recognition in another Study Group institution.
In November 2022, I led on organising the first ever strike in an outsourced private education provider in the UK, when my branch took three days of strike action to demand a 12% pay increase and improvements to terms and conditions. This dispute is continuing in 2023, despite our employer taking a hardline approach and withdrawing an offer they had previously made to our members, and we are currently in the middle of a further period of strike action. Our strike is notable for many things, but in particular it is notable for the active student support that we are building on the picket line and the effective way in which we recruit new members during the strike itself.
As Vice-President of Sheffield Trades Council, I am involved in supporting broader campaigns against insecure work. This includes Sheffield Needs a Pay Rise, which campaigns against low pay, sexual harassment and insecure contracts and organises workplaces where there are no established unions. I have also been involved in supporting the Stuart (Just Eat) delivery drivers strike, the longest running gig ecomomy strike in UK history.
Developing Our Struggle Against Casualisation
The neoliberal education system is built upon the hyper-exploitation of casualisation, which disproportionately impacts women, LGBT+, disabled, Black and migrant workers and other oppressed groups, and robs us of dignity and security. Ending casualisation, rather than simply bemoaning its existence, is one of the most important tasks for our union today.
We have made massive progress in recent years over casualisation, securing concrete victories such as one year minimum contracts, guaranteed hours, and bans on casual workers agreements, and forcing employers to acknowledge and engage with us nationally on the issue. This is due in no small part to the efforts of casualised members leading campaigns in their workplaces and the Anti-Casualisation Committee. But we need to build on this — we need to step up our recruitment and support more casualised staff to become reps, organisers and leaders in our union.
In recent months, the focus of our union has been on pay, inflation and the cost of living crisis, and this is absolutely correct. But we need to ensure that casualisation does not get forgotten by the leadership of our union — it certainly won’t be forgotten by the tens of thousands enduring the misery of zero hours, casual worker agreements, fixed term contracts and regular periods of unemployment or no income.
We also need a national campaign to fight against the very worst excesses of casualisation in private education providers, where sometimes almost all staff are engaged on casual contracts and teaching may start at 9am and finish at 9pm. We desperately need to recruit members, build branches, and win recognition agreements in these providers if we are to end casualisation.
Through outsourcing teaching to private providers, universities have found a way to sidestep our union and avoid collective bargaining. Durham University’s plans to outsource 25% of all teaching during the pandemic were shelved after public backlash but are an indication of things to come. If our union does not respond to the growth of private providers, then outsourcing will only become more widespread, and our members in universities and colleges will find themselves outsourced.
It’s also important that our union stops portraying our casualised members as helpless victims. Too often, casualised members are used to justify timid and tokenistic industrial campaigning, despite the fact that casualised members routinely prove they are among the most militant and determined layers of our membership, and despite the fact that almost 70,000 academic staff in the UK work on some form of atypical or casualised contract. Casualised members are the backbone of UCU and are capable of leading and winning for our whole union.
Developing a Political Strategy
The neoliberal university is reliant on fees and rent from students and on hyper-exploited casualised labour. Creating a free, publicly funded education system available to all, with secure employment and decent pay for all staff, will require a massive societal transformation. It will take more than industrial action to achieve that — we will need to be part of building a much broader political movement. Yet UCU has never had a political strategy, and that needs to change. We can and should point out the potential for the current national strike wave to deliver co-ordinated strike action powerful enough to get rid of the Tories for good, but we also need to argue within this strike wave in favour of building a political movement based on workplace and community to provide a real alternative to the misery of Tory Britain.
The experience of Corbynism makes this point clear. Corbyn’s Labour Party promised a National Education Service but rarely described what this would entail. Our union should have taken the opportunity to put forward ideas and build support for our vision of education. Instead of cheerleading his leadership, we should have placed clear demands and expectations on Corbyn, foricing him to sharpen his political approach and make a clearer case for a left Labour government. We need to develop a full political program for education, alongside other education unions and the student movement, and take the lead on building an alternative. If that vision does not come from education workers, then where will it come from?
We also need to address the crisis of working-class political representation. We could revise our rulebook to agree that we will support political candidates who share our goals and values — for example, we could agree to fund individual candidates who have proven they will fight for workers, like the RMT union does. But even this would be a short-term measure. Ultimately, we should be discussing how the hundreds of thousands if not milliosn of workers currently taking strike action to defend their living standards can build a political organisation that can transform society. Workplace organising alone is not enough to win liberation for our trans siblings, to end racist policing or to scrap the vile Hostile Environment policy which makes my students lives a misery. Workers and trade unions can and should lead the fight for an alternative to the misery and suffering of Tory Britain — for a socialist society based on solidarity, democracy, and collective democratic ownership of the vast wealth and resources controlled by the super rich.
For a Transparent, Democratic and Member Led Union and Member Control of Disputes
I co-authored and moved the Democracy Commission motion at our 2018 Congress because I believe we need genuine democratic member control of our union and our disputes. Despite this motion being met with walkouts and shutdowns, I won support for this and I am proud of the achievements of the Democracy Commission, which I served on as elected representative of casualised members. However, the work of democratising our union is far from over.
If elected I will fight for a democratic and member led union where all elected representatives and senior officials are accountable to and directed by members. Too often national officers and NEC members hide behind ‘confidentiality’ rather than openly discussing the way forward with members and collectively developing and building our campaigns. I believe national leaders of our union should be subject to recall, so that if members are dissatisfied with leaders, they can force early elections and elect new representatives. This principle already exists in local branches, and national representatives of the union should be subject to the same level of accountability as a local representative is. A genuinely democratic union means genuine democratic member control of the apparatus of our union.
Furthermore, I believe we need real member control over the strikes our union is currently involved in. During these disputes, I have received messages almost daily from UCU members despairing that our union appears to be announcing strike strategy on Twitter, totally confused as to how our leadership intends to win concessions from employers, or scared by the lack of clarity over how we are building the fighting fund or using it to support members taking strike action. I fully support my comrade James Brackley’s campaign for UCU Treasurer and strongly recommend members vote for him — like me he wants our union to use our resources effectively to support members and to be genuinely transparent, democratic and member led.
Powerful strike action cannot happen without the active involvement of members in building our strategy. I believe we should consider national strike committees, made up of elected strike leaders from branches, to replace the current Branch Delegate Meeting format, which are bewildering and bureaucratic at best, and serve only to divide us when we need to be at our most united at their worst. These strike committees could hold genuine discussions on the way forward in our disputes, and provide clear instruction from rank and file union members to national officers.
Thanks for reading! Please use your vote to elect a fighting socialist candidate for our national executive.
