‘We’re ready to strike again to protect our dignity in old age’

The strike by university staff in a row over pensions has been suspended. Dr Andy Williams explains what everyone in the sector and beyond can learn from the unprecedented action

LAST week staff at 63 universities across the UK voted, by a margin of two to one, to end the biggest ever industrial action to hit UK higher education. For now, at least.

We successfully fought off a threat by university vice chancellors to cut our retirement pay in half and leave many in poverty. Before the strike our employers said their cuts were inevitable, that they had no choice because decent pensions had become unaffordable.

But positive collective action by University College Union members and evidence-based campaigning showed this up to be a myth. Firstly, we won the argument by explaining how the methods and sums used to justify their cuts were flawed. To paraphrase Nye Bevan, we showed that our employers were either too negligent or misleading to be in charge of our security in retirement. But this wasn’t enough.

In the end only industrial action forced employers’ organisation Universities UK to change their minds. Across Wales and the wider UK this involved campaigning on many fronts, including: an unprecedented 14 days of all-out strikes with pickets, rallies and demonstrations; months of working to contract and refusing to do the unpaid overtime on which modern universities thrive; a mass resignation of external examiners which threatened the marking and validation of student exams; a legal battle which crowd-sourced funding to challenge the legality of the cuts; widespread political coalition-building, drawing cross-party action from MPs and Assembly Members; and impressive shows of solidarity between students and staff including occupations, angry meetings with university bosses, open public lectures and seminars in community centres, petitions signed by tens of thousands of learners, and pledges to withhold tuition fees.

The agreement we accepted involves setting up an independent panel of experts, picked equally by both sides, to look again at the dodgy methods used to justify the cuts.

We get to keep our current pensions until at least 2019, and the work of the group will be guided by our wish to keep guaranteed pensions comparable with what we currently have.

Lots of union members, myself included, are still worried the employers will pull a fast one, making their planned cuts anyway once we’ve gone back to work. But we’re united in our resolve to hold them to account, and we’re ready to strike again to protect our dignity in old age.

Going on strike is difficult, and it’s affected us deeply. Not just financially (we lost out on a lot of pay), but also emotionally (because we had to disrupt our students, which we hated doing).

We come out of this dispute battered and bruised, but also collectively stronger, more unified, more critical, and ready to keep fighting for our pensions, as well as against the broader marketisation and privatisation of universities.

University lecturers are not, generally, a militant bunch. On the contrary, over the last decade we’ve barely put up a fight against a series of previous cuts to our retirement income, and we’ve seen the value of our wages plummet in real terms. But this was an attack too far. We took a stand because a decent, secure retirement is not some kind of luxury, and pensions are deferred earnings to which we all have a right.

While I’m sorry I detrimentally affected my students’ learning this year, I’m also proud to have provided them with a different kind of education. We showed them that you don’t have to give in to attacks on pay and working conditions, that being in a union makes you strong, and that if you stand together, you can fight back, and you can win.

■ Dr Andy Williams is a senior lecturer at Cardiff University and Cardiff UCU spokesman