Branch life: negotiating national and local activism in UCU

Abstract

Two members of the King&'s College London branch of the University College Union (UCU) discuss the union's long-running national dispute over the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS), as well as more local disputes they have been involved with at the College level. Their actions over conditions within King's - including on equalities issues, specifically child care issues, London weighting and institutional democracy - illustrate how a branch can link up local disputes with national disputes, making them more concrete and specific, and seeking to create an institution that has a local form of democracy running through it. They also discuss how union debate and action has expanded during the period of the dispute: the union, both nationally and locally, has taken up issues of precarity and casualisation; pay gaps and structural inequalities; workloads; and questions of decolonisation. At King's, the union are negotiating for free childcare support for all staff, available on the same basis for everyone, as part of a wider collective agreement with the college on all issues of pay and conditions of employment. They have also sought to democratise the Council - the decision-making body of the College - partly through drawing attention to the increasing number of corporate figures who sit on the Council, including its chair, Lord Geidt. As well as increasing involvement in the Black Lives Matter movement, there has been a radicalising of the branch's activities on imperialism, including calling attention to the role of the college in imperialism, and demands to demilitarise both the USS and the university itself.