- Conference
- 2024 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 11 October 2023
- Decision
- Carried
Conference notes the continuing failure of the government to invest and maintain a wide variety of public services in the UK, with almost every institution showing signs of underinvestment in systems, infrastructure, and staffing.
Most of the public services delivered by UNISON members are showing sign of this strain despite often heroic efforts to maintain service levels with fewer staff. Initial staffing shortages can be caused by both an inability to recruit to vacant roles following years of real terms pay cuts and a simple unwillingness by government to spend the funds required to properly staff services. A vicious cycle can then develop in these struggling services, where efforts by staff to cope with unmanageable workloads leads to increased levels of stress-related absence, putting more pressure on the staff who remain and making it more likely they themselves will need time off.
The HSE’s annual statistics on work-related stress, anxiety, or depression for 2022 note that:
• 914,000 workers reported suffering from work related stress, depression, or anxiety in 2021/22, an increase in the rate reported prior to the pandemic in 2018/19.
• Workload remains the highest reported contributing factor to this absence.
• Education, Human health and social work activities, public administration and defence, and compulsory social security (categories that correspond to many of the public service roles UNISON members work in) all had “significantly higher rates than average” of work-related stress, anxiety, and depression.
This experience of UNISON members, of minimal staffing levels and an insistence that more is done with less, is one UNISON members in higher education definitely share, with support staff in Higher Education Institutes (HEIs) often reporting a failure to maintain numbers of staff even as numbers of students increase and the demands to deliver excellent services remain.
Conference notes as such that when it comes to the professional and support services provided by UNISON members across Higher Education, it’s often arguable whether staffing is sufficient to maintain a “minimum” level of service during the normal course of the academic year.
In this context, conference notes with frustration the announcement by Education Secretary Gillian Keegan of a “consultation” on whether Higher Education should be included in the public services subject to arbitrary “minimum service levels” specified by the secretary of state during periods of industrial action.
As in the other services affected by this policy, conference believes that this proposal:
• Completely fails to recognise the overwhelming case for improved pay and working conditions in Higher Education, which is responsible for the extent and duration for industrial action in recent years.
• Comes after the government’s own failure to properly fund Universities to a level such that they are able to maintain proper service levels outside of periods of industrial action.
• Would be, as in other sectors, a deeply draconian and unprecedented breach of the rights of workers to withdraw their labour, as can be seen in the condemnation of the proposals by the French, German, Italian and Spanish trade union federations of the plans.
Conference calls on the Service Group Executive to:
1)Formulate, with other Higher Education unions, a submission to any government consultation that highlights that the key issue lying behind industrial action in Higher Education is ultimately a drastic deterioration in staff pay and conditions, with insufficient funding of the sector a major contributing factor; and which highlights the sufficient difficulties in objectively determining any minimum service levels across such a diverse sector and,
2)If necessary and with other service groups, develop robust guidance for branches on continuing to take effective industrial action in the face of the legislation.