- Conference
- 2024 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 10 October 2023
- Decision
- Carried
This conference notes that the Year of Black Workers, and its focus of ‘Establishing Legacy to Generate Change’, is not the change we seek, it is merely the opportunity to generate change.
Black Workers across our society often find themselves in low-paid, insecure work, with poor terms and conditions. Despite the Westminster Government denying that institutional racism exists in our society, we know that it does and there is evidence that institutional and structural racism exist in Higher Education (HE). We want this to change.
UNISON campaigns for decent pay in universities – including a living wage for the lowest paid – as well as an eradication of the gender and ethnicity pay gap and to stop the use of zero-hour contracts and the casualisation of work. With UNISON having an estimated 185,000 Black members, it is imperative that we now build upon our long history of achievement in tackling inequities in our society to enable Black members working in HE to take the next step in our journey towards justice.
University employers should value the hard work of our members in continuing to adapt and deliver services, keeping universities open and students supported. However, actions speak louder than words and that there is evidence that Black staff are overlooked and discriminated against.
In 2017, an independent review undertaken by Baroness McGregor-Smith (of race in the workplace in the UK) found that: a) In terms of opportunities for progression, 29% of Black Caribbean employees reported feeling that they have been overlooked for promotion because of their ethnicity. b) In terms of top management positions, the Black and Black British group did particularly poorly over the period between 2007 and 2012, with the number of Black/Black British people in top management positions decreasing by 42%. c) 30% of those from a Black background reported experiencing or witnessing racial harassment or bullying from management in the last five years. The situation is unlikely to differ in HE. Indeed, the Higher Education Statistics Agency (HESA) found in 2020 that no Black staff were employed at the most senior levels of leadership in British universities. In 2021/2 there were 5 Black staff employed at a senior level. In associate professional and technical occupations in 2021/2, of 1670 staff, 40 identified as Black.
UNISON is far more than just another Trade Union; UNISON is an organisation that seeks to improve the lives of its members and wider society by challenging the status quo and seeking to generate change. With this being the case, this conference calls on the Higher Education Service Group Executive Committee to:
1) Work with the National Black Members Committee and other Self-Organised Groups to understand the number of Black members in the Service Group, and work to encourage those that do not have their ethnicity recorded in their membership data to update this.
2) Work with the National Black Members Committee and other Self-Organised Groups to analyse and interpret the data captured from (point 1) to create and implement a strategic plan to work towards ensuring that Black members are represented proportionately within the structures of the Service Group from Branch to Executive levels.
3) Work with the National Black Members Committee to develop an action plan for supporting Black members to become active within the union and their workplaces.
4) Work with the National Black Members Committee, Regions, and Branches to capture Ethnicity Pay Gap data from HE employers, and support Branches to work with Higher Education Service Group Executive Committee, to develop a strategy to reduce the pay gap, with the long-term aim of eradicating it in its entirety.
5) Work with the National Black Members Committee and UNISON’s Learning and Organising Service to develop a training and development plan to ensure that all activists within the Service Group receive training in ‘Defining Black’ and the ‘Race Discrimination Protocol’.
6) Work with Branches and the National Black Members Committee to collect the data around the number of Race/Equality cases within Higher Education, analyse the data to identify any commonalities between the cases and work with the toolkit developed by UNISON to tackle these issues.
7) Support Branches within Higher Education to negotiate with employers to get them to sign UNISON’s Anti Racism Charter, and support the Ethnicity Pay Gap (EPG) campaign.
Furthermore, this conference believes, that by taking these steps, UNISON will be able to work towards its mission of ‘establishing legacy to generate change’, but more importantly, these steps will support Branches, the Higher Education Service Group Executive Committee and UNISON as a whole to be able to meet the needs of our Black members, and improve our ability to lead the way in the journey towards the more Equitable and just society we all want, need and deserve moving forward in 2024.