UCU elections

(originally published by The Student)

     THE UNIVERSITY and College Union (UCU) elected a new Vice President and future President in a ballot held last week. History lecturer Simon Renton of University College London, currently a national negotiator for the Union, won with 61 per cent of the vote.

Renton will take up his post as president in 2013, following the end of Alan Whitaker's presidency.

     UCU represents over 120,000 academic staff across the UK, including lecturers, researchers and postgrads employed by Universities and adult education centres. In Scotland its focus is on equal pay and job security within Scottish institutions, and campaigns against tuition fees and 'casual contracts', which leave new employees vulnerable to being underpaid, overworked and treated as temporary members of staff.

     Internal politics within the Union has seen a split between the Independent Broad Left, of which Renton is a member, and the Left, represented in this election by Jim Wolfreys of King's College London. The UCU Left, described by the Queen's University Belfast branch as “Trotskyist dominated”, has links with the Socialist Worker's Party and lists both “struggles for sustainable environmental policies” and “the abolition of tuition fees” as key points in their constitution, while the Broad Left focuses its policies more on the internal running of the organisation itself.

     Of the ten candidates put forward by the Broad Left, nine won seats on the UCU National Executive Committee, while the Left focused their candidates in the regional and equality seats.

Despite this election's defeat, support for the Left has been growing in recent years and the group is becoming more and more critical of the Union's decisions, such as its refusal to mobilise behind December's student protests in London. Though numerous Union members, including both presidential candidates, attended the anti-fees demonstration, the organisation itself sent no official representatives.

     The Independent Broad Left cites independence from government and employers and the importance of Universities being “democratic, self-governing institutions” as part of their beliefs and denounces the “neo-liberal Coalition government”, which they describe as “mounting attacks on the public wage and the public sector”.

     A UCU motion to strike over plans to change the Universities pensions scheme was criticised by the Employers' Pensions Forum. Union members at the University of Edinburgh and across the country will strike on Thursday 17^th of March.