Confessions of a Provincial TUist

Jamie Melrose
Sep 3, 2018 · 3 min read

After a year’s quasi ‘break’, I am back at the University of Bristol, back as a part-time branch officer at the University of Bristol Local Association of the University and College Union (UCU), back as a part-time teacher of Politics in the Bristol/Bath area.

I thought I might give something new a go this new academic year: blogging on life as local UCU rep. Why so? Two reasons really.

The first: a feeling that this particular ‘coalface’ is often largely overlooked in discussions concerning ‘the union’.

This is because a good deal of it may be rightly considered mundane or of little interest (fixing the photocopier, etc.); partly, too, because more than a fair few of the day-to-day exchanges of branch officers do not lend themselves to public broadcast — for example, representing individual members more often than not has to be confidential and secretive.

Another reason is the most regrettable: because the branch officer experience is somewhat removed from the working lives of academic and academic-related staff. While TU branch officers (when in character) play at being employment lawyers and often external-to-the-institution negotiating partners, lecturers, librarians and admin staff are immersed in the highly personalised, immediate dynamics of their Schools, offices and/or subject disciplines.

Outside exceptional episodes such as the recent mass mobilisations to defend USS pensions from rapacious employers and pension industry orthodoxy, the work of branch officers remains largely out of sight and out of mind, leading in many cases to our formal negotiating partners — the representatives of University managements — knowing more about the business of campus trade union reps than their (union) lay membership.

All this is understandable. If ever increasing workloads and the demands of caring responsibilities are key aspects of HE working life, for example, it is to be expected that unceasing profane and profound branch negotiation and bargaining, unless it directly impinges upon someone’s immediate burning grievances and lot, is not going to be front and centre of members’ ‘class’ consciousness.

Yet, what is at stake in this unceasing process of discussion and debate is the very terms of our regulatory regime, the day-to-day decision-making, edicts and interpretations of the modern HEI. They lay the ground for a hostile (to the interests of trade union members) environment which impacts substantially upon HE workers. In this blog, first and foremost, I hope to press home this point even more.

The second reason is more personal. It has been worrying me of late what exactly social media is for. I struggle to use it for promotion, for dialogue, for ‘witty’ deconstructive interventions.

Naively and perhaps egotistically, on my return to Brizzle, I’d like to acquire a purpose, to shed some light, give some insight on the workings of a UCU branch that are maybe lost in the grand sweeping narratives of academic Twitter, or in those libertarian, romantic, individualist academic nostrums while fail to take into account the material conditioning of the modern HEI.

So here goes. Expect stuff on USS, on performance-management, on governance, on UCU politics, on statues and ordinances, on power and political economy, on the casualisation of employment. And on industrial action.

Jamie Melrose

Written by

Para-academic, historian of Marxist thought, leftist, COYS, anarcho-syndicalist (on a good day), Mark from Peep Show (on a bad one), product of suburbia

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