UCU boycott nears the crunch

As the marking and assessment boycott in universities comes to a head, management are persisting with their hard line. The University and College Employers’ Association is still refusing to negotiate, and at local level managers are demonstrating that they care more about giving students a pretty graduation ceremony than about properly assessing degrees. It is very possible that they are breaking consumer law, but as many universities have discovered with employment law, it is easy for management to break the law and hard to hold them to account when they do.

At Glasgow, around half of undergraduates have been told they will not have degree classifications at the time of graduation; in Cambridge it is likely that over 50% of 4,500 undergraduates will not graduate this summer. At Queens University Belfast over 750 students have been told their degrees are not confirmed, while Strathclyde is issuing "provisional" degrees without honours based on marks in years 1-3 of the four-year Scottish degree.

Elsewhere, management are employing non-expert markers in place of the tutors who designed the courses and assessments. This poses particular risks for students in highly-specialised subjects, where there may be only a handful of people in the country properly qualified to assess their work. In other cases results are being scaled up algorithmically from earlier marks, meaning students will get no credit for improved achievement in their final semester.

Meanwhile, in response to pay deductions multiple branches have called strikes. Leeds UCU is on indefinite strike as of 15 June. At Sheffield the branch is organising a wage-sharing scheme after management locked out staff refusing to mark on 100% pay deductions. Several universities struck on Friday 16 June, including Liverpool John Moores, Bristol, Queen Mary University of London, Edinburgh, Keele, Heriot Watt and Durham. Some strikes continue this month; Durham has a further strike scheduled on 29 June and is one of several branches that have called action for September.

Bristol’s strike coincided with an Open Day, and its Unison branch are also taking five days of action in June. Other Unison strikes this month will hit Liverpool, Liverpool Hope, Leeds, Manchester Metropolitan and Winchester, and further branches are being balloted for action in the autumn. Campaigns against job cuts continue at UEA, Kent and Brighton.

It's worrying, however, that these local struggles risk being undermined by a leadership that has so badly handled industrial relations with its own staff that the Unite branch of UCU is now balloting for action. This follows a decision by the UCU General Secretary and senior management not to extend the contracts of two postgraduate organisers, despite Congress voting to expand the work they do, yet another anti-democratic move by the union leadership.

• UCU members opposed to the Stop The War position on Ukraine adopted narrowly at Congress last month have set up a network. Model motions are being drafted in several branches. More: bit.ly/ucuukr