Over the last five months, university staff have taken 18 days of strike action in the fight to protect pensions and win long overdue improvements to pay and working conditions. I’m incredibly proud of my union and the action we have taken. But despite this almost unprecedented action, employers haven’t moved an inch. Instead, they are more entrenched than ever.

University vice chancellors are some of the most politically ideological bosses in the country. For well over the decade I have worked in UK academia, they have been spearheading a deeply toxic neoliberal commodification of higher education. Today, universities resemble corporations, seeking to increase revenue with an unhealthy addiction to student fees, expensive advertising campaigns and extravagant building projects—all with the aim of winning a bigger share of the market at the expense of investing in staff.

Whilst universities hoard tens of billions of pounds in reserves, around 100k university staff are employed on precarious contracts, while real terms pay has fallen by over a quarter since 2009. Equality failings are rife and staff are being pushed beyond breaking point by punishing workloads. On top of that, pensions have been slashed, for some by as much as 41%.

The strike action taken so far this year has been inspiring, as has been the support from students and the public on campus picket lines. Each vote to strike and withdraw labour is a courageous act and we should not forget that.

But we must also acknowledge when tactics need switching up and when circumstances on the ground change. The truth is, the second longest period of university strikes in the union’s history has not produced the progress we need. Pension cuts have been forced through and on pay and working conditions, vice chancellors aren’t even negotiating.

The challenges for our union don’t end there. As well as deeply ideological bosses, we are up against some of the most restrictive trade union laws in Europe. From the requirement for paper ballots to an arbitrary 50% turnout threshold, the entire system is hardwired against workers.   

Faced with this, we as a union have to take our campaigning to the next level. Three ballots in the space of six months have seen some branches perform extraordinary feats in beating the anti-union threshold. But overall fewer and fewer branches are able to get over the line with just 37 out of 149 able to secure new mandates. Numbers mean leverage and it is for this reason too that a marking and assessment boycott at this point simply won’t work either and deliver sector-wide success.

Some in our union want more reballots and to go again, hitting employers hard with however many members happen to be in the fray. It is heartbreaking to know that what we have given hasn’t been enough, but this is the reality. Continuing in these circumstances is not a sign of strength, it is a sign of weakness.

The best course of action for our union now is to build like our lives depended on it—our livelihoods and wellbeing certainly do. That means turning up the heat in our campaigning on campus, engaging with students on the issues that matter to us, and most importantly increasing our density to hit back harder in the next 12 months, the culmination of which will be a national aggregated ballot in 2023, if we haven’t already won by then.

In universities, only around a third of staff eligible to join UCU are members. Where density is higher, such as Chester, Northumbria, the 15 colleges who won disputes last year and in our Novus Prison branch, our union has won important and impressive victories, in the case of Chester with no strike action at all. A rapid, dedicated organising campaign which builds our density is what will scare vice chancellors, and compel them to negotiate and improve working conditions.

And we shouldn’t stop there. We need to spend the next few months working up national and local joint industrial strategies with other campus unions. Alongside estates, facilities and catering staff we can build bring universities to a standstill. If we invest the coming months in building and organising, it is that collective strength that will mean we will win early, and win big.        

Shifting strategy is not capitulation; organising and building is action. I share the concerns and impatience of casualised colleagues—I am one of them, and have been casually employed for the majority of my academic career. The harms perpetuated by widespread casualisation must end. By building our union on campus, we can scare the hell out of vice chancellors whilst achieving this key goal.

I know there will be deeply upset union comrades reading this. We want change now, but we don’t yet have the ability to win. However, changing tactics means we will in the future. That is what is important now, not pressing repeat out of a sense of loyalty to a strategy that isn’t working. A fight is only a fight if there is a path to victory.                    

Our higher education sector conference meets shortly to decide how to escalate our disputes. I don’t want more of the same. I want to see us emerge from it with a radical and ambitious plan to start organising now to win our first ever UK-wide aggregated ballot and put all 150 universities and tens of thousands more staff into the struggle for the first time.