Commons Mail #5: NEC Elections 2022
Hello, and welcome back to Commons Mail.
NEC Elections
Our union’s national elections to the executive committees and several other important positions have just opened, and we should all be getting our ballot papers soon. UCU Commons is once again standing a strong set of candidates for the NEC (National Executive Committee), and for positions as Trustees, whose role is to scrutinise and secure the union’s assets and financial positions. As a slate, our collective priorities remain much the same as in previous years, because, unfortunately, not much has changed for the better since! We’re still in a battle to preserve the heart and soul of our sector, not just from increasingly capricious and distant managers, but increasingly from the UK government, national media, vulture consultancy firms, and supine sector regulators such as the Office For Students.
We strongly believe that union structures need to become more responsive, inclusive, caring, and transparent, and that this process must start with the NEC. We also believe that the Equality Committees are an extremely important but little understood part of the union’s national structures, and we are standing three excellent candidates in this round to serve as Representatives of Women members.
Because we’re into that sort of thing, we made a neat little graphic introducing everyone in the “squad” currently standing for election. Our candidates represent what we are about as a collective in wonderful fashion, and we encourage you to read their election addresses when they arrive in the post, or if you’re super keen, here on our website. If you decide to vote for our candidates, we would appreciate it if you emailed your contacts and asked them to check us out too.
#Strike Swag
Many of us will be downing tools in the coming days, and while it’s unlikely anyone relishes the prospect, we all know it needs to be done. The sheer dishonesty of responses from our employers and our pension fund managers makes clear just how much is at stake in this strike round. We will be out on the picket lines, but in addition we are designing some “strike swag” graphics, fliers, and other fun bits to bring some brightness to those early morning pickets. We will set a dedicated commons mail with links to all of it, free to use, once it is ready.
It sounds trivial, but it is important to keep our spirits up even as assaults on our pay and conditions intensify, and as the scourge of precarity is forcibly normalised by managers whose only priority is their own bottom line. Chins up, and we’ll see you out there on the picket lines.
in solidarity;
The UCU Commons Collective