Jo Grady could hardly be better qualified for her new role. She was born in 1984 into a striking miner’s family; she studied industrial relations at university, and she is a leading expert in trade unions and pension disputes.
This week she will become the new general secretary of the University and College Union (UCU), whose members last year went out on strike over sweeping pension changes, causing two weeks of disruption on campuses across the country. Grady was on the picket lines, with her Glastonbury wellies and her homemade flapjacks.
This year, as she takes over the leadership of the UCU, which represents university librarians, technicians and administrators as well as academic staff, fresh strike ballots are being prepared for September over pensions – again – as well as pay. With the threat of further industrial action looming, Grady says: “It’s a huge responsibility. I take that very seriously. But this has to be resolved.”
The original strike centred on proposals to overhaul radically the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) – the country’s largest private sector pension scheme with 400,000 members at 67 universities and colleges. The changes would have ended guaranteed pension benefits for university staff, who would have lost up to £10,000 a year in retirement.
In an impressive show of solidarity and resourcefulness, UCU members did their homework, held their nerve, and saw off the immediate threat. It was a huge victory in which Grady played a key role as co-founder of USS Briefs – a research project that brought members up to speed on the detail behind the dispute. She was later elected to the union’s national dispute committee and then its national executive committee.
Since then key recommendations designed to resolve the dispute and preserve defined pension benefits in the long term have not been fully implemented, says Grady. “All of the sacrifices and compromises staff made have yet to be rewarded with the implementation of the proposals,” she says.
“It’s a defining issue. If we don’t stand up for this, what we are allowing is the managed decline of our pension scheme. Professions are defined by their terms and conditions and benefits, and secure retirement and pension income is one of those things.”
Grady, from Wakefield in West Yorkshire, was the first in her family to go to university. Her father was a striking miner who worked at the Lofthouse colliery, among others; her mother raised her and her two brothers against the backdrop of one of the most bitter and protracted industrial disputes in living memory.
The experience shaped her. She grew up on stories about the kindness of her community, dining on tinned peaches from unlabelled cans donated by a family friend who worked at the local canning factory, and the importance of pulling together and looking after each other.
“I grew up in a politicised household,” she says. “My dad is a central figure for me in how I think about things. I grew up with a sense of fairness, and of what injustice looks like, and also healthy cynicism about critically analysing the way information is delivered to you. That sense of ‘when we stand together and we act collectively we are stronger’ has always informed my thinking. When you grow up in a working-class community, you really feel that.”
After the miners’ strike finally ended, her father left the colliery and her parents opened a pub – “the community living room” – where Grady worked on Saturdays and Christmas Day, sending lonely older neighbours home with Christmas leftovers. After school and A-levels at Wakefield College, she studied industrial relations at Lancaster University, where she went on to do a master’s on the causes, consequences and solutions of the pensions crisis. Her PhD was about pension disputes, trade unions and the pension crisis.
She landed a job as a lecturer at Leicester University in 2009, moving to Sheffield where she became a senior lecturer in employment relations in 2017. “I’ve spent the past 14 to 15 years researching trade unions, industrial relations and pensions. I’m not sure there’s anybody more specialised in that area in the UK than me.”
Grady admits it was a huge emotional burden having to tell her students last year about the teaching they would miss because of their lecturers’ industrial action. “To know you are essentially abandoning these people who you care very much for and who rely on you, yes, that was difficult.”
Overwhelmingly, however, she says students gave lecturers their backing – with many of them joining the picket lines and sharing the banter, sense of solidarity and the cakes – and going on to organise student occupations in support.
For staff, there was a new camaraderie and shared sense of pride. “We were not all alone in our offices, we were together every day. It was a real democratising moment where all the hierarchies that existed in your day-to-day working environment just disappeared.”
The pickets braved “the beast from the east”. Only the geographers, says Grady, were appropriately dressed. “I don’t think the employers could have predicted that by allowing the dispute to go on for as long as it did that they were creating that alternative space for those solidarities to flourish.”
As the grassroots candidate to succeed the outgoing UCU general secretary, Sally Hunt, forced to retire in February because of ill-health, Grady won with a significant mandate, picking up 64% of the vote in the second round, with a record turnout. Come September she will be touring branches up and down the country, doing everything possible to get people to vote for strike action.
This time there will be simultaneous strike ballots, one to defend pensions, and a second to secure a fair deal on pay, workload, equality, and job security. Ballots open on 9 September and will run until the end of October.
On the pensions ballot, Grady warns: “We are heading towards another round of industrial action, because employers are refusing to cover the cost of the extra contributions USS has demanded.” And on the second ballot: “Pay has been held down for too long. It is time for a comprehensive deal for university staff on pay, equality, workload and job security that puts staff first.”
The UCU’s higher education committee will meet in November to discuss the results of the ballot and what comes next. Grady is optimistic. “One of the refreshing things that you see in the sector is an appetite for people to stand up for themselves.” If strike action follows, there will almost certainly be cake.