Adam Ozanne (University of Manchester)

Election address

I am a Senior Lecturer in Economics and have been President, Vice-President, Secretary and Committee Member in my branch. I am also on UCU's National Executive Committee and have served on its Legal Support Panel, Recruitment, Organising and Campaigning Committee, USS Advisory Committee, and Superannuation Working Group, which I chaired for a period in 2020.

Our challenges

UCU faces many challenges:

• Already excessive workloads made worse by Covid.
• Declining real pay and pay inequalities, rampant casualization, and redundancies imposed by employers who treat education as a business rather than a public good.
• Attacks on the post-92 national contract, pre-92 USS pensions, and on our members everywhere in academic-related and professional support roles.

My track record

I know what it takes to meet these challenges and win for UCU members.

Locally, I have ten years' experience of personal casework, organising, and collective negotiation. I helped lead successful campaigns against compulsory redundancies in 2015, 2017 and 2020 - two of which involved ACAS and one, in 2017, a two-day strike, which resulted in Manchester University adopting sector-leading redeployment, security of employment, and voluntary severance policies.

Nationally, I was an alternate USS negotiator during the successful 2018 strikes and campaigned for the Joint Expert Panel whose two reports vindicated UCU's criticisms of USS. Since then, I have argued for greater involvement of members in decision-making and for more thought to be put into developing industrial strategies that take account of the balance of political power between UCU and employers.

My priorities

We need to learn from the 2019-20 Four Fights/USS strikes, which cost us 22 days' pay but produced few if any tangible gains.

We need to develop new, creative methods for putting pressure on employers, and use every means possible to consult with all UCU members, not just committed activists. This way we can build the widest possible support for negotiating strategies based upon hard-headed understanding of the relative bargaining power of UCU and employers - not wishful thinking.

Success requires unity and the involvement of the whole membership. I argued (unsuccessfully, unfortunately) for the 2021 industrial action ballots to be "aggregated" rather than "disaggregated" branch by branch. The overall turnouts for the USS and Four Fights ballots were both over 50% which means that, if they had been aggregated, every single UCU university branch would have been able to strike instead of 40% of them. That would have given UCU far greater bargaining power: showing that disaggregating the ballots was a strategic error. In future, the principle should be "One Out, All Out", not "Some Out", because it is through united, sector-wide action that we will make long lasting, tangible gains for members.

I support Maxine Looby for election as Vice-President.