UNIVERSITIES and Colleges Union (UCU) delegates descended on Glasgow on Saturday for their first face-to-face congress since lockdown during a rare weekend of uninterrupted sunshine.

“First things first, Glasgow is my favourite UK city, and it’s great to be back,” the union’s general secretary Jo Grady told the Morning Star during a discussion on industrial organising and international solidarity.

“As you know, we took a firm stance as a union on the pandemic to keep people safe, so it’s great to have everyone back in one room, making decisions, having debates, having votes, having fringes.”

Lockdown has made way for the isolation of many of the workplaces UCU organises in, as the HE and FE sector have atomised and casualised in recent decades.

Educators in prisons feel particularly isolated — forced to organise outside of work time and unable to share experiences publicly.

“There’s loads of FE, HE, adult education and prison members talking to each other, meeting and realising that the union is not only a workplace vehicle for change, but there’s so much more we are doing.”

In a series of national disputes in over pay and pensions, Ms Grady recognised that ballots were only part of the story, particularly in sectors where union density still has “potential for growth.”

“Everybody loves a big ballot win, right?

“But, you know if you want to win a ballot you have to work day by day, week by week, to plan and organise to win.”

Ms Grady said that while a resolution to the pensions dispute looked close, there was still some way to go on the issue of pay. Referring to employer behaviour over the marking boycott, she said: “We have some of the worst bosses in any sector.

“Many vice-chancellors think that a good strategy to solving a dispute is terrorise their staff and alienate their students while the sector is sitting on £44.6 billion in reserves.

“It’s an absurd way of behaving.”

Ms Grady was clear that unions are about more than industrial organising though, with congress passing motions in solidarity with the people of Palestine, which she recently visited.

“Our union firmly understands the power in international solidarity, whether that is to Palestinian people, or any other repressed people.

“It’s the same battle at home or abroad.”

“We’re here in Glasgow, in Pollokshields (in Kenmure St), they had a well-organised network of supporters and they beat the government — we can all learn from that.”

The UCU Congress also passed a motion calling for the withdrawal of Russian troops from Ukraine, an end to British arms supplies escalating the conflict and for peace negotiations.