University and College Union
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| Full name | University and College Union |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1 June 2006 |
| Members | 116,000 (on formation) |
| Affiliation | TUC, ICTU |
| Key people | Sally Hunt (General Secretary) |
| Office location | Carlow Street, Camden, London |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Website | www |
The University and College Union (UCU) is a British trade union. The union has around 116,000 members and is the largest further and higher education union in the world.
UCU is a vertical union representing casualised researchers and teaching staff as well as "permanent" lecturers. Definitions of all these categories are currently rather grey due to recent changes in fixed term and open-ended contract law. In many universities, casualised academics form the largest category of staff and UCU members.
UCU was formed by the merger on 1 June 2006 of the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and the National Association of Teachers in Further and Higher Education (NATFHE). For its first year, a set of transitional rules was in place until full operational unity was achieved in June 2007. During the first year of the new union the existing General Secretaries (Sally Hunt and Paul Mackney) remained in post, managing the union’s day-to-day business jointly. Paul Mackney did not stand for General Secretary of UCU owing to ill-health and Sally Hunt was elected General Secretary of the union on 9 March 2007, and took office on 1 June 2007.
UCU is campaigning against private finance initiatives and joint ventures, such as those proposed by INTO University Partnerships.
UCU campaigns heavily to reduce academic casualisation, including the use of temporary contracts to employ tutors, lecturers and project researchers. UCU's view of project research is that research is performed more efficiently by professional and stable career researchers, based in researcher pools and assigned to projects internally as they come up, as in most non-university project-based organisations. As in industry, researchers between projects should be considered "on the bench", paid our of Full Economic Costs from previous grant income, and use their bench time to manage new project bids and fulfill their continued professional development quotas. Hourly paid bank workers on zero-hours contracts have also been represented by UCU, and in Universities such as Edinburgh these positions have been replaced by full-time jobs as a result.
UCU supports Abortion Rights which campaigns "to defend and extend women's rights and access to safe, legal abortion"; among its statements it opposes the criminalisation of sex-selective abortion.
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