Achi news desk-
The aim was to give the sector some breathing space, strike a deal, and use the interim years to rebuild relations and start working together on other issues that have spent years on the back burner.
That potential breathing space is quickly being suffocated. Almost two years later, the dispute continues with little sign of concessions from either side.
To understand how the current dispute has dragged on for so long, however, it needs to be placed in the context of a college sector that has been shaped and fractured by constant disputes over the past decade.
National discussions, national costs
Since unions launched an official dispute in May 2015 to defend their pay claim, there has been little respite and industrial relations have continued to deteriorate. The 2015 dispute was followed by industrial action before being resolved with a pay award in 2016.
However, the pause was short-lived. The Scottish Educational Institute of Further Education Lecturers’ Association (EIS-FELA), the union representing college lecturers, accused employers of rejecting their pay award in 2016 and launched further industrial action in 2017, calling on employers to “honour” the deal” from the previous situation. agreements.
This was settled after national industrial action, and employers agreed to implement wage deals for 2015-16 and 2016-17.
The 2016-17 academic year was a defining one for college industrial relations. That year, College Employers Scotland (formerly the Employers’ Association) was established to represent the management side in the Joint National Negotiating Committee.
This is also the year that national collective bargaining was implemented as promised by the SNP government.
The creation of national bargaining meant significant changes to the way pay claims, disputes and industrial action were negotiated and settled by providing a forum to negotiate national binding agreements over pay, terms and strategies for the sector.
But this required a critical, expensive first step to begin with: wage harmonisation.
Read more: Fears for students as 9% pay rise is imposed on colleges
Before national bargaining, college staff in similar roles earned vastly different salaries depending on which college employed them. Some lecturers earned as much as £12,000 a year more than colleagues doing the same job on other campuses.
At the time, pay harmonization resulted in salaries of up to £40,000 a year and 62 days of annual leave. A similar salary and job evaluation project was carried out for support staff.
In the end, Scottish Government reports show that reconciliation has cost the government tens of millions (£34 million in 2018-19 alone). It also meant that the government would sometimes step in and foot the bill for decisions arising from national bargaining (at least £10 million in “collective bargaining costs” in 2019-20).
A timeline of college mayhem
There have been 20 disputes between colleges in the last 10 years. Some have included lecturers, some have included support staff, or, recently, all staff. Most have been about pay, although there have been some disputes over terms.
The 2021 dispute, when lecturers walked out over possible plans to replace lecturers with lower-paid instructor assessors on some campuses, stands out for a few reasons.
The 2021 instructor assessor’s dispute was launched against what EIS-Fela called “fire and re-hire” plans to replace lecturers with lower paid workers.
But employers argued that this was happening locally, and was not being done as part of a national policy decision. Therefore, it should not be the subject of national bargaining or national dispute. Rather, it should be resolved at the relevant local colleges, particularly Forth Valley College.
The dispute was eventually settled and Forth Valley reinstated the affected lecturers. Still, it showed a rift in the bargaining process: much of the debate was characterized by disagreement over technical issues and the validity of the dispute, with no claim for an impartial ruling.
This also meant that arguments over procedure weakened public discussion about the problematic implications of the personnel plan.
Although most disputes have been between EIS-FELA and the employers, support staff—around half of the colleges’ workforce—have also experienced conflict.
Each of the three main parties – the college’s employers, lecturers and support staff – has representatives who form the National Joint Negotiating Committee for colleges. EIS-FELA is the only union that represents lecturers, but the three support staff unions, Unite, GMB and Unisein, are given weight in negotiations according to their membership.
Of the seven major industrial action cases since 2015, EIS-FELA has conducted five alone and two with support union colleagues.
Unison has by far the largest membership of the three, meaning that when there is disagreement, Unison’s votes will always win out. In the current dispute, GMB and Unite have agreed to the employer’s wage offer but cannot accept it until Unison votes in favour.
The role of the government
Since implementing national bargaining, the government has intervened several times—at different stages and to different degrees—with funding to facilitate wage negotiations.
This trend started with the government injecting tens of millions of pounds into the sector to help stabilize wages.
Since then, however, the government has vocally distanced itself from intervening in labor disputes in the education sector. Despite that public distance, however, the government has interfered with funding on several occasions.
Perhaps the most obvious case of this in recent years occurred in 2022. During the 2022-2023 school year, more than 55,000 teachers went on strike and closed schools across the country.
The dispute ended in December 2022 when local government employers and the Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) – the umbrella union including EIS-FELA – agreed a pay rise of 14.6% over 28 months. It was a historic agreement that ended the first major strike for teachers since the 1980s.
But the education sector learned the true cost of that deal in May 2023, when the Scottish Government withdrew a proposed investment of £46 million in higher and further education. £26 million of that funding was initially intended for colleges.
Pressed on the reasons for the U-turn, SNP Minister for Further and Higher Education, Graeme Day, told MSPs that withdrawing the extra funding was “primarily about the teacher pay settlement.”
He added that it should not have been a surprise: the government, he said, had been clear that money for the teachers’ settlement would have to come from elsewhere in the education budget.
The government may have established a pattern of paying to end disputes at the last minute, but the current financial and political climate may have taken that option off the table. Inflation and government funding cuts have caused the college sector to operate with a cumulative funding gap of almost £500 million over the past three years.
In recent weeks, government ministers have been involved in increasingly complex politics, from the termination of the Bute House Agreement to a vote of no confidence brought against Prime Minister Humza Yousaf and, ultimately, his resignation.
The £26 million reduction in college funding is less than the £30 million CES estimates it will cost to match the unions’ current pay claim and end the current dispute.
Concerns are growing that the national bargaining structure is not sufficient to resolve disputes in a timely manner. And the other primary exit ramp, emergency funding from the Scottish Government, appears to have closed.
