Anthony O'Hanlon (University of Liverpool)

academic-related

Election address

I am an academic-related member of staff and Branch President at the University of Liverpool.  I am proud to serve a branch that plays a leading role in driving UCU policy and action and hope to bring my experience to our National Executive Committee.

The Covid crisis has intensified attacks on casualised workers, threats to jobs and the worsening of working conditions of university staff. Under my leadership our branch fought over the summer to save the jobs of casualised members in a joint campaign with our sister campus unions, gaining high-profile media and political support. We are now developing a local anti-casualisation claim to provide secure employment and eradicate the yearly cycle of casualised employment many members face.

Working alongside our campus unions I have brought grotesque levels of senior management pay and pay inequality into focus and was successful in introducing a policy of a 1:6 pay ratio between the lowest and highest paid member of university staff into UCU's collective bargaining.

If elected, as a member of the Higher Education Committee, I would work with our Academic-Related Professional Services Committee to tackle one of the biggest attacks on our members: the deliberate undermining of pay grades by employers for academic-related staff. This is nothing other than wage theft and support needs to be provided in tackling this collectively.

Radical overhaul of post-16 education is required. We need to set out blueprints for further, adult and higher education that reverse the systemic inequalities within our sectors. In HE such a vision needs to develop an alternative to a marketised model that has allowed racism, sexism and other forms of discrimination to flourish while eradicating the scourge of casualisation, the role of the university in contributing toward climate change and tackling financialised capital expansion in the interests of workers and our communities.  To do this we need to work in a much more coordinated way with our sister unions and with student organisations and grassroots movements that are resisting rent-obsessed universities.

I am committed to increasing participation within UCU. Locally, a commitment to grassroots organising of rank and file trade unionists has helped organise resistance to returning to campus, helped achieve our branch's highest ever ballot turnout in 2019 and empowered members to fight back against a number of restructures to defend jobs at threat due to reckless managerialism.

If elected I will be accessible to all members and will be actively involved in supporting branches organise for a bigger, stronger and more active union. I firmly believe that through mass rank-and-file trade unionism we can develop a fighting union to create a vision for education that will be achieved through radical, large-scale direct action.