Julie Wilkinson (Manchester Metropolitan University)

Election address

Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing 

The first HR director I met as a newly-elected branch Secretary, in negotiations at Manchester Metropolitan University in 2016, told the UCU team that our members had a reputation as moderates, who would never support strike action.  We were fighting to defend more than 190 jobs.   We went on to become the first UCU branch in the country to achieve just above the 50% threshold in the newly introduced anti-trade union legislation.  We took two days of well-supported strike action, including offering an alternative street open day, and saved very nearly all the jobs at risk.  That was a powerful lesson in the value of solidarity. 
In my experience, UCU members learn faster than management.  It is better not to have to take industrial action to protect our jobs, our pay and conditions, our health and safety, and our professional autonomy and standing.  But as trades unionists, we care about education, and about each other.

As I write, our branch has just achieved nearly 65% participation in a consultative ballot on proposed action on health and safety and workload exploitation, with large majorities in favour of industrial action, should management refuse to reach a fair deal.  The branch is more than twice the size it was when I took on the secretary's role, the result of  determined and persistent team work, linking the understanding we develop in supporting individual and group casework, with branch campaigns.

Since I was elected from a branch that was effectively de-recognised by management, we began a painstaking fight back.  I have taken a leading role in winning crucial deals including a 'lecture capture' agreement protecting members' copyrights; a research Code of Practice which recognises amongst other equalities issues, the impact of pregnancy, child-rearing, and caring responsibilities in relation to research outputs; and at last in 2020, a new recognition agreement reinstating UCU's formal rights to consultation and negotiation.

I have worked to bring our branch into contact with UCU activity regionally and nationally, as well as with trade union networks across the North West.  In making our arguments to management we are acutely aware of the regional inequalities in Government responses to Covid19, and our responsibilities, social, economic and political to the future of the young people in the areas we serve.  If you choose to vote for me in this election I will bring to UCU's HEC, my experience of regional networking including as women's representative to the North West regional TUC, and as a long-serving representative from my branch to the North West regional committee of UCU.