Has the MAB in summer 2023 not shown that MABs do not work? Why should we pursue this tactic?
The UK-wide MAB in 2023 did not achieve all its objectives, as individual employers hid behind the national employers’ association UCEA, arguing that they cannot make concessions independently.
However, at the local level we prevented management from deducting salary in a second round of punitive deductions. Moreover, we had been extremely successful at fundraising substantial amounts of hardship finance, allowing us to make large payouts to members.
Similar to the MAB in 2022, the MAB in summer 2026 will be a local MAB confronting our management alone. Our local MAB in 2022 was a success for precisely that reason. We saw then, in our negotiations, how much management hated a MAB, especially when the responsibility for bringing it to an end rests with them. Management in the end made significant concessions without any pay lost.
Management’s contingency regulations will ensure that a MAB will be toothless.
Yes, contingency regulations can be and probably will be invoked again by our management, as they have done in 2023. It will allow them to award module marks as part for whole. A module in which the first item of assessment is completed and even if it only counts for 40 per cent of the overall mark could be upgraded to the full mark of that module. Before management can do so, however, they first need to get approval from Senate. This is anything but inevitable. The balance on Senate has changed and especially elected Senate members are highly likely to oppose this.
Moreover, the very fact that management has gone through the effort of drawing up contingency regulations indicates that a MAB represents a meaningful threat. These regulations exist because withdrawing your labour from assessments is emphatically a highly effective cause of disruption.
Finally, even if management successfully invokes contingency regulations, implementing them in practice is an all together different challenge. Due to APM job cuts, even the minor assessment problems resulting from strike action in September and October 2025 could not yet be mitigated. This has been postponed until the summer term 2026. A full MAB then will completely upend UoN’s assessment regime.
A MAB cannot work because not everybody will participate. Many colleagues are not UCU members and even some who are, will not take the necessary action.
Our understanding is that members in many Schools are keen on implementing a MAB. However, even if the implementation is uneven across the various units of the university, the disruption of the assessment process will be drastic. As management only knows very late, whether a particular colleague has participated or not, i.e. the date when the marks are due, the MAB will cause maximum confusion.
I am not participating in a MAB of final year students, as I am concerned about those students’ mental health and future careers.
This attitude, while understandable at some level, is exactly what management will rely on. They ‘trust’ our ‘obligation’ to students to ensure that the MAB will fail. We must not fall into this trap!
Please pause and also consider the mental health and future careers of your colleagues, who fall victim to the university’s large scale cuts. Academic jobs are rare, especially at this point in time. All of us feel very lucky to have found a permanent job working in the area we love. But many of us working in the sector also feel like there is nowhere else for us to go. Those who are made redundant will not just face the financial crisis associated with a lost livelihood, but a crisis of purpose. Furthermore, the small handful who manage to stay in academia and find jobs elsewhere will have to move to new cities, possibly even new countries, uprooting their entire family in the process. Or worse, accepting that they will have to live away from their families.
Finally, we need to remember that students will always receive their grades in the end, as soon as the MAB is resolved. At worst, the graduation ceremony may not be possible, a public relations disaster for management, but not future career threatening for students. Ultimately, it is management’s responsibility, if students are unable to graduate in the planned timescale.
How long will the action last (ie what would it take to lift the MAB)? And what happens once it is lifted?
The MAB will last until management has accepted our demands. Once lifted, any agreement is likely to include the obligation for staff to do the marking. We will make sure in negotiations that staff are allocated sufficient time in this respect.
Can I mark the assessments and just withhold the marks?
We cannot mark scripts and then withhold the marks. Any marks on university systems are the property of the university. How individual colleagues manage marks off the system is another issue and nothing we as a union can comment on.
