Questions to UCU General Secretary Election Candidates

We asked:

1) Do you agree that there is an urgent need for USS to divest from fossil fuels? 

2) What actions would you take to make this happen if elected to General Secretary?

Their responses follow.

Ewan McGaughey 

The answer from me is a massive “yes”, and I’m the only candidate promising any substantive action in their platforms.

I’m promising 100% clean energy (1) at UCU to set an example, and then (2) all universities, and (3) USS – and a credible clean energy shareholder voting policy for all funds: www.ewanmg.uk/planet We’ll do (2) through rankings and a league table, as well as collective bargaining, backed with action where needed, and we’ll do (3) with bargaining and legal action where needed (and I expect it won’t be). Please see the attached. 

Further detail from attachment

100% clean energy at UCU, USS, in all universities, investments and endowments, not more toxic gas, oil or coal

If you vote (for me), we will transform UCU itself to have “now zero” fossil fuels, we will make every university to follow our example, and we will enhance our pensions and endowment funds by making them a global force for the clean energy revolution. Like Harvard’s endowment fund or the Dutch pension funds, we will divest toxic gas, oil and coal. And even more crucially, we will lead the way in ensuring all shareholder rights at USS and university endowments are voted to make every company go clean. We will shift markets, and join the lobby for legislation to make all UK funds do the same. Our members want their savings for a fair retirement, not to be squandered in a fossil fuelled vortex that enflames the planet. We will take legal and collective action against universities and individuals who don’t get it, and throw around distant targets, whether at USS, or in university boards. We will win our future back. 

Saira Weiner

I absolutely agree that there is an urgent need for USS to divest from fossil fuels.

In terms of what I would do, I can’t claim to be an expert in USS Pensions (I work in a post 92) but I see my role as GS to ensure that when branches bring motions to Congress and Conference, that they are implemented! 

However my experience on the NEC has shown me that in practice many motions get dropped as a result of officials telling the NEC they don’t have the resources to carry them out. If that occurs I would use my office either to ensure they were properly resourced or seek to find other ways of doing so, for example working groups of members (openly advertised/or voted on). This is what often happens at a local level, so why are we not using members’ expertise at a national one? 

Also as the candidate of UCUleft, I have several colleagues who are experts on USS (i.e. Deepa Driver, Sean Wallis, Carlo Morelli & Marion Hersch) who have all been USS negotiators in the past few years who can advise me (with groups like yourselves) when in post.

Vicky Blake

USS urgently needs to divest. I’ve always voted to strengthen our union policy in this area. I chaired our USS negotiation team and wider Superannuation Working Group as UCU Vice President in 2019/20. During this time we shifted the ground by agreeing on the need for spaces for UCU and UUK negotiators to examine and propose routes to more ethical investment in dialogue with USS. This led to the agreement in 2020 for biannual meetings between negotiators, the USS Head of Investment, and the USS responsible investment team. UCU negotiators had pressed this for some time: there are no jobs on a burning planet, and retiring on one is not the kind of ‘security’ in later life anyone wants. 

As GS I will back this message and I will ensure our negotiators have full and timely support and analyses they need to make the case to USS, and to our employers’ negotiation team, whose many statements issued on the climate emergency across the sector need to be followed up with meaningful action. I’ve been working very hard with my fellow co-chair and members of the UCU Climate and Ecological Emergency Committee to establish how we, and the wider expertise and reach of UCU’s green reps network can best support elected UCU negotiators in this space. As GS I will ensure that all negotiators are supported in this way and can easily access expertise and understand members’ experiences across our membership. 

We need to identify and build our leverage with respect to divestment quickly and carefully, to make an impact that will shift the USS’s investment ethos. This means pushing on all possible levers politically, socially, and through our industrial relationships. As USS do not employ our members, we cannot therefore take industrial action to target USS. However, we can apply pressure in other ways. For example, we can and must lobby employers, both individually and through their representative body, and write to individual Trustees, asking them to join with us in pushing USS to promote transition to a green economy and to divest from fossil fuels rapidly. Many employers have made positive or promising statements on the climate crisis in recent years but we have seen relatively little progress in action. 

There are several avenues for us to do this, including but not limited to: 

• Closely monitoring and publicising how many times USS have actually used their votes on boards to promote transition. Noting that pension schemes such as Border & Coast publish their voting records on this, we must push USS to do the same. 
• Pushing for more open dialogue about fiduciary duty, including producing comparisons to schemes with stronger ethical investment strategies.
• Pushing USS to publish more information about portfolios of funds open for members to invest via the defined contribution (DC) part of the scheme where they have some control, highlighting to what degree these organisations prioritise a just transition, and where there is any involvement in conflict or arms production. 
• I would also ensure UCU highlights members’ existing options within the DC portion of the scheme, if they have money in the DC part, encouraging members to direct this proportion of their pension fund into ethical investment. We need a wider awareness raising campaign on this, so that our members are able to lead by doing and we can more strongly argue USS itself must follow. 

Ultimately, I will do everything I can as GS to keep the pressure on USS and our employers to understand that environmental collapse is the opposite of a “good investment” and this will include helping every member in the USS scheme to understand how they can add their voice to this campaign. 

Jo Grady

Ethical investment: there have already been a series of meetings with various activist groups about how we can exert pressure on USS to behave more ethically. This has also included engaging with senior legal counsel on the law around the limits of fiduciary duty. We also have a number of meetings scheduled with USS to discuss our concerns. We need clear divestment from fossil fuels, but also clear divestment from the military-industrial complex, such as firms we know have links to providing weapons deployed on civilians.