University and College Union

But thank you all very much indeed for coming on the program this evening.

On Monday, we'll be live from the Labour Party Conference in Liverpool, and the panel will include the General Secretary of the University and College Union, Jo Grady.

This has been a global production

So the National Education Union, Stand Up to Racism, Friends of the Earth, Unison, the Trade Union Congress, Unite the Union, and many more.

And in other images, they've also shown the Fire Brigades Union, the University and College Union, UCU, responsible for the university strikes that robbed us of our tuition fees, Unite, RMT, ASLEF.

It's basically anyone who drives the trains, the tubes, the trams, the buses, teachers in schools, fire brigades.

All of this, they are feeding into stand up to racism, feeding into the violent subversion of our country.

Hello, welcome to No Shortcuts, a UCU podcast.

This is a brand new podcast digging into key issues that impact workers in the post-16 education sector and how we can build a strong and lasting movement organising for power together.

We're going to have two episodes each month.

And today we'll be talking about the vision for this new podcast, we'll talk about the launch of the union's brand new campaign called education it's ours and we'll talk about ucu's place in the wider political landscape as well so today i'm joined by three of ucu's leadership team and firstly uh just to my right ironically is joe grady

hi Who are you? I'm Jo Grady.

I am lucky enough to be the elected leader, the general secretary of UCU.

I feel like I'm on a dating app.

I've been in UCU since about 2006, 2007, joined as a postgraduate student, got elected general secretary in 2019, got reelected in 2024.

But rest assured, there are no other interpretations behind the lack of morals and ethics at the heart of Reform.

As the National Secretary of the University and College Union, Jo Grady, points out here.

Their entire political endeavor is based on dishonesty.

They are presenting themselves as the party of the working class, a working class voice, whereas they are a pure establishment.

It probably adds more, and I think it kind of holds to really what we feared, what we've kind of known really for some time, is that when you go behind the bluster and the rhetoric, this is the reality of reform.

It is as Joe Grady, the General Secretary of the UCU, the University and College Union, put it on Sky.

Over the weekend, when she said that they are con men.

Yeah.

... a, a piece f- with Free Beacon about y- you got a recording from a kind of activist, uh, unit within the academic un- uh, union at, at Cambridge.

It's called the University and College Union.

So they're the top union for academics and other support staff.

Whatever you think of the controversy, it's obviously a tragedy that Jason Arday committed suicide.

Even so, credibly, he stole the interview responses of at least one other researcher and, like, recycled some of his own r- interview responses between people, et cetera.

Could you tell us about this recording you got? Uh, it sounds like an activist unit within the academic union at Cambridge?

So it's called the UCU Solidarity Movement, and UCU stands for University and College Union.

So they're the largest union representing people in higher ed of any stripe.