Why we are taking industrial action and going on strike
Staff in universities have experienced years of real terms pay cuts, combined with rising workloads. Structural inequalities and discrimination mean that those least able to pay the price bear the highest cost. Since the economic crisis in 2008 the real terms pay of university staff has declined by 20%. The gender pay gap across the sector is 15% while disabled and Black and Minority Ethnic staff continue to experience serious pay discrimination. In 2019-20 33% of academic staff were employed on fixed term-contracts. These were the workers who were ‘let go’ when the pandemic struck. Staff’s working conditions are students’ learning conditions. This means that your lecturers, professors, library and student services staff are working more hours for less pay. The university is simply refusing to invest in its most important resource—its staff. This also means bigger class size for you and lecturers who are stretched thin and exhausted. If we don’t stand up, our working conditions, your learning conditions will be eroded beyond repair.
Since 2011, management has relentlessly attacked staff pensions. Every three years a valuation of the health of the USS pension fund is produced, which is based on highly dubious criteria, resulting in a large and artificially manufactured deficit. Staff are then asked to accept cuts to their benefits in order to address the deficit only to be confronted with the same scenario three years later. When the last period of industrial action ended in 2018, the resolution of the conflict included an agreement between employers and UCU to change jointly the method of how the fund is valuated. Employers, including our management, have now broken this agreement. The March 2020 valuation was undertaken at the height of the pandemic and during the first unprecedented national lockdown, when economic prospects looked particularly bleak. The valuation also once again used the same questionable method that management agreed to change in 2018. Unsurprisingly, the March 2020 valuation again produced a deficit and again we have been asked to accept cuts to our pensions, this time of about 12 per cent. We can no longer accept this cycle of ongoing cuts to our pension benefits. If we don’t stand up now, there will be soon little left of our pensions. These huge cuts to pensions are cuts to our pay—since pensions are deferred pay.
We do not want to have to take industrial action yet again. After a year of disruptions due to the pandemic, we have been looking forward to doing what we enjoy, teaching and supporting you. But management has forced our backs against the wall. We are left with no alternative. We do not take industrial action lightly. Every strike day implies a significant financial loss for us. If we do take action, it is because of the decisions that management is making regarding its priorities.
Support your lecturers and university staff, write to the Vice Chancellor and urge her to change management’s position on pensions and pay and working conditions. This is the only way to avoid industrial action.
UCU Committee at UoN