Email sent to member’s by Lopa on Wednesday 10th December 2025
Dear members,
Please find attached the motion on Moving towards a new industrial action mandate, to be voted on at Friday’s members meeting. The most important part is the last four bullet points, in which we specify the terms of the new mandate. As we argued when we accepted management’s offer in November, this was also because of the limits within the terms of our previous mandate for industrial action around no compulsory redundancies until 31 December 2026.
The proposed new mandate significantly strengthens our position in that it 1) extends the mandate to 31 December 2027 (first bullet point); 2) allows us to respond to recent developments around new staff-student ratios and a reduction in research time and the related threat of job cuts (second bullet point); 3) targets specifically the suspension and threatened closure of programmes including the related job cuts (third bullet point); and 4) points out that management has already broken the November agreement (fourth bullet point).
This motion was discussed with your UCU reps and revised in line with their suggestions. For immediate questions, please contact your reps. Otherwise, we are looking forward to listening to your thoughts on Friday at the members meeting.
In solidarity,
Lopa (Branch President) on behalf of branch committee