Help your UCU Higher Education reps decide what we should do next for our pay dispute
Please read, fill in, and share with your contacts
Dear subscribers
UCU's consultative ballot results on whether we should take industrial action over another below inflation pay offer were released on 19 August. On a turnout of 32% of members, 74.5% rejected the pay offer, but only 61.2% of members who voted indicated that they were prepared to take action to try to win more. The overall turnout and the gap between those who are unhappy with the offer and those willing to take action for a better offer, gives members of the Higher Education Committee (HEC) some confusing messages about how we should respond. A decision on next steps will be taken by this committee on 1 September.
Like all of UCU, UCU Commons members want better pay and conditions for members, but we also recognise the depth of the current crisis facing HE, with so many people having hours cut, not having contracts renewed and losing jobs. Longstanding agreements to open national negotiations with employers on casualisation, equality pay gaps and issues related to workload have also finally begun to bear fruit, with meetings beginning to take place. Employers have indicated that they may again withdraw from these if we move to a formal ballot. Our UCU Commons HEC members want to make decisions on 1 September that put us all collectively in the best possible situation to get the best possible deal for members.
So we've put together a few additional questions to inform our votes. We hope many member will use this opportunity to feed further information in on how you'd like us to proceed.
We will keep this form open for responses until 5pm on Friday, 29 August.
Should you have any queries about this, please contact UCUCommons@gmail.com. Please see this link for our GDPR / Data privacy statement. We will aggregate and anonymise any data provided via this form and delete the raw data within four weeks of the closure of the form.
Please do take the time to fill this in and share with your contacts.
In solidarity,
UCU Commons
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