Would you like to know what’s going on with our pension scheme? Why the plans to attack it are totally unnecessary and actually damaging to the future of the scheme?

If you missed the open meeting on 6 February with Sam Marsh from UCU University of Sheffield, who explains in understandable terms what the situation is, here’s a video of the lecture.

What about USS? The great pensions scandal (YouTube)

The charts which were on screen during the meeting are in the blog post 10 reasons why USS is a scandal waiting to bite back

There are detailed resources if you would like more (loads more!) at UCU University of Sheffield’s webpages.

(updated 05/03/2018)

We were very grateful for the support at our march and rally on Thursday 22nd February.  Every day of the strike we are having a short rally at 11 am on the steps of the Parkinson Building, and all supporters are very welcome to join us there.

How else you can help us:

1. Financially

UCU members will lose a lot of money during this 14-day strike, so we’d be really grateful if you or your organisation can donate to our Fighting Fund.

For details of how to donate to the local fighting fund please email ucu@leeds.ac.uk

Or you can donate to the national UCU Fighting Fund

2.  Letter writing

It would be great if you could write to the University of Leeds Vice Chancellor, Sir Alan Langlands (vice-chancellor@leeds.ac.uk and copy to ucu@leeds.ac.uk) expressing your concerns and asking him to use his influence on Universities UK to get them to negotiate meaningfully with UCU, with no pre-conditions.

A particular concern you might like to raise is the intention of university management to deduct wages from members observing the Action Short of a Strike. We have already had wages deducted for strike days, but in addition management intend to deduct 25% of our pay, ongoing, for not rescheduling classes that were not held because of the strike. This is double counting, unprecedented, and impractical, and is clearly eroding the goodwill which the university relies on heavily.  More about this here and also see our Open Letter to university management asking them to drop this punitive 25% deduction.

If you are an alumnus of the University of Leeds you could use or adapt this template letter to the VC.

Thank you very much for everything you can do.