Slides for students about the industrial action

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

If you teach you may want to use these these slides to give students a quick overview of about UCU, the dispute and the industrial action.

PowerPoint format

Text only format

Text only format

A quick guide to UCU 4 fights & pensions
for students
Leeds UCU edition

Significant pay gaps

17.1% racial pay gap

15.1% gender pay gap, In 2020, Leeds reported a gender pay gap of 18.5%

9% disability pay gap

Casualisation is rife in unis

68% of research staff are on casualised contracts

3, 545 academic staff are on Zero hour contracts

We are at a breaking point

4 in 5 staff surveyed are struggling with workload

86% of staff surveyed have been directed towards mental health support because of workload

Below inflation pay rise

£8.70 the hourly rate of the lowest paid teacher in HE

17.6% fall in salaries against inflation since 2009

www.leedsucu.org.uk @leedsucu (twitter, facebook, tiktok).

What do we want?

This is a national dispute with very real local consequences. #OneOfUsAllOfUs

Equality. National agreed action to close the racial, gender and disability pay gaps.

Job security. Staff on hourly paid contracts moved to fractional contracts

Framework to eliminate precarious employment

Manageable workload. 35 hrs to be the standard weekly employment contract for all HE staff

National action to address workload

Fair Pay. £10 minimum per-hour wage for all contract types £2,500 pay uplift for all pay points

USS Pensions

The less you are paid the less goes into your pension

UUK voted to cut ££££ from our retirement benefits

representing an annual guaranteed pension cut of 35% for a typical member

What can students do?

Our working conditions are your learning conditions.

Join our teach outs on strike days!

Make your voices heard.

Ask senior management to engage in meaningful negotiations with UCU.

Let striking staff know you support them!

Organise a fundraiser for our strike fund. We don’t get paid while on strike.

Follow us on social media @leedsucu (twitter, facebook, tiktok). Show your support by using

OneOfUsAllOfUs #UCUstrikes

Strike days

February 14, 15, 16, 17 &18

February 21 & 22

February 28, March 1 & 2

Join us!

On the picket line, in our rallies and teachouts

save staff pensions

staff working conditions are our learning conditions

students support the strikes

fair pay for staff

Industrial action – answers to initial questions

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Branch president Chloe Wallace answers some initial questions about the planned industrial action. This post is from an email sent to branch members 17 November 2021.

UCU reps at the pink picket line gazebo

Dear Members

You will have received yesterday afternoon notification from Jo Grady that we are called to take strike action on 1st, 2nd and 3rd December, and to work to contract from 1st December indefinitely. You will appreciate, I am sure, that a lot of decisions and plans have to now be taken very quickly both at national level and by Leeds committee and officers. I am mindful that many of you will have questions – I thought I would in this email set out some key points of what we know and what we know we have to decide/work through, to answer any immediate questions and reassure you that we are thinking about the rest of them! This is therefore a long email but necessarily so because of the range of questions people have – I’m afraid we don’t have the capacity to deal with lots of incoming emails with individual questions but we know there are a lot of different questions! But much of it will be reiterated over the next days, and advice and FAQs will be issued nationally, so feel free to skim/ignore if you have no particular questions right now!

1. Democratic process

I’ve had some queries about how the decision announced yesterday was reached. As I’ve explained, following our GM on Tuesday last week, our branch delegate went to a Branch Delegates Meeting on Friday. The questions asked at that meeting were a bit different to those we had originally been asked, but given the motion we passed we believe that Leeds answers were clear. We have been sent the report of voting and you can access it here (voting is weighted by size of branch). On USS Leeds voted for option A on industrial action, option B on reballots and yes on strategy. On Four Fights we voted for Option A on industrial action, option  A on reballots and option A on strategy. As you can see, particularly on the matter of the number of days action, views varied and it looks as though HEC have tried to find a compromise. It is now for the whole union to make this work – it is clear that this needs to be a long fight. The NUS have already declared their support of UCU action and have published surveys suggesting robust levels of student support, and student solidarity groups are already organising, including at Leeds – and we will be producing more materials for students as we go. 

2. Strike action

Many of you are veterans of strikes and pickets; many will be doing this for the first time. A few key points

  • Remember that striking means doing no work at all – you can’t strike from one part of your job but not another (this is a matter both of union solidarity and of the law). So anything that you do as part of your job on those days should not be done. I anticipate national FAQs fairly soon, but want to be particularly clear that you should not plan to reschedule teaching or any other events
  • You are not obligated to tell anyone that you will be striking although you will be asked to report your action afterwards. You should not respond to any requests to say you will be striking as that might be used to reduce the impact of the strike. We will send advice as to how to communicate with students (because we recommend that you do talk to students – just not managers)
  • You will not be paid for the days you strike. Historically, the University’s position has been that pay deductions are carried out on the normal run of payroll. The last payroll date for December is 1st December, due to the early Christmas break, which means we anticipate the pay deductions should on that principle be made at the end of January. However, it is for the University to decide when deductions happen and how your strike action should be reported – we can, and will, make representations to them about it and we hope that the university will choose not to be punitive.
  • We await confirmation about what is to be done in relation to strike pay from HQ – once we have that we will decide what to do about our local strike fund. Our local fund is healthy, although we will be fundraising, and we anticipate being able to support low paid, casualised and hourly paid staff in particular. To prepare for a long period of action, including possible deductions for action short of a strike, we need to do fundraising for the national Fighting Fund – branches without a current mandate are being asked to donate and I encourage you to share the donation link amongst connections and to donate yourself if you can afford it https://www.ucu.org.uk/fightingfund
  • We are known for our lively and colourful pickets which we hope can continue, but will be doing things a bit differently due to COVID and the need to be inclusive. Discussions are ongoing but if you have ideas of how we can ensure that our wonderful solidarity can be extended to those who cannot make it to the famous pink gazebo, please do share them.
  • We are also mindful that our current remote/hybrid working will mean that striking may happen differently – again, we expect national advice but will also communicate as much advice as we can. For now, we remind you that it is university policy that any recording you make is under your control and cannot be used without your consent.

3. Working to contract (action short of a strike)

Working to contract is one form of action short of a strike (ASOS) and we expect national guidance to be produced. The plan is to escalate ASOS – so if the employers don’t move, we add in other activities (e.g.marking boycott). We need to work to ensure that it bites and thus will need ongoing dialogue and support amongst ourselves – we really do need to take it seriously. But please wait for national guidance. The point of working to contract is that you are within your contractual terms and thus pay should not be deducted (unlike a marking boycott where the university may claim the right to deduct pay by calling it partial performance) – but most of our contracts are quite vague so it needs care. You will hear more from us on this. Please remember however that the mandate for this starts on 1st December – there are legal requirements in relation to notice which mean we can’t start earlier than that

In solidarity

Chloe

Dr Chloe Wallace
Associate Professor in Law
School of Law
University of Leeds.

Co-Director, Centre for Innovation and Research in Legal Education
Programme Leader, School of Law 4 year programmes

President, Leeds University UCU

@chloew1970

Universities UK misinformation about pension cuts?

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

There are serious questions to ask about whether university senior management has misrepresented the planned cuts to our pensions. This post was an email sent to members on 16 November 2021 on behalf of the committee by the committee’s lead rep on pensions, Mark Taylor-Batty.

Dear colleagues

Have the University misinformed you about the cuts to your pension represented by the UUK proposals to change benefit structures? Have you been given misrepresentations or simplifications which might nonetheless contribute to decisions you might make about long-standing financial decisions concerning income in retirement? In this email I want to address these questions, and frame them first in terms of the University’s guiding principles for management, the Code of Practice of Corporate Governance. This code puts expectations on governance structures to be ‘open and transparent’ and ‘promote integrity and objectivity’.

Focussing now on communications regarding the current USS pension issue, there have been three seeming misrepresentations that we have seen relayed to us at the University of Leeds.

  1. That the UCU did not table a proposal at the August JNC. We have since been fully disabused of this misrepresentation. The UCU did table a proposal, one that had been costed by the USS and was on the August JNV agenda, but UUK obliged its removal from the vote by refusing to match the covenant cover they had nonetheless already costed into their own proposal. This issue is now contributing to arguments within a legal challenge.
  2. That Mercer, who is providing the University’s information sessions is ‘independent’ or ‘impartial’. Even the University of Sussex, at a time when Adam Tickell (chair of the Employers’ Pension Forum) was VC, agreed to remove the word ‘independent’ in relation to Mercer. The close relationship between Mercer and USS is outlined in their 2021 accounts. (‘we have partnered with Mercer’; ‘investment advice from its external advisers, Mercer’; ‘For the year ending 31 March 2021, the scheme’s external investment advisers/consultants were Mercer’). Further, the University of Leeds’s own Pension and Assurance Scheme is advised by Mercer.
  3. That the pension cuts represented ‘only’ a headline 12% reduction in defined benefits (more recently modified to argue 10% to 18%)

This email seeks to address this last misrepresentation, with the use only of calculations from the USS’s own modeller.

Before I do that, I want to say that in fairness to our senior management inputting into comms to us, what they have been doing is relaying UUK lines of argument fed to them and replicated at other Universities. There is now an opportunity for our University management to acknowledge those UUK misrepresentations, guided by the principles in the above named Code of Practice.

The misrepresentation in 3.) above was communicated to us via an Internal Comms message of 8 September, which linked to a page offering the following:

“For a university staff member earning under the salary threshold of £40,000 per annum, the UUK proposal would lead to a headline reduction of about 12% in future pension benefits […] assuming inflation remains below 2.5%.”

More recently they have published material that states: “the proposals would reduce the amount USS pension members receive in retirement by around 10 to 18% for most members (7 to 15% including state pension) – contrary to a figure of 35% reduction reported elsewhere”

I want to unpack here for you why these figures represent a gross misrepresentation. You might want to note that inflation is already above 2.5%, but we’ll park that for now and return to it further down. You might also want to note that the attempt to reduce figures by incorporating state pension, which is nonetheless totally independent from the USS pension.

To address the seeming misrepresentation, I will make use of the valuable work of Michael Otsuka ,whose meticulous calculations in this area you can follow on Twitter, alongside those of his colleague on JNC Sam Marsh.

I quote from Michael’s feed here:

We now have graphic visualisation of how misleading @USSEmployer’s “headline reduction of about 12%” claim is. The 12% “headline” captures only the smallest initial gap between blue [current pension value] & orange lines [UUK proposed pension value] as indicated by the red circle at far left.

[The 12% headline rate] fails to account for decades of erosion of the value of this member’s pension by inflation as this gap grows larger over time, to a 22% reduction in the first year this member draws a pension at retirement age 66 & a 30% reduction by age 86:

These reductions in the value of this member’s pension are based on the [USS] modeller’s default assumed rate of CPI inflation of 2.5%. But market expectations of the average rate of inflation over the next 10 years have recently been running at about 4%. If one slides the modeller’s inflation assumption up to a realistic 3.5% CPI per annum, the reductions in the value of this member’s pension at ages 66 & 86 grow from 22% & 30% to 40% & 55% respectively:

I leave you to decide if the information detailed in University communications on the impact of the UUK proposals offer a full and fair, ‘open and transparent’, assessment of the measurable loss to your income in retirement that those proposals actually represent.

Further reading:

There is currently an ongoing consultation of USS members about these changes. I will communicate about this at a later date.

Mark Taylor-Batty
UCU Leeds Pensions Officer

Industrial action: December strike days announced

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Following members’ vote for industrial action, three strike days have been called for December 2021:

  • Wednesday 1 December
  • Thursday 2 December
  • Friday 3 December

More on the UCU national website at https://www.ucu.org.uk/article/11872/Universities-to-be-hit-with-three-days-of-strikes-in-December

More details to follow.

Strike rally on Parkinson steps with Leeds Student Staff Solidarity banner

Changes to Senate and Council

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

On Friday 12th November papers were circulated to members of Senate in advance of the meeting set for Wednesday 17th November. These papers contain three major governance changes which we are profoundly concerned by.

Firstly, Council have agreed to change the method of selecting its members, such that elected staff members will be replaced by staff members nominated by the Nominating and Governance Committee. This committee consists of the Pro-Chancellor, the Vice-Chancellor and three lay members of Council. The rationale for this is unclear. A review was undertaken of governance processes at the University by Advance HE last year, and that review, it appears, refers to a need to ensure that members of Council have the appropriate skills and experience needed. That review is available with Council papers for July, when this was discussed, which can be accessed by University staff here : https://forstaff.leeds.ac.uk/homepage/374/governance. It raises some concerns about the expertise of non-staff members of Council, in relation to their understanding of the Higher Education sector, but is silent on issues relating to staff members of Council. The review also reports concerns that Council lacks diversity, and notes that elections can prove a barrier to members of under-represented groups putting themselves forward. The same can be said of appointment processes. This proposal has already been agreed by Council: Senate is being asked to comment on it.

Secondly, Senate is being asked to agree a substantial reduction in its size and composition. Senate currently has up to 189 members, of whom up to 83 are ex officio or co-opted, up to 84 are elected staff, and 19 are drawn from the student body. The Advance HE report suggested that this be reduced to 80 or fewer and that that could include a rebalancing of the composition of Senate in favour of elected, as opposed to ex officio, members. The proposal before Senate is for a Senate which has 49 members as a maximum – quite a lot fewer that what is proposed by Advance HE. Ex officio and co-opted members are reduced to 27, elected members to 16 and student members to 6. This means a rebalancing of the membership of Senate in favour of ex officio rather than elected members. It also means an almost complete removal of professional services staff from Senate. Heads of Services are stripped of Senate membership, with the exception of the Librarian and it is not clear by what mechanism, if at all, Professional Services/Academic-related staff will be able to stand for election. Any justification on this on the basis of the Senate’s role as focused on student education and research is flawed and an insult to our Professional Services and Academic-Related colleagues who contribute so fundamentally to the core business of the University. Senate is being asked to agree this proposal.

Thirdly, the proposal is to reduce to remit of Senate to only academic matters, narrowly understood. At the moment, as well as its academic remit, Senate may consider various important aspects of the university work and governance:

“In addition, the Senate

(a) may discuss and declare an opinion on any matter whatsoever relating to the University;

(b) shall be consulted about the allocation of general revenue;

(c) shall be given the opportunity to comment on proposed policies or modifications to policies, and on major business proposals affecting the academic work of the University;

(d) shall be consulted about any material modifications to the constitutional and organisational structure of the University.”

See https://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/documents/senate_statement_of_role_and_responsibilities.pdf) In the new proposals, this is reduced to merely:

“The Senate may discuss and declare an opinion on any academic matter relating to the University.”

Taken together these proposals reduce the ability of ordinary staff members to participate in the decision making of the University at the highest level. They are the very opposite of participatory democracy. The proposal appears to be that representation in Senate and Council will be replaced by ‘town hall meetings’ to ‘air concerns’: this is by no means adequate, particularly given the tendency in recent similar meetings across the university to the use of a webinar format and selectivity in the taking of questions.

Finally, the proposals violate the University’s Code of Practice on Corporate Governance – https://www.leeds.ac.uk/secretariat/documents/code_of_practice_on_corporate_governance.pdf

Under ‘Collegiality’ the University commits “to maintaining elected seats on the Council, the Senate and all policy boards (in the case of the Senate the elected seats to constitute a majority of the total membership)”. This statement was negotiated with UCU in 2010 and we are thus gravely concerned to see it so comprehensively violated. UCU believes that the participation of elected staff representatives on governance bodies is a central tenet of academic freedom and that these changes thus add to the continuing undermining of academic freedom that is being seen across the sector.

Finally we note that no Equality Impact Assessment has been conducted of these proposals and we are concerned that they will exacerbate the already existing lack of diversity within Senate and Council. It is not enough to make general commitments to equality; if we are to have confidence in the University’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion, proposals such as this one should contain specific assessments as to the impact on the diversity of Senate and Council, before either body is asked to agree them.

We urge all Senators to support any call for a vote on these proposals and to vote against them. In a General Meeting on 7th October this year the branch resolved to lodge a dispute with the University if proposals which reduce the involvement of professional services staff and undermine democracy are not removed. See https://www.leedsucu.org.uk/substantive-motions-passed-at-general-meeting-7-october-2021/#senate

Chloe Wallace, branch president

Policy decision: motion 1, 9th November 2021

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

The motion was agreed at the general meeting Tuesday 9 November 2021

A. Leeds Uni UCU notes
  1. The excellent votes for action in ballots.
  2. The new strategy proposed by the General Secretary in her address and email on Friday 5 November 2021.
B. Leeds Uni UCU believes
  1. The results are a testament to the hard work of branch officers and activists and the willingness of members to fight in over pensions, pay, equality, casualisation and workloads.
  2. One day of strike action in each dispute this term is token action which will not be effective.
  3. A full, aggregated ballot over the Four Fights is an unnecessary gamble.
  4. While casualisation is important, so are pay, pay equality and workloads.
C. Leeds Uni UCU resolves
  1. To argue that the period up to Christmas should be used to discuss local tactics, mobilise students and to increase our branch organising and recruitment with the view to escalating strike action alongside action short of strike in the New Year.
  2. To propose maintaining the Four Fights as Four Fights.
  3. To propose immediately re-balloting only those branches which did not make the threshold in either or both disputes.
  4. To reject aggregation of the re-ballots.
  5. To propose 1 day of action in first week of December across all branches (whether strike or not) to mobilise the workforce and start putting pressure on our institutions in light of January escalation.

Proposed by Lesley McGorrigan, moved by Lesley McGorrigan, seconded by Megan Povey, with amendments proposed by Gabriella Alberti, moved by Gabriella Alberti, seconded by Jane Holgate, proposed by Jane Holgate, moved by Jane Holgate, seconded by Andi Rylands, proposed by Nely Konstantinov, moved by Gabriella Alberti, seconded by Lata Narayanaswamy. Motion as amended carried.

USS ballot outcome

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Good morning members

Many of you will already be aware of the outcome of the ballot on the USS dispute, which arrived in our inboxes at about 7pm last night. This branch has yet again smashed the anti-union 50% legal ballot threshold, with a turnout of 60.8% – 75.2% of those of you who voted said that you are prepared to take strike action, and 85.5% of you who voted said that you are prepared to take action short of a strike.

The results of the Four Fights ballot will be out at some point today – they take longer to count as more branches have been balloted, but I do not expect to see much difference in those results.

This is a magnificent outcome, which repeats what we achieved in 2019, in very different circumstances. 

I want to pay particular tribute to everyone who volunteered as part of the effort to get the vote out – texting, calling, messaging people to ensure that as many people as possible exercised their democratic right to have their voice heard. The importance of this work can be seen across the Pennines  – our comrades at Manchester University missed the threshold by one (1) vote, amid reports of  massive postal delays. Newcastle UCU were short of the threshold by about 6 votes; UCL by 17. Discussions will be had about whether these branches will reballot to be able to join the action, and we will do everything we can to support them.

To remind you, we have an Extraordinary General Meeting next Tuesday 9th at 1pm – we will send a link out on Monday. What we will do in this meeting is discuss the branches views on next steps which we will then feed into a UK-wide  branch delegate meeting on Friday 12th. UCU’s higher education committee will then meet on Friday afternoon to make decisions about how we will take industrial action on this mandate. Because of legalities it often takes a little while for those decisions to be announced to members, so we may need to be patient, and the employer must be given 2 weeks notice of any industrial action, suggesting that we can expect any action to start in very late November or December.

 Our employers, of course, can avoid the disruption of industrial action, by working in collaboration, with each other and with us, to find settlements to these disputes, and I hope they have woken up this morning determined to do so. In the meantime, we are determined to build our solidarity and our creativity to take effective, powerful action to bring them back to the table. 

This was an immense branch effort – I’m proud of us and proud to be your President.

In solidarity

Chloe

Your pay; did you know…

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Three reasons to vote YES, YES in the UCU ballots:

● Twelve years of below inflation pay offers have given us a 20% pay cut

● This year’s pay offer is just 1.5%, but inflation is at 4.5%

● You are also facing a 35% cut to your guaranteed pension

You can check the cut to your pension (deferred pay) here:  http://uss-pension-model.com/

Post your ballot envelope today. We can win.

Email to all members, 29 October 2021, from branch campaigns officer Lesley McGorrigan

USS – Notice of statutory consultation

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Notice of statutory consultation by employers in relation to Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS)

Email to all members from branch pensions officer Mark Taylor-Batty, 28 October 2021

This morning many of you will have received the formal written notice of a statutory consultation in relation to USS. It contains details about proposed changes to your USS pension, most of which would take effect from 1 April 2022, if implemented. These are the changes that UUK presented and were pushed through the JNC in August, bringing negotiations to an end and thereby instigating a ballot for industrial action. UCU are now asking you to decide whether you accept a loss of income in retirement of potentially tens of thousands of pounds (and the younger you are the more you will lose) or whether you will stand with your union colleagues by voting ‘yes/yes’ in the ballot to do all we can to improve that situation. We will address the details of this consultation in an email next week. 

In this email I want to outline some of the impacts of the changes to your pension, and address some of the things stated in the presentation for the University by USS’s partners and advisors Mercer’s. 

The representative of USS’s advisors in that presentation yesterday stated that the UCU’s proposals had not been tabled at the JNC, but did not give the detail of how UUK had blocked UCU’s ability to table those proposals. The UCU proposals were on the agenda, and had been fully costed by USS and were viable. But, in order to be formally tabled,  they relied on the UUK applying the same covenant supporting measures that they were offering for their own proposals. UUK refused this, and therefore obliged UCU to remove the proposal from the discussion. As such, it is now questionable simply to state that ‘the UCU did not formally table any proposals’ without offering that context. Please note also that the UCU’s proposals, unlike the UUK’s, were a starting point to moving to a much better position with a new valuation. Unlike the UUK’s, these also involved better intergenerational opportunities. If you would like to see the full details of the UCU proposal you can read it here, and see how this compared with the UUK’s in this WONKHE article.

These old UCU proposals are not part of our demands now, as there have been significant developments since then, not least the Dual Schedule of Contributions that USS has filed to the regulator, which means that in the case that UUK revoke their cuts before the end of February, contributions for current benefits would go no higher than 11% for members until October 2022, giving more time for a solution built around an updated valuation, and obviating the ‘fall-back’ position and associated numbers that were circulated this morning. 

The Mercer’s talk seemed to indicate that the Pensions regulator had required a March 2020 valuation. While there is a requirement to provide a valuation of a DB pension every three years, if anything tPR had discouraged a March 2020 valuation, and certainly did not insist on that as the valuation date. USS is the only UK DB pension scheme to insist on a valuation set at the onset of the pandemic. See more here. You may wish to know that the current value of the assets of the scheme stands at around £90bn, which is more than £20bn higher than the 2020 valuation assumed they would be now when calculating a ‘deficit’ of around £15bn. Here are some of the details of the changes to your pension that are proposed by UUK, and what they might mean for you.

KEY INFORMATION

  • From 1 April 2022, each year members will build up a pension in the USS Retirement Income Builder, the defined benefit section of USS, at a lower rate of 1/85 of salary compared to the current 1/75 of salary, and a separate lump sum of 3/85 rather than 3/75, up to the Salary Threshold. This means that you will have a smaller defined benefit pension in retirement, because each year you will put aside a smaller proportion of your salary toward that pension.
  • From 1 April 2022, the Salary Threshold will reduce from £59,883.65 to £40,000. This means that any money you do set aside for a defined benefit pension is capped, and that if you earn over £40k, you will contribute additionally to a defined contribution pension with salary above that point, with an unknown pension outcome.
  • From 1 April 2023, the Salary Threshold will continue to increase annually in line with official pensions, which are currently increased in line with the Consumer Prices Index (CPI), but subject to a lower maximum increase of 2.5% a year until 31 March 2025 or if earlier, the date of any change concluded by a review by the JNC of the amount of the Salary Threshold. This means that the 1/80th of your salary set aside with grow in line with CPI inflation in the background, but if inflation goes over 2.5% (as indeed it is now, and predicted to go to 4% next year) your pension savings will not rise in the background to keep up with costs of living.
  • Benefits earned in the USS Retirement Income Builder from 1 April 2022 will continue to see increases applied annually before and after members retire, but subject to a lower maximum of 2.5% a year. Ditto.

From 1 April 2022, there will be a change of benefits for those who are members of USS for a short period (more than three months but less than two years).

What to do next

  1. Read more about the proposals and our dispute on the UCU website here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/strikeforuss
  2. Use the modelling tools to understand how the changes could impact you. (See opposite for a graph that indicates what impact the cuts would have on someone aged 40 earning £40k).
  3. Vote yes/yes in our ballot. If you have not received your ballot papers, today is the last day you can order a replacement – do so here.

Participate in the formal consultation, perhaps after considering the guidance we will issue.

Graphic showing effect of UUK cut from March to October 2022 of 40 year old earning £40k. Graph shows current pension line reducing gradually from a little above £250 to £250, and the "UUK pension" falling more steeply from a little below £250 to a little above £150.

From email to all members from branch pensions officer Mark Taylor-Batty, 28 October 2021

Equality and the ballots

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

One of our ‘Four Fights’ is about inequality.

We are calling on Higher Education employers to address the scandal of the gender, ethnic, and disability pay gaps.  

While salaries at the top of universities continue to grow, and there are ever more senior managers on six figure salaries, very little has been done to address the inequalities that blight our sector. Across Higher Education, women are paid on average 15.1% less than men, there is a 17% pay gap between black and white staff, and the pay gap for disabled staff is 9%. During negotiations about ‘pay and related matters’, employers make supportive noises about this and say they are happy to have working groups to discuss it, but they will not agree to actual commitments to do anything.

We think this is unacceptable, so we are asking you to vote Yes Yes in the Four Fights (pay and related matters) ballot.

Last time we were in dispute with the employers over equality, in 2019/20, we were starting to see some progress towards a national framework, binding on all HE employers, rather than vague wishy washy promises. That was abandoned by employers when the pandemic struck in March 2020 and UCU called off further strikes. We need to push them back to meaningful, agreed action to tackle the injustice of the ethnic, gender and disability pay gaps, and also to take proper account of the impact of intersectionality.

The employers’ body UCEA say they have no mandate from their members (ie university leaders) to do anything about inequality. Leeds management tends to say “Oh but we are only one university, we have no influence on this”. But actually, Leeds could choose to push within UCEA and show sector leadership to ensure that these commitments are made. It is a national issue and UCEA needs to proactively seek a mandate from its members and agree to binding commitments across HE.

We know from experience, and from the latest round of negotiations where our negotiators were basically given a big No, that the only way to see change on equality as well as on workload, pay and casualisation, is to be willing to take industrial action.

So please vote Yes Yes in the Four Fights ballot, to push UCEA to committing to genuine agreements towards a more equal workplace.

Pay inequality lasts throughout life into retirement – lower pay leads to lower pension. We need solidarity from every member on the equality issues because everyone deserves a decent, fair wage now and a decent retirement. We all deserve decent and secure working conditions, a genuinely accessible work environment and a healthy work life balance.

If you haven’t received your ballot papers, please request a replacement at https://yoursay.ucu.org.uk/s3/USS-HE-replacement-form  Do it now!  – today is the last day to get a replacement.

Please vote Yes Yes Yes Yes.  And post your votes soon because the ballots close next Thursday and we’d recommend getting your vote in the post by Monday to be sure of it getting there in time.

In solidarity,

Ben Plumpton and Megan Povey

Joint Equality Officers, Leeds UCU

PS If any members would like to attend the UCU Equality Groups Conference in early December (on Zoom) please let us know, see https://www.ucu.org.uk/membersannualgroupsconference (there are five separate half-day conferences for black, disabled, LGBT+, migrant and women members, and a plenary session for all equality strands)

Email to members 28 October 2021 from joint branch equality officers Ben Plumpton and Megan Povey