UCU University of Leeds BranchPosted on by Alan Smith
At the UCU stall at the National Stress Awareness Day event, 7 November in Parkinson Court, we asked people what they thought were the causes of stress for them. Many staff said job security was the main cause of stress, and many staff and students said money was the main cause of stress. The overwhelming majority of staff and students said workload is the main cause of stress.
Most people who participated said workload causes them stress
UCU is campaigning to reduce workloads, but we’re facing opposition from senior management, some of whom are very dismissive, claiming they don’t think there is a widespread problem.
We’re setting up a new network of UCU workload reps to investigate and provide more evidence to show university senior management that they need to reduce workloads for the sake of staff health and safety and so we can all have a rewarding life outside of work.
Our University was one of the institutions that wanted us to lose Defined Benefits altogether.
UCU National Disputes Committee adopts a ‘No Detriment’ position
USS letter proposes using an updated March 2018 valuation to supersede the March 2017 valuation
Our University’s position on last year’s UUK proposal to end to Defined Benefits
Members at Leeds may have seen the recent release of the University of Leeds’s recent responses to UUK surveys of its members over the USS pensions scheme. What these documents tell us is that our University is among the most hawkish in willing an end to your Defined Benefit pension and that, in something of a volte-face given that early verdict, they have conceded that the UUK should adopt the JEP recommendations. We link to these documents at the bottom of this page.
Michael Otsuka, who has been instrumental in commenting on and explaining the various vagaries of the pensions dispute, has described our recorded university’s position as “foaming at the mouth alarmist in their claims of DB” and pointed out that our employer was one of the minority that advocated a shift to 100% defined contributions – the base cause of last year’s strike. Professor Otsuka highlights the insensitivity of our University’s response.
UCU National Disputes Committee adopts a ‘No Detriment’ position
A National Disputes Committeeof the UCU was established at the HE sector conferences of May and June 2018. The NDC is tasked with providing direction to the Superannuation Working Group and to Union leadership. In light of the JEP recommendations, the NDC made the following announcement last week:
UCU members should suffer no detriment in any proposed resolution of the USS dispute. Lost earning should be repaid, any interim contribution increases should be shouldered by the employer, and USS benefits should remain the same.
UCU should call upon UUK and individual Vice Chancellors to apologise to their staff for their role in triggering the dispute [see above for the Leeds position!]
UUK and individual Vice Chancellors should also apologise to students for their actions and offer appropriate compensation for lost teaching.
USS letter proposes using an updated March 2018 valuation to supersede the March 2017 valuation
In a letter dated 23 October the USS has proposed to employers that, in order to accommodate some of the JEP proposals, they might in effect replace the March 2017 valuation with a March 2018 valuation. This, they argue would nonetheless still necessitate the controversial requirement of triggers for more contributions from employers between valuations, and this despite the already increased ‘deficit recovery contributions’ from employers that were put in place partially to avoid automatic triggers of further employer contributions. This is something that the JEP had already suggest should be addressed in the longer term rather than be kept within the envelope of discussion. This letter suggests that USS is still minded to resist all of the JEP recommendations. This last week, @USSbriefs has been surveying various employer responses to the UUK consultation over the JEP recommendations, and collectively these, alongside any UCU position could participate in bringing USS closer to accepting all JEP recommendations.
Leeds Citizens would like as many university staff and students to sign their open letter to the university, and to attend a rally outside the Ziff building at 12.30pm on Monday 5 November.
UCU University of Leeds BranchPosted on by Alan Smith
There may be formatting errors in online versions of minutes because of complex embedded list formatting
Friday 19 October 2018, 12pm – 1pm Michael Sadler building LG15
Minutes of EGM 12 June 2018
Item
not taken (out of time)
2. Pay and equality dispute
Industrial
action ballot results – pay and equality – will be out on Monday. We may need
to have another emergency general meeting before the next ordinary general
meeting 10 December.
3. USS pension dispute update, including motions 1and 2
University of Leeds highlighted as extreme institution in how they
responded to USS consultations as far back in 2014.
Motion 1 amended to remove “to spine point 49 of the nationally agreed
framework salary scale (£56,950 in 2017/18) and to increase each year in line
with pay for that spine point” and replace with “in line with inflation.”
Motion to submit to UCU higher education special conference on USS now reads:
Conference notes that:
the Joint
Expert Panel report on the USS valuation largely vindicates UCU’s arguments
that there is no substantial deficit
Universities
UK is currently consulting employers about their response to the report
there will
soon be another round of Joint Negotiating Committee negotiations about
potential changes to pension arrangements
employers
were concerned by the industrial strength we showed during our spring 2018
strikes
Conference instructs UCU’s pension
negotiators to press for:
the
employers to cover any additional contributions that USS may seek as a result
of the JEP report
the
restoration of the 1% match
the Defined
Contributions threshold (£55,550 in 2017/18) to be increased to spine point 49
of the nationally agreed framework salary scale (£56,950 in 2017/18) and to
increase each year in line with pay for that spine point
Motion carried as amended.
Motion 2 carried
Motion 3 (rule change): Motion to amend local
rule 7.3 (committee membership and vacancies)
Motion
3 carried
Motion 4 (rule change): New department rep roles
Motion
4 carried
Approval for spending to purchase of Leeds UCU
flags at £411.26 for 504 University of Leeds UCU flags (45 x 30 cm)
Approved
Committee vacancies for anticasualisation
officer and postgraduate rep (ordinary committee member)
Noted
that committee would be writing out to seek nominations to fill these
vacancies.
Motion 1
Conference notes that:
the Joint Expert Panel report on the USS
valuation largely vindicates UCU’s arguments that there is no substantial
deficit
Universities UK is currently consulting
employers about their response to the report
there will soon be another round of Joint
Negotiating Committee negotiations about potential changes to pension arrangements
employers were concerned by the industrial
strength we showed during our spring 2018 strikes
Conference instructs UCU’s pension negotiators to press for:
the employers to cover any additional
contributions that USS may seek as a result of the JEP report
the restoration of the 1% match
the Defined Contributions threshold (£55,550 in
2017/18) to be increased to spine point 49 of the nationally agreed framework
salary scale (£56,950 in 2017/18) and to increase each year in line with pay
for that spine point
Proposed by the committee
Motion 2 -Motion to Leeds University UCU GM to submit to the national HE
Sector Conference on USS
Conference notes that:
the report delivered by
the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) has
recommended adjustments to the USS scheme valuation methodology.
UUK has used the
“deficit argument” since 2011 to introduce massive cuts to our
pensions.
The JEP report undermines
the deficit claims.
Conference believes:
None of those cuts were
justified from a financial perspective; they were purely dogmatic.
Conference resolves to
campaign for:
The re-establishment of
one defined benefit scheme
for all USS members,
financial compensation
for those USS members who have lost a portion of their defined benefit
pension due to the above unjustified decisions.
Proposed by Mouloud Kessar and Lesley McGorrigan
Motion 3: Motion to amend local rule 7.3
This amendment will allow the committee to recruit new
members to itself during the academic year, in situations when a vacancy
becomes available, but 4 committee member have already been co-opted. It is
proposed that the following clause is added to rule 7.3:
“1. d) ordinary members recruited as necessary from the
general membership by committee when vacancies occur, who will then serve to
the end of the term.”
Proposed by the committee
Motion 4: Rule change motion: new department rep roles
The meeting notes:
§29 of our proposed rules
(‘Departmental Reps’) says that ‘Each School/Unit/Service is requested to
elect a departmental representative.’
Leeds UCU committee has
since found that it would be valuable for departments also to have an
anticasualisation representative, a postgraduate representative and a
workload representative.
The meeting moves:
To amend ‘Each
School/Unit/Service is requested to elect a departmental representative’
to ‘Each School/Unit/Service is requested to elect a departmental
representative, and other representatives as needed by the Committee for
the satisfactory representation of the membership, such as an
anticasualisation representative, a postgraduate representative and a
workload representative.
UCU University of Leeds BranchPosted on by Alan Smith
We’re seeking another member on a non-permanent contract and another postgraduate member to join the UCU University of Leeds branch committee, to fill two vacancies.
Anticasualisation officer
This is a branch officer position, so the university will usually allocate funds up to 10% of your time to your department to allow them to back-fill 10% of your time.
Postgraduate rep
This is a vacancy for an ordinary committee member (i.e. not an branch officer) who will lead on postgraduate issues, working closely with the anticasualisation officer. (There is no back-fill time for ordinary committee members.)
If you would like to volunteer for either of these roles please ask two colleagues who are union members to email ucu@leeds.ac.uk by 11am Friday 9 November to nominate you.
Nominations for women and black members particularly welcome as white men are currently over-represented on the committee
UCU University of Leeds BranchPosted on by Alan Smith
Email from branch president Vicky Blake to branch members 24 October 2018
Dear Members,
The situation with our USS pension has moved rapidly since
our open meeting with Mark Taylor-Batty and Sam Marsh (a member
of the USS Joint negotiating committee) two weeks ago. It is really vital
that we all fill in responses to the USS consultation.
Today’s Internal Comms email from the university does note that Sam Marsh has demonstrated that – without changing our contributions and still using the prudent measures that USS apply – the scheme will be in surplus in the time frame applied in valuations (http://sam-marsh.staff.shef.ac.uk/uss/docs/UoS_USS_discussion_document.pdf).
However, the university communication also links to USS’s inadequate response to Dr Marsh’s findings, which contains inaccuracies and, remarkably, fails to use the words ‘test 1’, the mechanism that was at the heart of Dr Marsh’s critique (see the bottom of this email for links to responses to USS’s latest communication).
The USS consultation with members of the scheme is still open, and we now have a recommended set of responses for you to apply. To access those responses and the link to the consultation, please go here: https://medium.com/ussbriefs/resile-and-resubmit-uss-consultation-response-template-4809945fb6bc. It’s really quick to do, and obviously even better if you can tweak and personalise responses.
Please do give those a read – it is particularly empowering to see how UCU members’ action, and UCU members’ analysis has shifted the debate, and gained us access to previously hidden-but-vital figures.
UCU University of Leeds BranchPosted on by Alan Smith
Text of email from Branch President Vicky Blake
Dear Members,
Thank you to everyone who voted in the Pay and Equality Ballot, and all who helped us to get the vote out. As you will see from Matt Waddup’s email that has just gone out to members nationally, our historically high turnout in this postal ballot on pay and equality was not quite enough to break the 50% threshold set by the (anti-)Trade Union Act 2016.
In this email:
• Our result
• What next in the pay and equality dispute
• Local campaigning and action on gender pay and casualisation
Our result
Prior to 2016, we would be celebrating this turnout, and this result. At Leeds, members voted strongly for strike action (69.8%) and action short of a strike (77.7%). This government’s anti-trade union legislation has denied us our right to withdraw our labour despite our turnout of 49.2%. We only needed 15 more votes to break the threshold.
(You may wish to note that, while advocating the 50% threshold’s introduction, Boris Johnson was in post as London Mayor having achieved… 31.8% turnout in his election.)
What next?
We remain in dispute over the joint unions’ pay and equality claim. Two important meetings are coming soon which will inform the union’s next steps:
1 November Higher Education Committee (HEC)
7 November Special Higher Education Sector Conference (HESC) on Pay and Equality
I am an elected member of HEC, and I would very much value your comments and thoughts. I will write with further updates following that meeting on 1 November. As a branch, we are also sending 5 delegates to the HESC (+ me in HEC capacity), and similarly all of us would value feedback from the branch before we go.
Local campaigning on gender pay and casualisation
Locally, we continue our work to push senior management to implement effective policies for closing the 22.5% gender pay gap at the University of Leeds. On 15 August, we submitted our Gender Pay Claim asking for further data on the extent of the gap and how it affects different groups of staff, and arguing for a clear timeline for redressing the problem by 2025 (the Claim can be found here: https://www.leedsucu.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/Gender_Pay_Claim.pdf). Meetings are now being set up in which we will be negotiating for meaningful change.
On Friday (26 October) members are invited to “UCU Anticas Roadshow: IGNITION!“ events in Leeds University Union – to kick off planning for the Anti-Casualisation Roadshow and to turbo-boost our Anti-Casualisation claim. We’re also holding a “Contract Casualty: a drop in for the confused” from 12-2pm. Please see attached flyer and please circulate! Our workshops on Friday will lay the foundation of a strategy day we’re holding with our branch anticas activists in mid-November, with national UCU bargaining office support.
The latest development in the ongoing USS saga sees the revelation that USS themselves seem to have failed to correctly apply their own ’Test 1’, and that when this is corrected there is no deficit in the scheme as of March 2018. If there is no deficit, then there is no longer any argument for any change to our contributions or for any ‘benefit reform’, the euphemism we hear often which means changes to how much we receive in pension, and the means by which it is calculated. This seeming flaw has been exposed by Sam Marsh, a member of the Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC).
‘Test1’ and ‘self-sufficiency’
The USS have three tests which they apply in coming to a valuation.* Of these, Test 1 considers the viability of achieving a ‘self-sufficiency’ position in 20 years. ‘Self-sufficiency’ is, in effect, a position whereby all owed pensions can be paid without significant further contributions to the scheme from employers or employees. The Joint Expert Panel (JEP) expressed concern about Test 1 as “given too much weight in determining the valuation and its effects extend beyond its original purpose” (p. 8) and that specifically “Test 1 drives the investment strategy toward a low return investment strategy that results in a higher deficit and higher contributions than would be the case if the current investments strategy were maintained” (p. 24). In other words, the JEP argued that Test 1 was responsible for magnifying the very deficit that it seeks to address.
We should note that, of course, this calculation of a ‘self-sufficiency’ position is to ignore the fact that the contributions made to the scheme each month more than cover the pensions paid out each month, always have done, and are forecast do so safely for at least the next fifty years (JEP, p. 7). That is to say, the USS make a valuation of the scheme not on the basis of affordability in these income/outcome terms, but on a basis of whether we can reach ‘self-sufficiency’ in 20 years, regardless of the unlikely necessity of such a position. The ‘deficit’ is the projected amount needed to attain something close to that position. This is a response to the regulatory requirements put on the scheme to demonstrate its viability.
Test 1 can flag a problem even when none exists
Sam Marsh made a submission to the JEP on Test 1, but it was received too late to be factored into their report. He had concluded that Test 1 could flag a problem even if the projected value of assets in 20 years was greater than the cost of paying off all pensions at that point, because Test 1 as formulated does not take into account the projected value of the assets. What is more, USS confirmed his calculations that, applying their own measures and projections, there will indeed by a surplus in year 20. The deficit disappears. It’s just that USS, remarkably, never do this calculation of what the assets will be worth as part of Test 1.
USS’s response
USS have today begun to respond to the critique of their application of ‘Test 1’, and in doing so confirm that ”current contributions are ultimately adequate” (via @JosephineCumbo on Twitter). Sam Marsh comments on this admission that “this is pretty much the first time #USS have explicitly said this. I have a feeling that @UniversitiesUK and many VCs/finance directors around the country may be surprised to hear this.” (@Sam_Marsh101 on Twitter) In this Twitter thread, he responds to each of USS’s points
No deficit means no detriment
Where does this leave us? Well, if there is no deficit, then there should be no detriment. If the JEP report vindicated our strike action, this latest revelation furthers our cause: the status quo should be the outcome of any further deliberations, and JEP can continue their scrutiny and exposure of Test1, and appeal for better transparency from USS.
*Test 2 measures the stability of contributions to the scheme and Test 3 considers the ability the HE sector to underwrite the scheme in a disaster scenario. The recent report from the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) found that “Tests 2 and 3 appear not to play a significant role in either the valuation or the on-going monitoring” (p. 8)
UCU University of Leeds BranchPosted on by Alan Smith
Chloe and colleagues outside the School of Law during the USS pension strike
A personal post from new UCU committee member Chloe Wallace
When I look back over our strike action in February and March, I have a lot of good memories: standing with friends old and new; the support of my colleagues and students; the feeling of empowerment and hope for the future. But all in all, it wasn’t much fun. Quite apart from the snow, the rain, and the pay deduction, there was disruption to the job I love and the students I’m committed to, anxiety in such an uncertain situation, and an ever-present feeling of guilt. When it was over, I breathed a sigh of relief; back to normal at least for a while.
So my heart sank when it became clear that we would have to ballot on striking yet again for a fairer deal on equality, casualization and pay. We, individually and collectively, have too much to do, and university staff and students don’t deserve more disruption after what we dealt with this year. We talked about fairness, equality and casualisation on the pickets and on #striketwitter throughout and beyond the action. We know they matter and that we have to fight for them, but the memory of the difficulties of that fight make being pushed to disruptive strike action (by employers who, it turns out, still aren’t listening) difficult to contemplate.
The problem is, we have to do this. Above all, we all have to vote in the ballot. The Trade Union Act 2016 requires, for a ballot on industrial action to be valid, that at least 50% of eligible members vote in the ballot, as well as that a majority of those voting vote for the proposed action. This is quite clearly, and explicitly, intended to make it harder for unions to strike. In January this year, UCU branches defied the legislation, with a 58% turnout across affected branches. We need to do it again, to prove that that was not a fluke and that we remain a force to be reckoned with. Abstaining the ballot is not sitting on the fence. It undermines the strength of the unionacross the board, not only on pay, equality and casualization, but in the many local issues, disputes and negotiations on which UCU works for its members, and all university staff, around the country. It also undermines us on pensions. The JEP report was a massive vindication and felt like a moral victory, but it isn’t a victory. We need UUK to stand with us to push its recommendations through to the trustees and regulator, and I don’t believe they will do that if we show weakness at this point. We need to beat the turnout threshold to show that we are still engaged and we still care; if we don’t, we risk undoing all the good we did earlier this year.
Voting “no” in the ballot is better than abstaining. But voting yes/yes is even better, and I think it’s the strongest way to maintain pressure and show we mean business. Universities are now expecting to be able to get away with below inflation pay-rises for ever more, and that has to stop. Most university staff, particularly support staff and academics who can’t, or won’t, work long hours to fast track to promotion, can’t rely on incremental pay-rises – and increments are supposed to recognise professional advancement, not increased cost of living. The gender pay gap in the sector is simply unacceptable, and recent reports confirming that over half of all academic staff are on insecure contracts ought to be pushing university management into action – but they aren’t. And, given that the size of the pension fund is dependent on contributions, which are dependent on salary, the further our salaries fall behind inflation, the less money goes into the fund to pay out later on. I am privileged in academic terms: full time, permanent contract, senior and well paid. It’s easy for me to say that a percentage point or two on the pay scale isn’t worth the challenge of another strike. But the stakes are much higher than that, for my colleagues (present and future) and for the health and success of the sector I’ve spent my whole life in.
So please dig out your ballot paper and vote in the ballot, to show that we are a united and active union. And please make that vote Yes/Yes, to show that there’s fight in us yet, and we’re not giving in.
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