Members vote to strike over pensions

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

UCU members at the University of Leeds, and across the country, have voted to strike over the outrageous attacks to our pensions which would see the ending of the defined-benefit scheme.

The UCU national executive committee and the local committee were recommending members vote for both strike action and action short of a strike (to be used in combination). The results are:

Strike action:
Yes: 87.0%
No: 13%

Industrial action short of a strike:
Yes: 92.1%
No: 7.9%

The turnout, 55.3%, was comfortably clear of the government’s new anti-strike threshold, which requires a 50% turnout while banning trade unions from using secure electronic voting or workplace balloting which would increase the turnout. (i.e. they suppress the turnout then outlaw strikes with low turnouts.)

UCU members in branches across the country have overwhelmingly voted to strike. See national website article

The UCU Higher Executive Committee is meeting today and it will decide on the next steps based on these results.

There are further talks – currently billed by the employers as final talks – to try to negotiate a solution tomorrow (Tuesday 23 January), after which we’ll expect a further update.

Thank you to everyone for participating in the ballot. It is good to have such a vibrant democracy when we’re making important decisions. Apologies on behalf of the committee if the reminders got annoying – reminding people significantly increases the turnout and we had to beat the government threshold so our votes would be counted.

Here are the detailed results of the ballot.

Organising a teach-out

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

On 11-13 October, Leeds UCU went on strike in a local dispute. It had been a while since we’d had a three-day strike and we wanted to do more with the event than picket, so we organised a TEACH-OUT (a form of protest like a teach-in, except that it happens off campus, because we’re on strike).

Good reasons to do teach-outs include:
teach out graphic

  • They show students that their teachers aren’t just putting their feet up. We care about students’ education and are willing to educate unpaid — just not to do the kind of educating we’re normally paid for.
  • We only go on strike when bad things are happening, but promoting the teach-out allows us to focus conversations on a positive activity. Attending allows students (and anyone else!) to show support for the strike.
  • The teach-outs also give members a communal, productive activity to do on strike days that builds ideas, capacity, and community — and reminds us what higher education is really all about.
  • Not all members are willing or able to be involved in picketing, but are happy to participate in teach-outs, broadening the possibilities for activism on a strike day.

And luckily, organising teach-outs is very easy! Almost everyone in UCU organises conferences, open days, meetings and talks professionally. Moreover, it’s in the nature of teach-outs that they’re ad hoc, a bit improvised, even carnivalesque. So basically, it’s about doing what we’re good at, yet no-one minds if it goes wrong 🙂

Of course, it’s quite a lot of effort to organise something when you know a strike might be called off. We planned ours so that the talk could still run even if we’d gone back to work. But the risk of cancellation is really just a good reason to keep the planning simple, and a lot of the plans made can be shelved ready for next time, so the effort isn’t wasted.

Six steps to organise your teach-out

1. Get one lead volunteer.

Lots of things about teach-outs can more or less organise themselves in a refreshingly unhierarchical way, but we found it helpful to have one person who was clearly in charge. They were able to delegate some things to other volunteers, but it was always helpful, when people asked the UCU committee what was going on, to have one person to direct people to.

No doubt you could have a whole committee to organise a teach-out, but why organise something elaborate when you can have just as much fun with something simple?

2. Invite your members to offer events

We set up a Google Docs spreadsheet to enable people to sign up to offer events: the one we used, anonymised and now locked for editing, is . In the spirit of academic freedom, we just let people propose whatever they fancied, and aimed to host as many proposals as possible. The spreadsheet clearly requested the information we needed (contact details, title, special requirements, availability). This saved us collating emails and allowed all members to see what sorts of things were being proposed as the proposals came in. The hardest thing about using a Google Doc for this is making sure you have the privacy settings right, so that anyone with the link can see the page, and anyone can edit it — log out of your Google account and and check that it works before sending.

Here’s the invitation we sent out: feel free to use/abuse it. We were keen to welcome as wide a range of members as possible to participate, and to encourage people to do thingd they wouldn’t normally have the chance to do.

Dear UCU colleague,

As you know, on October 11-13, we will be on strike to defend our conditions of employment. We all worry about the effects our strike action may have on our students, so Leeds UCU will be running a teach-out, entitled ‘Striking Insights’, enabling students to enjoy just as high-quality education as usual (but not geared towards passing exams). We’ll be using venues such as pub function rooms on the edge of campus.

We are therefore inviting you — whether or not you are normally engaged in teaching — to suggest a session that you’d like to run while on strike.

We’ve never done this before, so we can’t say what the take up will be either from staff or students, but we’ll do our best to accommodate everyone and we will certainly ensure that the event is educational, inspirational, and fun!

Of course, we are all very much hoping that the University changes its plans and we can call the strike off. Since we hope this will be a worthwhile event on its own terms, however, we’d be grateful if prospective participants could consider running their session even if the strike is cancelled (see below).

Deadline for proposals is the end of *Monday 2nd October*.

THEMES

The organisers will make sure that there are sessions directly related to the strike, on themes like trade unions, academic freedom, and students’ own visions for higher education.

We’d love other colleagues (whether academic or academic related) simply to run ‘public science’-type sessions that might capture the imaginations of our students. Possible examples might include:

Our changing ecosystems
Achieving social change
Science and ‘post-truth’ politics
What new technologies mean for our futures
How universities really work
The economics of debt
The origins of the universe
The mental health crisis
Learn a new language for 50 minutes
The future of public healthcare
What are numbers, really?

We’d particularly love to see sessions that model modes of education or topics that we’d like to offer within the university, but ordinarily can’t.

FORMAT

* Sessions will, as usual, run from five past until five to the hour, 1300-1600, October 11-13.
* They need to be critical, energetic, and engaging, suited to a general undergraduate audience.
* Otherwise, you can do what you like, as long as you can provide any equipment needed!
* (But we suggest a 20-30 minute lecture followed by open discussion would work well.)

OFFER A SESSION!

Please send your proposals by filling in the spreadsheet at:

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1e_9bsmfkEJnCJdGd6q2PlvY_LmmAVLXzyZgnoY-4dX0/edit?usp=sharing

In retrospect, the list of themes — which was intended to emphasise that anyone in the institution could participate — put off some people who, when they didn’t see their particular specialism on the list, assumed they weren’t invited. So maybe we should have left that out.

3. Find a venue or two

Our biggest worry was whether we’d have enough space to accommodate all the events, or audiences. But everything seemed to fall into place okay, and if it hadn’t, we’d have had fun anyway.

We checked out the suitability of three pub function rooms right next to campus, and the brilliant Central Leeds Quaker Meeting House. We settled on a room at the latter (£80 per day, but with good facilities and disabled access) and a couple of rooms in the Pack Horse (which lacked these advantages but were conveniently located and free). We guessed that two venues would be sufficient for our needs, and luckily the guess was right! But we could easily have cancelled a booking.

Depending on your circumstances, you might consider venues like pubs, places of worship, a tent in a park, community halls, walking tours, sports halls, cafes, an off-campus students’ union building, or office space awaiting proper tenants.

The main thing that we’re hoping to do better in future is prioritise disabled access; but inevitably there’s a degree to which you have to work with what you’ve got.

4. Sort out the programme

Like it says on the tin: about a week before the strike, we spent a few hours arranging the sign-up spreadsheet into a programme, taking into account people’s availability, suitability of venues, emailing them with queries, etc. This was the hardest part of organising the teach-in. Since all the participants were easy-going do-gooders, it was not very hard.

In the event, the programme didn’t change much, but because everything was done in a bit of a rush and was quite provisional, we published the programme online as a Google Doc again, meaning that those with editing rights could easily change it at any time. We made it easier to publicise this by creating a short url (from tinyurl.com) for people to circulate. You can see our finalised programme at http://tinyurl.com/ycu5ssgo.

5. Invite people to come

We circulated the programme link via the usual social media channels, including sending it to student societies. We asked members to circulate it to their students, put copies on their office doors, etc. (How many staff actually did this is unclear — but if they didn’t, their students were missing out!)

Most importantly, we printed simple black-and white programmes to hand out while picketing (pdf here): by the end of the second day of the strike, it seemed like all the students we talked to knew what was going on.

We originally only printed a few hundred of these, and regretted it. Leeds University is big, and in the event we handed out about two thousand programmes. Kudos to Footprint Workers Co-Op who rushed through an emergency order for more programmes, and liked it so much they tweeted it 🙂

Some people suggested having people sign up to events via Eventbrite, but we wanted to make attendance as easy as possible, so we didn’t do this!

6. Sit back and have fun

University staff are used to flitting between unfamiliar lecture halls or meeting rooms and to adapting when technology fails them. Moreover, our main organiser couldn’t be present for one of the three days of the teach-out. So we were clear that on the day, people should just expect to improvise where necessary and help each other out where possible. For example, here’s the message we sent to participants once the programme was lined up:

Thanks again for volunteering to participate in the teachout this week!

* I’ve attached a programme as it stands. But if aspects of the programme have to change, I (or other participants) will be keeping the version online at http://tinyurl.com/ycu5ssgo up to date, so that’s the most authoritative one.

* Probably needless to say, although I and UCU committee members will be around, there won’t chairpersons and won’t be much by way of technical support! So do please make sure you finish at 5 to the hour and use your initiative if something goes wrong 🙂

* As a reminder, if you’re in the Quaker Meeting house, there’s a data projector (for VGA-compatible computers). I’ll bring a laptop, but if you can bring your own that would no doubt reduce the range of things that can go wrong.

* If you’re in any other venue, it’s just you, your native wit, and anything else you bring with you!

* We have pretty much no idea about attendance. So do try and be flexible to respond to the size/needs of your audience. In the unlikely event that professional staff at the venues say we have too many people present for safety, please help them turn attendees away. We don’t want to be a nuisance!

* Most important, HAVE FUN!

Thanks everyone!

So once the teach-out was actually underway, thanks to the skill and goodwill of the UCU members who participated (and of the venues we used), it felt like it ran itself.

What went well, what could have been better?

Given that Leeds University has over 30,000 students, we might have been swamped. So perhaps it’s for the best that the proportion of the population that will attend lectures on what they view as a windfall ‘day off’ is limited… On the other hand, we have the anecdotal sense that lots of students liked the idea that lecturers were offering classes, even though they didn’t go. And those students who did attend — mostly postgraduates or members of undergraduate socialist societies — evidently got a lot out of the events. Some were also running their own teach-outs alongside UCU’s. Some members of the public also came along, which was great. Overall, attendance generally ranged from about 12 to about 50. In future, we’ll need to encourage members to publicise the teach-outs to their students, and to get the students’ union more involved in promoting and perhaps running events.

The UCU members who volunteered were mostly from the arts and social sciences, and ran events on fairly traditional left-wing themes. We’d have loved to have more scientists involved, and would have welcomed events on pretty much any topic, as well as things like music performances. Next time, we’ll work harder to cajole some scientists into taking part and should perhaps emphasise that events don’t have to be Union-related as such. Perhaps the biggest impediment to people participating was their own overly high expectations of themselves. Anyone working at a university can probably run an interesting discussion on a subject they’re familiar with (without straying into the territory of delivering a lecture on a current module!) without any special preparation, but members did not always recognise this potential in themselves. But perhaps as the idea of teach-outs gets bedded in, people will participate more readily.

That said, a positive side-effect of the participants’ self-selection was quite a thematically coherent programme. It also involved some great activities which staff wouldn’t normally have a chance to run, like mushroom-hunting, zine-making, and a critical-geographical walking tour of Leeds. And the teach-outs certainly proved a brilliant forum for UCU members to develop ideas, situate day-to-day union activity in a bigger intellectual frame, and dream up new ideas for making our workplaces and worlds better. The discussions we had while on strike are leading us towards new events, like running a UCU seminar series and maybe autonomous higher education activities.

Our main message is that teach-outs aren’t hard, and are fun! Try it and see 🙂

Rights of EU27 citizens after Brexit

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

On 12 December the European Commission published a memo with questions and answers based on the common understanding of the rights for citizens following the recent negotiations. We’re linking to this here not as legal advice but because we know this will be of interest to many members and because it hasn’t been widely publicised in the UK.

“Questions and Answers – the rights of EU27 and UK citizens post-Brexit, as outlined in the Joint Report from the Negotiators of the European Union and the United Kingdom Government”

You may also be interest in the response of the campaign group the3million to the latest negotiations.

For UCU members there both general and individual legal advice available – see Guide to working in the UK for EEA and non-EEA nationals.

Alternative Christmas carols

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

The ‘UCU choir’ has been carolling on campus this week.  We have some alternative lyrics, written by the talented poets among our members (ahem), see some examples below.  Our performance by the Wavy Lines sculpture (“Sign for Art”) was greeted with smiles, giggles, and even some applause!  We greatly enjoyed this festive way of making our views known about our statutes dispute and about pensions.  If you like singing (no experience or ability necessary) or play an instrument, get in touch so we can invite you next time.

Some alternative lyrics (there are more…)

We wish you a merry Christmas

We wish we could keep our pensions (x3)
It would make our New Year

(Chorus) Sad tidings we bring, to staff and their kin
To have a fair pension, this fight we must win

We all want a decent pension (x3)
So vote to strike now

We won’t stop until we’ve won this (x3)
So join in right here

All I want for Christmas

We don’t want a lot for Christmas,
There are just some things we need,
We don’t care about the presents,
Underneath the Christmas tree,
We just want to keep our rights,
Not dismissal overnight,
Make our wish come true,
All we want for Christmas,
Is academic freedom

Silent Night
Pensions theft,
We’re bereft,
Money slashed,
Hopes are dashed,
Manager’s wages rocket sky high,
It feels like we have been poked in the eye
Time for action is here,
Time for action is here.

University of Leeds Statute VII Local Provision

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

DOWNLOAD: UCU local provision claim form

A fund has been put in place to help those suffering particular financial impact caused by the industrial action taken in October 2017 due to the dispute over University of Leeds Statute VII. Payments are limited to the actual net loss due to action taken and no more. This will take into account any payment made by other means, such as the UCU National Fighting Fund (please see Fighting Fund for more details).

“Particular hardship” means that the member is low-paid (e.g. small fractional contract; or hourly-paid equivalent to only a small fraction) AND that the strike days disproportionately affect them (e.g. it’s the only day(s) they work; or it’s the day(s) they work most). Note that the usual position is that members should expect to lose a day’s pay for taking a day’s strike action.

We expect that you will have applied for the national ‘fighting fund’; the local hardship fund is intended to augment this fund in cases where there is particular hardship.

Claimants for hardship relief should compete this form and send to the UCU Administrator, UCU Office, Room 751, EC Stoner building by 12/1/18. A small group of the local officers will consider the claims and their decisions will be final. It is expected that the claimant may need to provide evidence of hardship.

As the fund is finite there may be a cap placed on payments this will not be known until the extent of application.

Please note that we ask members to apply for assistance in the following order, and that total contributions from both sources must not exceed the deductions that were made for your participation in the industrial action:

National UCU Fighting Fund – 2 layers:

– Provision for 13th October – available for all striking members to apply* – capped at £75/what you lost this day (whichever is the lowest, to ensure HMRC compliance)

– Provision for 11th and/or 12th October – available for hourly paid staff and those who would be disproportionately affected by strike deductions – capped at £50 per day / what you lost on these days (whichever is the lowest, to ensure HMRC compliance)

Local provision 

This is designed as a safety net to catch people who will be disproportionately affected by strike deductions but who are not eligible for one or more of the options under the National UCU Fighting Fund. Please download the form and return to ucu@leeds.ac.uk or UCU Administrator, UCU Office, Room 751, EC Stoner building by 12/1/18.

 

Shadow secretary of state pledges full solidarity with ‘brilliant university staff’

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UCU has received a statement of support Angela Rayner, the shadow Secretary of State for Education, pledging full solidarity with ‘our brilliant university staff’. She also calls for negotiations for ‘as long as it takes’ to find a solution.

Angela Rayner MP

Shadow Secretary of State for Education Angela Rayner MP

“I am deeply concerned by the proposed changes to the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) which would leave hundreds of thousands of staff in many of our biggest universities significantly worse off in retirement.

Decent pay and working conditions for those who work in education are vital to the success of the National Education Service that Labour is planning. We want our brilliant university staff to stay in UK higher education and to continue working for the public good. A race to the bottom will only create a brain drain in this crucial sector that the UK can ill afford.

The last thing students and their parents need right now is a prolonged dispute in which they get caught in the middle. I would urge both sides, aided by USS and ACAS if necessary, to agree to sit down and negotiate for as long as it takes to agree an equitable solution.

USS is the largest private pension scheme in the UK and it is vital to our economy as well as to the education sector that it continues to enjoy the confidence of its current members and their employers, so I also urge the Pensions Regulator to provide the headroom if needed for negotiations to take place.

A sensible solution which protects the scheme’s members and ensures that USS remains an attractive scheme for the future must be everyone’s priority.”

UCU Fighting Fund applications

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

This post reproduces the details from an email sent to all members on 16 October about how to apply to the UCU fighting fund. Please read carefully and if after applying you have any additional questions or need further help email ucu@leeds.ac.uk with FIGHTING FUND in the title. See note at the end about evidence of deductions from the June strike.

All UCU members who took strike action* as part of this dispute can apply to the UCU Fighting Fund for support connected to the third day of strike action (Friday 13th October) regardless of financial status (the fourth day of action we have taken as a branch). A cap will be applied at £75 for this day, or at a lower level if the member would have usually earned less than £75 that on that day (this is to ensure HMRC compliance).

Additional consideration will be given for payments connected to the first two days of the strike action (Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th October) for members on hourly paid contracts or who can otherwise evidence that the strike deductions will have a disproportionate impact upon them leaving them financially vulnerable. A cap will be applied at £50 per day, or at a lower level if the member would have usually earned less than £50 per day (this is to ensure HMRC compliance). This is really important and is a mark of the importance this dispute holds as it is beyond usual Fighting Fund provision.

Other support may be available locally (see email and here).

Please note that you will need to evidence that you have taken strike action and deductions made* in order to apply for the national Fighting Fund and/or for local provision:

Many hourly paid staff will have seen their “deduction” in October as they submit weekly time sheets to HR. This includes postgraduate staff. We will prioritise processing your claims as you will be “hit” first and are among those most likely to be disproportionately affected. More details on how to evidence the hours you would normally have worked below.
Update: We are aware many hourly paid postgraduates have been waiting longer to have their October pay processed, and that there may be complications with decoding the pay slips – please see below, and email us for help with this if you’re struggling: ucu@leeds.ac.uk.

Members who work on a salaried basis (rather than submitting time-sheets for hours worked) should expect deductions to be made in November’s pay. You will need to show us copies of your payslip showing the deductions made (details below) when that payslip comes through on the system.

How to use MyUCU to make a claim

Claims from the national Fighting Fund need to be made on-line through the new portal, MyUCU and we will support you through the process. Hourly paid staff can begin making their claim right away, and salaried staff will be able to do this once they have a copy of their payslip for November’s pay.

All members will be able to make claims once you can evidence deductions of 3/5 of your normal working week; i.e. if full-time from day 4 of action (our 3rd of this strike), or pro rata for part-time or hourly paid appointments – i.e. after the equivalent of 3/5 of what would have been your normal working week. This means that all our members who participated in the 3 day strike are eligible for a payment of up to £75 for the final day of strike action last week (the cap kicks in sooner if you would normally have been paid less than £75).

Additional payments can be made from the national Fighting Fund to any member for whom the deduction of pay for qualifying 3/5 period of a working week causes excessive difficulty for that individual. You must contact us on ucu@leeds.ac.uk so we can endorse your application. The Fighting Fund will pay up to £50 per day for those claims when UCU HQ match the list provided by us (the branch) with the on-line claims submitted.

  1. Even if you have previously registered to use UCU web services, you will have to update your password to use the new system (worth doing to manage all your membership stuff anyway): https://ucu.custhelp.com/app/utils/login_form/redirect/membership%252Fmy_details/
  2. Once you are in the portal you will see a tab for the Fighting Fund. Within that area, there is information about the general principles and how to apply.
  3. The existing Fighting Fund claim arrangements allow members to signal if they are in a category where the deduction/s made is/are causing excessive hardship and this signal will prioritise those claims over their peers. HQ will match this with the list we hold at the branch, so you must also email ucu@leeds.ac.uk with details as above. Please make sure you make the claim under your name as it appears on the membership system.

 

*Additional note 4 December: a few members have emailed about being asked to provide evidence of a deduction for the June strike. This is because the Fighting Fund is paying for the fourth day of action in the dispute (which is the third day of the October strike). There are some exceptions, particularly members who started work at the university after the June strike.

  • 2 Updates from UCU HQ 7 December: 
    1.  Eligibility triggers for Fighting Fund:
    The Fighting Fund is usually activated on the fourth day of industrial action in branches engaged in a nationally significant dispute, however in this case, those members who took the three days of action (or if part time/hourly paid, took industrial action as applicable across these three days) this term (October 11/12/13) will be treated as if they had also taken the day of industrial action in June but will not have to evidence that earlier day. The requirement for that evidence is being waived by HQ because it is proving a problem to some claimants, so HQ is making the assumption that those who were eligible to strike in June 2017 did so, and that means claimants will be paid for the third day of industrial action taken this term.2.  Further update for hourly paid / part time staff: UCU do require evidence from the part-time and hourly paid for their industrial action but it may be too difficult to demonstrate this via pay-slips as they are  often difficult to decipher and many hourly paid staff are facing delays to their pay which makes it harder to track. For members afflicted with indecipherable pay slips / difficulty in tracking late pay, the evidence can be in the form of a time-sheet or timetable, alongside confirmation of the recorded strike action (perhaps a screen shot of the self-service strike record, or a copy of an email confirmation from this from the University’s Industrial Action email address). The principle is that UCU need enough evidence to show that these staff would ordinarily have been expecting to work on the dates that strike action was called, and therefore their strike “deductions” were incurred by loss of pay from not recording work on time-sheets on those days. Hourly paid staff will also need to attach some evidence of their hourly rate of pay, such as a previous payslip or copy of the contract.  The “deductions” (pay that would usually have been expected but was not accrued due to strike action) will be worked out from the hourly rate of pay. 

UCU Leeds newsletter December 2017

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

The latest newsletter for members of UCU University of Leeds branch is available now.

 

Contents include:

  • Statutes dispute
  • USS pensions
  • Welcome to all our new members
  • University of the Aire
  • EU staff rights and Brexit
  • UCU Equality Conference
  • Christmas with UCU
  • Free UCU membership for postgrads
  • Raising problems with management
  • Ask a colleague to join
  • Next UCU General Meetings

 

Pensions – please let us know when you’ve voted

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It would be great if you would let us know when you’ve voted in the pensions industrial action ballot by emailing ucu@leeds.ac.uk with the word ‘voted’ in the subject box. (We’re not asking what you voted.)

This will help us to remind colleagues who may have forgotten to vote, so we can deal with the obstacle of the Tory anti-strike law which says unions have to get a 50% turnout but forbids us from using electronic voting or having ballot boxes in the workplace because these would increase the turnout.

(We will try not to ask you again once you’ve either told us you’ve voted or that you don’t want a reminder.)

If you haven’t received your ballot paper by Monday 4 December, you can request a replacement by going to ucu.org.uk/ussballotrequest

For the latest updates on the pensions dispute see the national UCU website www.ucu.org.uk/uss

 

National action on pensions: inaccuracies in management statement on USS

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Yesterday, our university management posted an update on the USS Pension scheme, under “latest news” which has led to queries from members. The university management’s statement contains a wholly inaccurate claim that the USS pensions dispute is “not a national ballot” and goes on to claim the “University is the subject of a dispute which we have no power to resolve.”

In fact, save for one detail, UCU is following the same process as we always do in a national ballot – which is to serve individual ballot notices to each institution on whose behalf negotiations are being conducted.

The only difference in this ballot is that, as our first national ballot since the unfair, anti-trade union Trade Union Act passed in 2016, every ballot now has to pass a 50 per cent threshold before action can take place. UCU has therefore decided to count each ballot separately in order to maximise the opportunity for branches to take action and minimise the possibility that low turnout in one or two institutions would stop action elsewhere. Every USS branch is being balloted, and this is a national campaign.

Two Leeds UCU officers (Lesley and Vicky) are members of the UCU’s Higher Education Committee. They were both present at the meeting which voted decisively, and with unity, to move to the ballot in this national dispute. We absolutely assure you that the claims made by management to the contrary are erroneous.

Yesterday we wrote to you to suggest you write to the Vice Chancellor (vice-chancellor@leeds.ac.uk) to ask several questions – here they are again:

  • Under the UUK proposals can you tell me what my retirement income will be?
  • Under the UUK proposals will my pension benefits now be significantly worse than those in post-92 universities?
  • Will the University of Leeds please formally request evidence of the modelling that has been provided by Universities UK?
  • Will the VC take action to stand up for staff and for the difficulty we will face in attracting staff to work in a UK university without an adequate pension scheme?

Please note that these questions are important because, contrary to senior management’s assertions in the 29 November update, every University does indeed have power to affect the course of negotiations – we ask that our VC follows the example set by Warwick and Glasgow universities by standing up for our pensions.