UCU members in HE have voted strongly to strike again (70% in favour) but the anti trade union laws would make any strike unlawful because the turnout was again below the very high 50% threshold. (The same law which doesn’t allow online voting.) For details see ucu.org.uk/he2018

Thank you to everyone who took part in the ballot – it’s really important that so many members are involved in setting union policy and decisions like this, even if the government prevents those decisions from being enacted. And thank you to all the reps who helped to remind people to vote. While we can’t know the exact turnout here, we believe it was much higher than the overall turnout.

The union’s national negotiators will meet next week to discuss the next steps for national work on anti-casualisation, workloads, equal pay and fair pay.

Locally, we already negotiating with the University of Leeds to try to bring about improvements in anti-casualisation and equal pay. On workloads it’s more mixed – they’re not yet engaging with us as meaningfully on workloads and we continue to press for serious improvements.

If you want to get more involved in our local work on anti-casualisation, workloads or equal pay, email ucu@leeds.ac.uk.