What is happening?

UCU, the University and College Union, has achieved an historic mandate for industrial action. The Union has gone through democratic processes and outlined a plan of action:

  • Strikes on 24, 25, 30 November
  • Marking boycott in the new year
  • 18 days of strike action in February and March

None of these dates and actions have to take place. Employers, including Goldsmiths, now have the opportunity to negotiate meaningfully and stave off disruption.

Why are UCU members doing this? 

The dispute ties together a number of problems that are fundamentally reshaping the nature of higher education in the UK: 

  • Casualisation: many staff are living on precarious, short-term contracts and often don’t know in the summer whether they’ll have an income in September. 
  • Rates of pay: have fallen steadily in real terms and are now worth around three-quarters of their 2009 value. This makes embarking on a career in universities the privilege of the independently wealthy.
  • Systemic inequality, with a particular focus on the longstanding gender, ethnic and disability pay gaps
  • Workload and working conditions, with a focus on manageable hours and reducing levels of stress and ill health. Spiralling workloads and out-of-balance staff-student-ratios means students in 2022 do not receive the kind of attention and education staff would want to provide and which they were able to provide a mere couple of years ago.

Pensions: a separate dispute – but likely to be coordinated alongside the other one – is an attempt to resolve long-running problems with the management of USS, the pension scheme used mainly by UCU members at older universities, including QMUL. That pension scheme has slashed pensions by roughly 35-50% based on a valuation of the fund from March 2020, when the world had crashed. Members have been challenging this in multiple ways, including via courts, but USS has refused to reverse its cuts.

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