UCL UCU: *reminder* General Meeting Wed 13 Oct, 1-2pm, ballots for USS & ‘Four Fights’ + FE disputes

This is a reminder for our General Meeting tomorrow, Wednesday 13 October, which we have called to launch the national ballot over the USS pension scheme and over pay, casualisation, workload and equality (“Four Fights”). 

For a summary of the position on both these disputes see Appendix 1 below.

The USS and Four Fights disputes

The main business of our meeting is to discuss the plans for our disputes and the campaign to ensure that every member entitled to vote is able to do so. This is a paper ballot which will be posted out from next Monday 18 October. You will receive two ballot papers (one each for the USS and ‘Four Fights’ disputes) in a single envelope, sent by independent election service Civica to your preferred address. These must be returned before the end of the ballot period on 4 November.

If you do not receive your ballot envelope by 21 October, you can ask for a replacement. Please take a moment to confirm that your home address is correct on MyUCU, and ideally choose your home address as your preferred address.

As a result of the Conservatives’ Trade Union Act, we need to ensure that more than 50% of our members who are eligible to vote, actually participate. As we explain below, the stakes, especially for USS pensions, are extremely high. 

We will be reminding members to vote over the next three weeks! But the more members who are involved in that campaign to remind members to vote, the higher the turnout is likely to be.

Previous ballots have returned 80% for strike action and 90% for action short of a strike. In two branch meetings this summer, members voted overwhelmingly to take forward these ballots.

Solidarity for Further Education strikes

We have also invited UCU members on strike in Further Education to address our meeting. 13 branches have been taking strike action, with the fight at the three branches in the ‘Capital City Colleges’ group becoming a test case in the sector. Two years ago they won a sector-leading increase on pay and casualisation. But lecturers’ pay is still around £9,000 less than that of the equivalent schoolteacher, and insecure contracts are commonplace. As they are low paid members of our union taking strike action we propose practical solidarity in the form of donations to the three branches’ hardship funds. See the motion in Appendix 2 below.

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Appendix 1: USS and Four Fights

USS

We have to stop drastic cuts in the USS pension scheme. These have been justified by USS by using a 2020 valuation that has been widely criticised for being implausible, relying on outdated stock market values and estimates of life expectancy, and a range of other highly conservative assumptions.

Unless stopped, USS will impose the changes proposed by the Employers’ organisation, Universities UK (UUK). UUK can still withdraw its proposals, but unless they do, all pensions accrued after 1 April 2022 will be cut as follows:

• The accrual rate will be cut from 1/75 to 1/85 (a 12% cut in benefits).
• Only salary up to £40,000 will be paid into the Defined Benefit scheme (currently slightly less than 60,000).*
• All benefits will be inflation-proofed only up to 2.5% CPI. Currently, USS benefits are subject to a 5% cap, with a ‘soft cap’ of 50% protection up to 10%. 

As a result, UCU estimates that a typical member of the USS scheme on a £42k lecturer's salary, aged 37, will suffer a 35% loss to the guaranteed retirement benefits which they will build up over the rest of their career. As these changes apply to future pension accrual, the younger the member, the greater the cut in pension. UCU’s pension modeller makes conservative estimates about future inflation, so it may yield an optimistic estimate!

The scheme will become poor value for money, and only appear attractive because of the high employer subsidy. Already USS is seeing large numbers of members leave the scheme, and this is likely to sharply increase, putting further pressure on it. We believe that the employers want to push USS in the direction of a 100% Defined Contribution scheme, just as they imposed in 2018, only to withdraw that proposal in the face of our strike.

The purpose of our action is to demand Universities UK withdraw their proposed changes and instead side with UCU to demand a new valuation of the pension scheme.

See Strike for USS for more information.

Note: 
*Payments over the threshold goes into the ‘Defined Contribution’ (DC) scheme. This is a stocks-and-shares portfolio whose value is dependent on USS’s investments at the point of retirement, and is not guaranteed. To avoid paying a large tax bill on retirement, the entire investment must be converted to an annuity, which can also substantially devalue the expected income. As a result of the proposed changes there are also cuts in the amount of income going into the DC pot.

Four Fights

The universities have had a ‘good pandemic’. Whereas other public services and private industry suffered, universities were able to switch to online teaching. Last year undergraduate enrollments increased by 4%, and the increase has been maintained this year. Staff worked extremely hard to deliver teaching online, with workloads increasing enormously, despite e.g., research being put on hold.

We can expect to see official inflation rising rapidly as the result of large increases in gas prices and other financial shocks. In June, Dow Jones economists estimated CPI could hit 5% by the end of the year.

• Pay. The employers have agreed only to increase pay by 1.5%. UCL has increased its London Allowance by £250. 

The employers refused to negotiate on proposals to address casualisation, spiralling workload or pay inequality. At most they offered ‘working groups’ to collect data.

• Casualisation. Insecure contracts still dominate our sector. At UCL we made progress after the last dispute, but we need national minimum standards of employment. 
• Workload. Members reported dealing with exceptionally high workloads over the course of last year, and universities like UCL are hiring some more staff. However the tendency has been short-term fixes: hiring low-paid TAs rather than Teaching Fellows or lecturers.
• Inequality. We still have very large gender, race and disability pay gaps in our universities. To address this requires a national action plan and a commitment to invest in staff, and increase promotion rates on all grades. (Inequality is closely connected to rates of job insecurity, as a comparison between Teaching Fellow or Research and Lecturer grades reveals.)

Appendix 2: Motion: Solidarity with FE strikes

UCL UCU sends solidarity to the 13 UCU branches in Further Education Colleges that won their ballots and are taking strike action and negotiating for higher pay.

UCL UCU recognises the enormously important work that FE members do in offering ‘second chance’ education, and supports UCU calls for the sector to be properly funded in order to allow workers to retrain or gain the qualifications necessary to access Higher Education.

UCL UCU commends the struggle at the ‘Capital City Colleges’ Group (City and Islington, Westminster Kingsway and the College of Haringey and North East London), where colleagues are in the second full week of strike action.

UCL UCU resolves to ‘twin’ with these particular FE branches to offer support:

1. make a donation of £1,000 to each of the three FE branches’ hardship funds.
2. advertise this dispute among our members, encouraging members to participate in actions of solidarity, including participating in protests, writing to principals and making personal donations.