the importance of voting YES in UCU’s national ballot
- Pay and four UH refusals
The pay offer this year is a mere 1.4% but inflation is 3.8% which means our pay’s gone down since the recession of 2007-9 by 20-30% in real terms, depending on whether you use CPI or RPI measures. Whatever the measure, it’s a catastrophic cut.
It’s made all the worse by these four UH refusals:
- The refusal of the new VC, Professor Woodman, to reverse the hugely unpopular 50% parking charge rise;
- The refusal of the VC to pay any Outer London Weighting (OLW) – though the Royal Veterinary College in Hatfield pays its staff over £4,000 OLW per year;
- The refusal by senior management to pay any hardship payment this year unlike last year; and
- The refusal of the VC to say now how much he’s paid. Instead, he says we’ll have to wait until next year’s financial report 2025-26 to find out but calls this “full transparency”.
We think it only fair to ask: is this the thanks we get for our “hard work, dedication and commitment” (VC email ‘Herts achieves top 50 UK university ranking’ of 13 September)?
- Redundancies
Universities have announced cuts of over 15,000 jobs in the last year in a real crisis for the sector. UCU is balloting to halt redundancies at all universities. Redundancies are currently taking place at UH, though not currently on the scale elsewhere. A national agreement on redundancies is therefore urgently needed.
- Protecting national agreements
As UCU General Secretary Jo Grady has explained, this is about “the continuing disregard some institutions have for the protection of national agreements” between employers and unions regarding our terms and conditions of work. At UH we face significant breaches of national agreements, their local versions and our contracts regarding appraisals and teaching observations..
Unison is balloting too
Unison, the union representing our professional colleagues, is balloting at the same time with a view to joint industrial action to get university employers back to the negotiating table with serious proposals for all staff and the sector.
If you haven’t voted, vote today and vote YES. A strong vote is the only way of getting VCs and universities to take our pay and terms and conditions seriously.
