Cost of living crisis!
This year’s pay negotiations with employers are set against a back-drop of eye wateringly high energy and food prices. We have been offered 3% – yes you read that correctly 3 flippin’ percent! This is also set against a decade of pay not keeping up with inflation even when it was low. use the UCU pay modeller to see how much better off you would be if pay had even just kept in-line with inflation.
This is why UCU is launching a new campaign – UCU Rising. The 4 basic “asks” of the campaign are:
1 – A pay uplift that is, at least, RPI plus 2% on all pay points, to keep up with the cost of living and to catch up with pay lost over previous years.
2 – An end to casualisation – 1/3 of all academic staff are on fixed-term contracts
3 – a demand for fair treatment for staff across the HE sector – UCU’s 2021 workload survey (published June 2022) showed that academic staff are working on average 51.3 FTE hours per week (i.e. more than 2 unpaid days each week).
4 – an end to pay inequality for all staff – The pay gap between Black and white staff stands at 17% and the disability pay gap is 9%. The mean gender pay gap is 16% and at the current rate of change it will not be closed for another 22 years.
Had enough of this? Then look out for your ballot paper in the post and make sure you vote for industrial action. You will be hearing a lot more about the UCU Rising campaign over the next few weeks, but it is vital that we “get the vote out“. There is lots of useful information on the UCU national site, so please get informed and involved and lets get a decent pay rise for a change as well as tackling some of the other issues in the sector.