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HE dispute employer lobby

Your ballot papers start arriving from today: post your vote as soon as you can

19 October 2021

Your ballot papers for industrial action should arrive today or tomorrow. The law does not permit online voting, so you need to post your vote back in the prepaid envelope provided.

If your institution is in the Four Fights dispute over pay, casualisation, workload and equality, you can find FAQs introducing the dispute with links to other materials and resources here. 

If your institution is in the dispute over massive cuts to USS pensions, please read the updated FAQs at this link. 

There are general FAQs that apply to both disputes at this link. 

To check which dispute(s) you should be receiving ballot papers for, please consult this list.

Our demands to employers 

Yesterday morning I and other UCU members, along with the NUS President Larissa Kennedy, visited the shared headquarters of Universities UK (UUK) and the Universities and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) -- the employer representative bodies we negotiate with in the USS and Four Fights disputes, respectively. We delivered letters to the chief executive of UUK, Alistair Jarvis, and the chief executive of UCEA, Raj Jethwa, setting out what it will take to resolve our disputes. 

You can find the UCEA letter at this link and the UUK letter at this link. 

Every vote counts 

Every vote counts in this ballot. That's not just because the law requires unions to achieve a turnout over 50% to be able to call industrial action -- it's also because a high turnout sends a message to employers. A strong turnout and YES vote for action is the best way to force employers to make an improved offer, because it demonstrates the scale of disruption which you will cause if the action goes ahead. 

Every action which you and your branch take to increase turnout and the size of the YES vote in your institution will strengthen our negotiators' hand at the bargaining table.  

UCU branches that have balloted during the pandemic and achieved a high turnout have done amazing things -- stopping hundreds of compulsory redundancies, protecting members' health and safety, and winning agreements on workload, casualisation and other issues. Now we need to replicate their achievements throughout the higher education sector because that is the only way to reverse the sector-wide trend of over a decade of declining investment in staff.  

Make you sure you vote as soon as possible. 

Jo Grady
UCU general secretary

Last updated: 6 May 2022