UCU Rising: time to turn your anger into action

Thank you to all of you who came along to last night's UCU LIVE event. I could see from your comments how angry you are at the current state of the higher education sector. From stories of members having their pay cut by £17,000 a year to members struggling to start a family due to endless casualisation, you are furious at the way you have been treated.  

This week we launched our pay modeller to show how much your pay has been cut by in real terms since 2009. We also launched our HE finances tool to show how much cash your university is sitting on and how much your vice-chancellor is being paid whilst you have faced these pay cuts.

We also saw this week the announcement from USS that the £14.5bn deficit that was used as a justification to cut 35% off the future guaranteed retirement income of our members in the scheme is now a £1.8bn surplus. We have been consistently lied to and gaslighted by people stealing our wages. 

You are right to be angry. You and your colleagues have been overworked, underpaid and undervalued for long enough.  

Now is the time to turn that anger into action.  

On the eve of when your ballots will start arriving, on Tuesday 6 September at 20:00 we will be hosting the biggest UCU Live event of the entire campaign, and the biggest rallying call for strike action in the history of higher education. You can watch it live on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. This event will be recorded.

We know that your employers have been watching our live events, trying to gauge if there is actually an appetite for strike action. We need to have an unprecedented turnout at this live event to show them how big this campaign is. We need to show them that we are not only going to win this ballot, but that we are going to smash the threshold and bring every single university in this country to a standstill. 

So contact all of your colleagues, both in and out of the union, and make sure that they will be there on Tuesday 6 September at 20:00 and that they will rise the next morning and vote YES. 

In solidarity

Jo Grady 
UCU general secretary

P.S. a special shout out to UCU members at Falmouth University, who have just voted overwhelmingly in favour of strike action in their dispute over management's creation of a two-tier workforce--please extend your solidarity to them.