It is nearly 50 years since the Equal Pay Act 1970. Only a clearly defined career progression scheme will resolve the gender pay gap and other pay gaps. The pay gap has a lasting effect on current pay but also on past pay and future pension. Therefore clearly defined career progression should also be applied retrospectively as women, BAME, disabled and LGBT+ staff have been held back for far too long.

UCU Congress in 2019 proposed running the ballots for pay inequalities and USS pension disputes together and combining our strike action for both disputes as a means to maximise the unity of our union.

Take back the university – Unite and Fight

UCU members have achieved something many thought impossible. We bust through the Tory anti-union threshold of 50% turnout in sixty universities. Activists have breathed new life into the campaign to defend USS, and broadened the fight to the post-92 universities, winning ballots on pay, equality, casualisation and workload.

• Leaflet A4 (for printing)

The strikes in the 60 universities which got over the 50 percent ballot threshold will undoubtedly win enthusiastic support. Those of us who didn’t quite …

Build the HE strikes: organise to win

UCU has called eight days of strike action over Higher Education pay and USS pensions before Christmas, one full …

The ballot results are in. UCU members throughout Higher Education are ready to fight to defend their pay and pensions, and to stand up against …

Download leaflet here
Ballot papers are out in the national industrial action ballot over pay.

We now have a chance to end ten years of pay erosion …

Take the fight to Boris – Defend Higher Education!
What is at stake
This is what is happening to our USS Defined Benefit pension. If we were …

The Augar report

The disastrous HE tuition fee market experiment of 2011 is unravelling.

The much-trailed Tory-commissioned review into HE funding, the Augar Report, is proposing cuts in tuition fees to £7,500 but a much harder ‘hit’ on students: faster repayment schedules with a lower threshold.

In UCU Left, we have always argued for cutting tuition fees to zero, bringing back grants, and demanding that “all who may benefit can come” to university (the so-called Robbins Principle). For us, Higher Education is the gift each generation bestows on the next – access to knowledge at the highest level. Make the super-rich pay their taxes, and this is entirely feasible.

But that is not what this cut is about.