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.

Click below for an update on the USS dispute from Carlo Morelli – UCU negotiator on USS JNC.

National Industrial Action: Developing a Strategy to Win
The result of UCU’s equalities and pay ballot is a contradictory and complex outcome. It is both disappointing …

UCU HEC 15th February 2019
Equality and respect
HEC on 15th February has met a new low. And it has had some real lows at times. UCU …

Voting in the Vice President & National Executive Committee elections starts on 1 February and closes on 1 March.

Jo McNeill is the UCU Left candidate for Vice President. Many universities and colleges have already organised hustings, if there isn’t one where you are, please contact Jo to invite her.

To get in touch with Jo and to find out more about her campaign, please see her website.

UCU Left recommends the following candidates for a member-led, democratic and fighting union. More…

Success has a thousand parents, failure is an orphan. That the 2018 USS dispute transformed UCU everyone in the union accepts. Similarly, it was the members …

Build the ballot over pay, equality, workload and casualisation

UCU has called a five-week ballot for industrial action over pay this term. It opens on Tuesday 15 January and closes on Friday 22 February. It is timed for the maximum duration while still allowing members to take hard-hitting strike action this term and hit exams next term. So if we win the ballot we can take serious action.

We need to get organised. More…

HE votes to re-ballot and campaign on pay, equality, casulisation and workload – prepare to organise and fight

Following a serious debate about strategy, delegates at Wednesday’s HE Sector Conference voted to relaunch a hard-hitting national pay campaign, focusing on pay, equality, casualisation and workload.

HEC members were presented with a report from a national official that accepted that we had received the best ballot result in a pay dispute …