USS
All the items in this category are listed below, most recent first. Click the title to see the whole item.
9 Jun 2020
After the HEC on 8th June branches and members need to campaign to keep the Four Fights alive. UCU must not cut the feet from under our casualised colleagues, nor ditch the campaign over equality or accept the inevitable increase in workloads now facing all staff.
29 Jan 2020
Members vote more than 3:1 Yes
14 more branches join the fight, 8 post-92
Over 50,000 HE members in 74 universities able to strike
The latest round of ballots …
7 Jan 2020
We enter the new semester knowing, yet again, the resolve of UCU members to fight for the defence of higher education. We now have a further 38 institutions balloting to join the action over USS and the ‘Four Fights one Dispute’ pay inequalities campaigns. There must be no wavering in our resolve to fight for the whole sector
16 Dec 2019
The long awaited second Joint Expert Panel (JEP) report on USS was released on Friday 13th December. In this brief commentary many of the key positive and negative points of the Second JEP Report are examined.
11 Dec 2019
The motions passed by the HE Special Conference on Friday have now been published. https://www.ucu.org.uk/hesc_Dec19
The mood of the conference was buoyant after eight days of …
23 Nov 2019
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.
5 Nov 2019
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 …
5 Sep 2019
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 …
1 Jun 2019
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.
13 Sep 2018
After more than ten meetings and careful consideration of the state of the USS pension scheme’s finances, the USS Joint Expert Panel (JEP) has concluded …