UK universities have been stuck in a cycle of industrial conflict for over five years.
It has been debilitating for staff, compromising welfare and career opportunities, and damaging to a generation of students already deeply impacted by Covid-19.
And repeated conflict undermines the sector’s reputation at home and abroad. We at the University of York – the vice chancellor and the local branch executive of the University and College Union (UCU) – want to work together to break out of this cycle.
Breaking the impasse
But the national negotiations are now at an impasse. We need, as employers and trade unions, to get back to meaningful negotiations on pay and conditions. We’ve shown it can be done on pensions. That’s in part due to recent changes in economic circumstances. All are now agreed the latest valuation process of the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) will be positive and enable benefits to be restored.
But, importantly, we’ve gone beyond that to begin to explore measures that would guard against future instability if economic circumstances change. And – together with the USS trustees – employers and unions are collectively pressing both the UK Government and the Pensions Regulator not to impose tighter, over-cautious regulation in future. That capacity to work together to think into the medium term is crucial.
Are there ways in which employers and unions can build a shared perspective on the future of pay and conditions in the sector?
Working for the future
We made some progress a few months ago on a set of long-standing issues which have vexed the sector, working up draft Terms of Reference for action on the national pay spine, minimising casual contracts, closing pay gaps and ensuring workloads are at – and stay at – reasonable levels.
There’s a balance to be struck here between employer concerns about university autonomy and the demands of trade unions that these matters must be subject to UK level frameworks. But we could still work in negotiations to strengthen these Terms of Reference, perhaps creating shared baselines that universities would be expected to meet to improve working conditions.
Recognising the issues
The bigger sticking point in the national negotiations is pay. To move ahead we need two things.
First, we need – as employers and unions – to jointly recognise that real wages, as across the wider public sector, have been gradually eroded since 2008 by repeated below inflation pay rises. With high inflation over the last two years, that erosion has been accelerated. Pay rises in 2022-23 and 2023-24 have lagged seriously behind inflation. Many staff now face real hardship.
Staff at York and elsewhere – who have always worked with great commitment, and in recent years through particularly difficult circumstances as a result of Covid – deserve more. The risk is that increasing numbers of staff feel they cannot develop good, sustainable and rewarding careers in the sector. We need to change this. As we look ahead to resuming negotiations, we need to find ways to begin to reverse the decline in real wages.
But second, we should also – as unions and employers – jointly recognise that the financial situation of the sector is at risk of becoming precarious. We are grappling with a broken funding system which systematically underfunds the true costs of both home undergraduate teaching and research and leaves us reliant on other unstable funding sources.
Combined with the effects of recent inflation, it has put a growing number of universities in a position where higher pay rises could bring further financial risk. Some universities – even with the below-inflation pay rises of the last two years – are now in a highly problematic financial position.
Onward to action
But if we can find sector-wide agreement on these two points – first, staff deserve more and the last two pay awards have not met the needs of staff and second, many employers feel they are not in a position to afford more – then, as we have seen around USS, we can turn to how we can fix the situation in future.
That will require us to think in new ways. One would be to set up a framework for shared understanding of sector finances, perhaps with independent leadership. This could enable employers and unions to build a clearer shared perspective on a sustainable approach to reversing the decline in real wages, which is vital for our sector’s future.
We should also look to approach pay beyond annual, short-term and reactive negotiations, and develop multi-staged or multi-year deals that would enable employers to plan ahead with greater certainty, which would support developing and implementing the frameworks mentioned above. This would likely involve putting guardrails around these pay deals through stabilisation mechanisms, analogous in outcome to those under consideration for USS, so we could manage changes in economic circumstances.
But above all, we at York jointly recognise that the current pay offer is not what staff deserve and have a vigorous, shared commitment to building and making a shared case to both government and opposition for fair and sustainable funding for the sector. We cannot achieve this effectively if we are engaged in constant industrial disputes. At the University of York we are clear that negotiations must restart to enable a different path to be found.
We think that many others among employers and the trade unions across the UK want this too. Let’s do it.
Worth noting here that the Terms of Reference on workload, casualisation and equalities were rejected by 56% of members as inadequate (this is linked on David Kernohan’s piece). Interesting reference to strengthening the ToR – it lacked meaningful concrete commitments (“involuntary zero hours” being a case in point – far too vague and far too much space for exceptions). UCU nationally have called for 24 month minimum contracts – concrete commitments of this sort could provide a means to really add substance that would genuinely change the lives and working conditions of UCU members.
Genuine question: why would my university allow me to take up a 9-month fellowship (with research buyout) if it would mean employing my replacement for 24 months?
I’d be interested to hear the answer to this one – also why a University should cover 12 months of maternity leave with a 24-month contract.
These are very old problems that large organisations have been able to handle for decades. In brief, large organisations handle fluctuations by pooling. If you are the first person in your institution’s history to get a 9-month fellowship (or to have a baby), then it is probably worth the institution going out of its way to support this. If there is a steady stream of people going on leave, a head of department can do their job as a manager by asking some people to take on more of one sort of work (e.g. teaching or admin) now with a… Read more »
Thanks for the reply, which is helpful on ‘pooling’ (though only larger teaching units will have that sort of carrying capacity, which they’ll need to ‘hide’ from their own finance department). Piecing together a 2yr contract out of combined grant funds also sounds very enlightened, but I’m trying to imagine a scenario where e.g. 3 colleagues in my department all have significant buyout money to spend in the same 2yr window, which they then spend on a temp lecturer somehow capable of covering the modules of 3 people. This ‘London buses’ scenario sounds improbable even in a large department (i.e.… Read more »
I am unsure that the majority of organizations cover maternity leave in this “pooling” manner – typically this is covered by a fixed term contract covering the same amount of time as the maternity leave, surely? Even if one wants to acknowledge the difficulty of uprooting to a different city to take a year long maternity cover role up, I am unsure that paying someone for an extra 12 months on top could ever really be justified in terms of resources, if there was not the need to cover that role for more than the 12 months (and what if… Read more »
Universitys only typically pay 4.5 months of full pay then its satutory maternity pay which is less than £700 a month – My question would be why should they not cover maternity pay – and if you think they shouldnt- who do you sugguest should cover womens maternity pay?
They absolutely should cover maternity pay. I’m talking here about cover for the work the person on mat leave is not doing, because they are on mat leave. UCU current policy is that this should be covered by someone on a minimum 24 month contract, which seems to me unjustifiable financially.
A 24 month minimum contract for everyone would be extremely counterproductive, how would we ever employ anyone on any of the many 6-12 month Fellowship and research funding calls? What about interns? Graduate Teaching Assistants (GTAs)?
I’m all for providing stability to researchers and staff, but a lot of the discussion has been ludicrously simplistic. Our GTAs are crying out for zero hours contracts, but they’ve become extremely difficult to arrange and the result is we’re struggling to recruit GTAs at all.
UCU have never given anything *close* to a satisfactory answer on this, re their demand of 24 months minimum vs the work these posts are meant to cover which is almost never 24 months, and rarely over 12. Sure, it’d be nice to employ someone for longer, but the truth is a University would just insist on cover from within. It’s a recipe for far fewer opportunities for postdocs.
What is needed is either additional grant funding or tuition fee increases on an ongoing basis to compensate for cost inflation, or some combination of these. It simply isn’t possible to give staff significant pay rises, or even relatively modest ones, without there being more income. Some HEIs are already in serious deficit, many are teetering just above this. And all other costs, notably TPS contributions, also increase each year so the available pot is getting smaller each year. Nobody wants strikes, nobody wants unhappy staff, but there’s a reality which doesn’t look as if it will be moving anytime… Read more »
Alex it’s curious that you think we shouldn’t punish students but we should increase tuition fees. We could save a lot of money by eliminating a large number of upper administrative roles in the university that really serve no purpose (example: do we really need deputy deans?), and cap institutional salaries at £100k. That’s before we get to the unnecessary property speculation that has been endemic at HEIs over the last while.
Senior pay has to be competitive in the wider world, not just HE, and whilst there may be some roles which could be changed, capping salaries would be a drop in the ocean financially and wouldn’t then attract the same range of talent. Tuition fees don’t punish students, but do form part of what some graduates pay back. If there’s no more funding from either fees or grants, inevitably the HE sector will have to either diversify further (maybe into property letting) or reduce in size or range of offer, affecting staff at all levels. And there are many other… Read more »
I’d be interested to see if the proportion of wages relative to institutional income has changed over the past few years. My sense is that its decreased meaning other expenditures are being prioritised. That has to be part of any reality too. Staff are the university.
This is easily checked, just look up your institution: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/finances/kfi
So e.g. for York, ‘staff costs as % of total income’ is:
2015/16: 55.6%
2016/17: 55.2%
2017/18: 55.1%
2018/19: 75.3%
2019/20: 51.4%
2020/21: 59.5%
2021/22: 74.7%
The chart linked below shows staff costs relative to everything else — the one to worry about is interest, which barely registered in the 2014-22 window but which will spike this coming year:
https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/finances/expenditure
It is dispiriting to see people seemingly seriously suggesting that, say, losing 4-8 senior roles in a University could somehow make up for the *current* funding gap of a minimum 5% pay increase for all staff which has been imposed this year (the stats UCU use on income and expenditure are from 2022, so prior to this imposition) – let alone covering the pay rise UCU seem to think is feasible of another 10% on top of that (plus of course making all fixed term roles permanent, which is another thing they seem to think is feasible). The current dispute… Read more »
The problem with this line of argument is two-fold: 1) You can have all the watertight cases you want that it’s not possible to pay someone a remotely competitive salary with sensible surrounding terms on workload, security, etc … but the best-case outcome is that they nod seriously, sympathise, and then throw your job advert/offer in the bin to do something similar for £10-20k more elsewhere. In my professional services department we have multiple critical roles we can’t fill because university pay scales have gone from “pretty decent” to “no chance mate” over the last 10-15 years and the people… Read more »
I think re ‘the sector is utterly broken’, the truth is that the model as imposed by the Tory-Lib Dem coalition is one that needs fees to actually rise in order to work, but part of the point of it was to try to bankrupt some institutions, especially post-92s. Not that I support this happening, or that I support students taking on the full burden of fees, because I don’t – I think, just realistically, 1/3 of total fees is probably about right, with the state funding the rest as they do post-16 education – but the truth is that… Read more »
As regards negotiated settlements … the vote against the current UCEA offer was only 56:44. So that’s the sort of level where a relatively small improvement in the offer could perhaps have tipped the balance – scrape together an extra 0.5% on pay, clean up some of the wording objections groups had to the ToR on the casualisation/workload/equality issues, get it over the line. Acceptance by 51:49 wouldn’t have been fun internally for UCU but that wouldn’t have been UCEA’s problem. But UCEA decided that they didn’t need to do that and could fight it out, so here we are.… Read more »
Propaganda on both sides, but this is the education version of the argument that the minimum wage can’t be raised because then all of those great small businesses couldn’t afford workers. If a small business can only exist by exploiting workers on low wages, then that’s a problem. Are we saying that it’s OK that universities are being run in such a way that salaries consistently fall below inflation and workers are increasingly badly off? This is (partly) about values and priorities, how we balance a desire for high-quality education with a willingness to exploit teachers. And YES, why are… Read more »
York and the other Russell Group institutions can probably afford a higher pay settlement. *But loads of others genuinely can’t.* UCU leadership know this but seem not to care. Already there are hundreds of redundancies in process at very established universities — and that’s before big cost increases this year (energy, etc) hit the books.
I really wonder if the loud and proud MAB-bers at rich universities pause to think about the impact (i.e. potentially my job) of stretching post-92s way beyond sustainability. Solidarity indeed!
I’m sorry, but the idea of university leaders pressuring government into giving us shedloads of extra money is just beyond delusional. That would have been fanciful 20 years ago; after 2010 it’s a total fantasy.
Beyond the HE bubble, the UK government is currently boasting about stiffing the pay demands of doctors, teachers and nurses. If anyone think the British public are keen to pour extra billions into our pockets while nurses go hungry, I suggest they do some informal surveys at the local bus-stop, or better yet the A&E waiting room.
“Are we saying that it’s OK that universities are being run in such a way that salaries consistently fall below inflation and workers are increasingly badly off?” – I don’t think we are, but the current dispute features, on the one hand, employers saying ‘we simply can’t afford this’, and a union saying ‘you can’ by using ridiculously misleading stats – inexplicably swallowed by a membership who are meant to be clever people – to suggest that what they’re asking for is easily-achieved. As someone above says, it might be true that a Uni like York can afford a further… Read more »
If that’s the GS’s voter base, she has no hope of keeping it next year. She dismayed a lot of casualised staff by endorsing the ToR which had nothing concrete for casualised staff and betrayed a naive understanding of the nature of casualisation by allowing herself to be tricked by the employers’ focus on zero hours contracts. She’s losing postgraduate researchers with her current plans to make the excellent PGRs as Staff campaign co-leads redundant. I suspect her voting base now is those who oppose strong action such as indefinite strikes and MAB and those who don’t know much about… Read more »
Small businesses can also set their own prices for their product to cover some of the cost for responsible pay increases. HE is not allowed to do so except for international students and then get hammered in the press and by government for having too many international students.
I’m really pleased to see this article! It seems so obvious written down, and yet to get traction with this kind of thinking has been a real struggle. I very much hope the step forward made at York can pave the way for other insitutions and their branches to acknowledge that this is the only solution to the problems of pay and funding. Well done to all at the University of York!
Agreed! I look forward to seeing more unis make such eminently sensible (yet apparently brave in UCEA/the Russell Group) statements.
Agree with Naysayer. We should expect propaganda from both sides of an industrial dispute, but I stopped supporting this strike when the UCU rhetoric on ‘surpluses’ became intolerably dishonest. There is robust public data on UK university finances – go here and sort by ‘surplus/deficit as % of total income’: https://www.hesa.ac.uk/data-and-analysis/finances/kfi (If UCU tweets are your main source of information you’re in for a surprise.) Very few UK universities have any cushion to speak of, and will be facing skyrocketing costs as debt comes up for refinancing. Deploying the ‘nuclear option’ in these conditions was insane – at the very,… Read more »
Yes – and bear in mind that those are 21/22 figures where the rise in fuel prices was yet to hit, ditto the 5% pay rises (and concurrent pension pay rises too), let alone refinancing of debt as you say. There is absolutely no way that universities can pay v much more without cutting elsewhere. That’s what this statement from York is essentially saying anyway, isn’t it – the suggestion is to tie Universities into gradual pay rises over successive years, but this will bring with it attendant financial planning – and that isn’t going to be the kind of… Read more »
Wouldn’t it be better to sort exclusion pension adjustment since it’s now been acknowledged that we were right all along on the pension cuts and that they will be reversed? Anyway, what I see is the majority of unis – which are not-for-profit institutions – making a profit. Not-for-profits should make a loss as often as a profit. We shouldn’t be hoodwinked by employer logic that we need big surpluses, nor should we uncritically accept what they choose to spend money on instead of us. We should pressure them with our industrial action for fair offers. That’s what we’re doing… Read more »
First sentence should say: sort by surplus/deficit as % of total income excluding pension adjustment.
Which do you think is more likely: a successful effort by university employers to “collectively push for funding reform”, or lots of universities going under? Because that is not only the easier option, it’s what the government explicitly desires (‘market exits’ that open the way to sexy new providers who will compete and innovate the survivors into shape). I would love to live in a Britain where it was remotely plausible to imagine such reform, I truly would. Labour have already ruled it out in the clearest possible terms, and let’s not forget they created quite a lot of the… Read more »
Firstly re pensions – Universities aren’t all in USS and the employer contribution that post-92s are paying on the TPS is likely to be substantially increased in the very near future. That’s in addition to the standard increase to pension contributions from employers in USS and TPS when salaries go up, as they have by 5% minimum. This is going to have an impact on staff spend and thus balance sheets, no matter the resolution of the USS dispute – in fact it literally already has. But to move on – I’ve never supported a dispute being run as the… Read more »
£25bn in covid loans fraud that will NEVER be recovered because the Tories are terrified we’ll find out whose bank accounts the money actually hit. Michele Mone receiving £29million from flawed PPE Medpro, a company she lobbied ministers to use, and then the PPE was stored (at further cost) and disposed of because it wasn’t suitable. Pfffttt. Wake up folks. The money is there to afford to pay workers, but the political will isn’t. Yes the funding model may be broken, but the current day government has made a huge mess of everything it touches, unless you happen to be… Read more »
Please credit York UCU in the byline as well as Charlie Jeffery.
I wonder how long before York follow Queen’s Belfast and do a ‘shared perspective’ that shafts the rest of the sector?
It does feel like this is where we’re heading – and, I’m guessing, for the ‘independent review’ of the sector to decide that post-92s should be looked at differently.
We should be building more universities and expanding the capacity for taking International students to help balance the books.