We are writing to give you some information about the planned strike called by the University and College Union (UCU) and which, if it does go ahead, will take place from Monday November 25 to December 04.
What is the strike about?
The University and College Union is in two legally separate disputes with the umbrella organisation of universities in the UK. One of the disputes is over pensions of (mostly) academic staff and it already led to a strike in the spring of 2018. We have seen the value of our pensions shrink massively over the last decade. It has been the consistent strategy of the universities to reduce the pension benefits of staff and increasing the cost of the pension to us. This reduces the value of our pay across the lifespan massively: according to Jo Grady, the general secretary of the union, the average union member stands to lose around £240,000 over their lifetime. The second dispute is about salaries and working conditions. Real term pay has fallen more than 20% since 2008 and an increasing number of, particularly junior colleagues, are employed without any job security and on hourly pay, which means, for example, that they receive no sick pay when they fall ill. We believe that it is wrong to cut our pensions, our pay, and to treat young aspiring academics in this way.
This is why members of UCU voted by a large margin to go on strike. Nobody wants to go on strike. We like our jobs and we would rather be paid doing our jobs than be on strike, not be paid, and not do the job we love. However, we see no alternative to taking this action. If the universities don’t shift their position, a strike from 25 November to 4 December is now inevitable.
The national union of students has issued a joint statement with UCU supporting our action: https://www.ucu.org.uk/UCU-NUS-jointstatement More information from the student union should come out in due course.
Some further background information can be found in the following places:
We will also hold an information meeting for students in linguistics on Friday, 22 November, 3-4pm in the A V Hill Lecture Theatre 131, Anatomy Building, Gower Street.
What does this mean for you?
Concretely, this means that staff who are on strike will not be teaching you during the strike days, they will not answer email, not mark essays, and not hold meetings with you. It is a reasonable assumption that you might hear from your lecturers whether they are going to participate in the strike, though you should know that they are not legally obliged to tell you (or anybody) beforehand if and when they will be on strike. On the strike days, members of the union will create a picket line at the entrance of Chandler House (and all other entrances to the university). This picket line is a symbolic barrier. The strikers will ask colleagues who are not striking yet to support the strike and refrain from entering the building. The picketers will also ask students to support the strike. You can support the strike in a number of ways. You can refrain from entering the building, you can chat with the picketers, you can bring warm drinks and food to those standing out in the cold…
If you want to support the strike in this way, please consider finding places away from UCL to work. You could work from home, your favourite cafe, or you could use the library facilities around that don’t belong to UCL such as the SOAS library, the Senate House Library, or the British Library.
The union has asked lecturers not to reschedule missed classes, so you will end up missing eight days of teaching. Lecturers in linguistics will make sure that missing lectures and tutorials during the strike will not affect your marks, for example, by adjusting exams so that they do not cover material that was not taught, or in some other appropriate manner. While the strike should therefore not affect your marks, it will negatively affect your education and your educational experience here.
What you can do?
We realise that in taking strike action, we are in the first instance targeting your classes and your eduction. You have paid for those and you should feel entitled to getting your money’s worth. An overseas student on the MA Linguistics, for example, stands to lose the equivalent of £620 if all classes get cancelled. Whether you support our cause or not, we recommend that you complain to the management of the university about the fact that you are, in this case, not getting your full money’s worth. There are many ways of complaining, a simple one is to send an email to the provost of UCL (Michael Arthur, michael.arthur@ucl.ac.uk) and the vice provost of eduction and student affairs (Anthony Smith a.w.smith@ucl.ac.uk). You can email them individually or as a group.
In 2018, some students won the right to a partial refund of their fees because some of their lectures had been canceled as a result of the strike. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_UK_higher_education_strike#Compensation We suspect that threatening and taking similar steps this time around will increase the pressure on the universities to return to the negotiating table and to resolve the strike more quickly (or to avoid it altogether).
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