Industrial Union 620
Lecturers' pay dispute suspended: deal reached
Although still only offering a total pay increase for lecturers if 13.1%, the agreement does improve wages of many non-academic staff by around 15.5%. This will include cleaners, porters and security staff, among others. Further to this agreement, an independent review of funds will be udnertaken, in the hope of showing more revenue to be available to academics.
In a particularly important step, part of the deal was to reimburse all pay docked as a result of particularly hard bullying tactics at some universities, such as Northumbria. This is in effect a step down from management, perhaps in the acknowledgement that they were acting extremely unfairly to their employees.
The ongoing action had been increasingly manipulated against the lecturers, with emails having been sent from management to students and staff in some universities, giving only the bosses' side of the story. This, as well as the u-turn made by the National Union of Students falsely shifted the discourse from 'lecturers versus bosses' to 'lecturers versus students'.
This right-shift in debate on the matter led to Boris Johnson, Conservative shadow education secretary, attempting a half-hearted commendation of 'both sides' for coming to an agreement. In particular, however, he emphasised that it is now up to the lecturers to forget the dispute and begin marking immediately. No doubt very few lecturers will simply forget the dispute, and the UCU is prepared to recommence the struggle if this compromise is not acted upon fully. In the meantime, further negotiations will continue between the UCU and university bosses.