UCU will soon be balloting for industrial action over the latest insulting deal on our pay and conditions. Every year these below-inflation pay deals reduce the value of your wage a little. But have you looked back to see how much we’ve lost over time? There are different ways to calculate this, but if you uprate 2005 wages with inflation, you see most of our members should be getting between £20,000 and £30,000 more every year in their pay.
We know that now might not feel like a great time to ask for more. But we’ve been told it’s not the right time to ask for more for a very long time. There was the financial crisis. There was austerity. There was the pandemic. We had to be patient and wait for the return of “the good times”. Meanwhile, the economy has grown, prices have risen, and millionaires and billionaires have rapidly increased their wealth while the rest of us have tightened and tightened our belts. Not forgetting how much your workload has increased.
The “good time to ask” isn’t coming next year. Or the year after that. It’s certainly not coming in five years, or ten years, under a Reform government. The fact is that the good times never went away – for the super-rich. We’ve just been locked out of them. And it’s time to start changing that.
We need members to get involved with branch activity around the ballot. Speaking to members and non-members about how much they’re owed. Helping to get the vote out. And helping everyone to understand that without pushing back, the trend will just continue down. We can’t afford not to be in a union, and we can’t afford not to stop this decline.
To get involved, contact Branch Organiser Callum Salfield at ucu@lboro.ac.uk
The ballot is expected to open on Monday 20 October and close on Friday 28 November (5pm). For more information on the ballot, see this page on the UCU website.
