Update From Cardiff UCU General Meeting – We Need Your Views On The UUS Pensions And Pay Disputes

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Great job from everyone who joined the last general members’ meeting of the academic year yesterday and contributed to the discussions.

At the meeting we discussed:

  • potential upcoming USS pensions and pay disputes,
  • our strategy to address excessive workloads,
  • some recent anti-casualisation victories, and
  • the proposed changes associated with Recast Transforming Services and Better Ways of Working.

You can see the slides presented by our member and pensions expert, Woon Wong, on USS pensions here, and the slides presented by our Exec members Nicky Priaulx and Martin Weinel on workload here. Chris Graves’ presentation on Recast Transforming Services and Better Ways of Working is here.

As part of the discussion on Pensions and Pay, UCU head office has asked us to collect views from members on potential industrial action. Please complete this very short survey so that your thoughts can contribute to the union’s strategy.

Members voted overwhelmingly (95%) in support of the proposed strategy for the workload campaign, which includes exploring the submission of a collective grievance to university management regarding the workload crisis and its consequences for staff.

If you are interested in the anti-casualisation workgroup updates, there is a dedicated Anti-casualisation meeting on Tuesday 29th June at 10 am. Everyone is welcome and the link to the meeting is: https://cardiff.zoom.us/j/87682683237?pwd=Rm12U3Zyd0o3NmVHR3dHcmNNcHU2QT09

All the updates and news from the branch are sent to members in our branch’s newsletter/bulletin so we urge members to read these in order to be up-to-date with the branch’s activities – you can search for “Cardiff UCU News” or “Cardiff UCU Bulletin”; there will be one in your inbox next week. We were initially sending the bulletin every week but decided to start sending it less frequently and intersperse it with occasional specific e-mails like this one.  We hope this works well for you but please let us know if you have any ideas or preference regarding how we communicate with you.

If you have any questions or any issues we would like to discuss with the branch, please contact our office (ucu@cardiff.ac.uk).

In solidarity,

Cardiff UCU Branch Committee