A day of strike action has been called for 31 October 2013 in support of our claim for a decent pay increase and to respectfully ask you to support the strike.

The members of all three unions – UCU, Unite and Unison will be taking part in this strike and we hope it sends a powerful message to the employers.

With four years of pay cuts hitting the living standards of everyone in our sector and the university employers sitting on an amassed surplus of more than £1.1 billion, it’s not surprising that members in higher education are angry. The position of higher education staff has also made the mainstream press, with Sunday’s Observer carrying an article from Will Hutton describing our four year pay cut as the ‘most sustained cut in wages suffered by any profession since the Second World War’.

This is an unnecessary dispute. We know that your employers can afford a better pay offer than 1%. I hope that our action will bring them back to the table, but until that happens we have to be ready to take action.

Following the one-day, united strike, UCU members will begin working to contract and we will be sending out more details about this very soon. In the meantime, I’d ask you to support this sector-wide united strike.

Yours

Michael MacNeil
UCU Head of Higher Education
HE Pay Dispute 2013 – Fair Pay in HE

You can follow UCU on Twitter at https://twitter.com/ucu where you will get regular updates throughout the dispute.