Our negotiating team and an official from UCU Scotland met with the University Executive (UE) yesterday in the first of two Dispute Resolution meetings.

The meeting was broadly productive with some progress made towards resolving the dispute. The UE have said that they will make an initial offer of concessions, in writing, by Friday lunchtime for which they will ask that members agree to step down strike action on Monday and Tuesday so that the Dispute Resolution conversation can continue. The negotiators have agreed that the offer, when it is received, should be put to members for consideration.

The offer which we expect to receive would only be in return for standing down strikes on Monday and Tuesday so that the Dispute Resolution process can continue with a meeting on Tuesday at which the negotiators hope to seek a more complete agreement resolve the dispute.

The negotiators feel that there has been sufficient progress in the first meeting to warrant consideration of an offer. While we do not expect the initial offer to be fully fleshed out we would expect to see some kind of concrete commitment to members in exchange for them considering to call off the first two days of strike action. We remain hopeful that the UE will deliver on their promise.

Members’ Meeting

There will be an online members’ meeting to discuss the offer at 15:00 on Friday 6 March. All members have been sent an email with instructions on how to join the meeting.

We are aware that this meeting is very short notice and not all our members will be able to join but it is vital that the meeting is quorate, so please attend if you can and help us decide collectively what our next steps should be.  We update all members on the outcome as we can after the meeting is concluded.

If you can, please attend the meeting. It was our membership voting  for industrial action over these issues in record numbers which has brought the UE to the negotiating table.