Below are the first two questions that employers posed in a webinar with USS on the 2023 valuation, plus the responses from Kate Barker, Chair of USS, and Aaron Punwani, the Scheme Actuary. (See this video, from 29 minutes.) ‘The first question asks to what extent the panel think that…

Vote Yes for motion HE16 at Sunday’s UCU HESC — I’d like to encourage UCU branch delegates at Sunday’s HESC conference to vote Yes for HE16 on conditional indexation (CI). It was proposed by the Sheffield branch and has the strong support of Sam Marsh. 1. The first thing to emphasize is that CI is proposed as a potential means…

Comments on their minority report — A majority (4 of 6) of UCU’s USS negotiators — as well as a majority of UCU’s Higher Education Committee (HEC) — have recommended that union members vote to “NOTE” continuing joint work with UUK, thereby pausing industrial action over USS for the time being. They write: We do not…

A pause in industrial action is now warranted — Yesterday, Kate Barker issued a statement reporting that the USS Board of Directors she chairs ‘concluded’ at a meeting last week that ‘the overall contribution rate … that would be required for the pre-1 April 2022 [i.e., uncut] benefit structure, going forward, is unlikely to be in excess of the…

UPDATE 25 March 2023: Here is a briefer Twitter thread along lines of my blog below, but from a somewhat different angle👇. The UCU Left USS negotiators Deepa Driver and Marion Hersh have posted a new blog on their ‘Reverse USS!’ website. They write: We must keep up strike…

How the UCU Left proposal is mired in a paradox of deterrence — Please have a careful look at the following FAQ, which tries to explain how it will be possible to employ the threat of ‘hard-hitting industrial action’ to force restoration of the DC threshold by 1 April 2023: Can USS make the changes to restore the DC threshold by 1 April…

Rejoinders to the ReverseUSS! FAQ — This post provides four brief rejoinders to the attempt in this linked ReverseUSS! FAQ to show that Driver’s and Hersh’s proposal would not in fact set a dangerous precedent As I spell out in Section II of this blog post, this the dangerous precedent that I and others have argued…

The 11-day question which supporters of the proposal cannot and will not answer — If there were ever a group for which collective responsibility among its members made sense, it would have to be a group of union negotiators. But a minority of one of the five UCU negotiator on JNC and one of the two UCU alternates to JNC think otherwise. These two…

The “Reverse USS!” website containing the UCU Left-supported proposal to restore all pensions benefits by 1 April 2023 has just posted a 5,000 word set of FAQs which attempts to address the various problems with their proposal that have been raised, including those I spell out in my blog post…