Charity workers at the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) are in the midst of a bitter pay dispute. Imperial UCU have passed a motion (full details in PDF below) to support the RSA union. We have sent a donation to the strike solidarity fund, and are asking Imperial UCU members to boycott any activities organised by the RSA.

Strike action continues at the RSA this month, with dates announced for the 26th – 28th February, and a demo outside the RSA Fellows’ Festival on 2nd March. Please do what you can to go along and support.

Imperial UCU motion with full list of resolutions here:

IC UCU RSA solidarity motion passed

Imperial College’s three recognised trade unions are consulting their members on the latest pay offer. Herewith the unions’ pay negotiators’ report, and consultation question as posed to members from Imperial UCU:

Negotiators’ report

The Joint Trade Unions (JTU) at Imperial College have continued to seek a resolution to the current pay disputes through an Acas conciliation process.  Our key aim in these negotiations has been to obtain an increase in the College pay offer for 2023-24, with any improvement consolidated into pay scales.  We have also sought to (i) reopen discussions in relation to the Professional, Technical and Operating staff pay scales which were previously close to agreement but which was ended unilaterally in 2022, and, (ii)  reach a satisfactory resolution for members impacted by deductions for undertaking the Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB).

The context of these negotiations is that Imperial College has seen a significant improvement in its finances for 2022-23.  Where management initially predicted a small annual loss, there has been, in fact, a comfortable surplus.

Despite this surplus, Imperial College has made it clear that any possible improvement in the pay offer would be unconsolidated, i.e. provided as a one-off payment. In contrast, for a number of reasons, we have consistently stressed the need to incorporate any offer into pay scales. In an attempt to make progress we proposed to Imperial that they consider an increase in London Weighting (currently around £3,200) which is consolidated into pay scales. We reminded Imperial that a number of London Higher Education institutions are increasing their London Weighting payments: UCL, for example, has announced an increase to £4,500 from August 2023 and there will be a further increase to £5,000 for grades 1-7 in December. Kings College, London is currently in negotiation with the recognised trades unions in relation to an offer of £4,500 in August 2023.

The JTU are of the view that given the state of Imperial College’s finances, they could easily afford to offer the same payment.

The College has maintained that any improvement for pay for 2023 -24 would need to be financed by some of the savings that are predicted from reductions in employer contributions to the USS pension scheme. These reductions will be confirmed soon. We assured the College that USS predicts that these savings will be long-term and therefore offer enough certainty to consolidate any improvement into pay scales. The College is not prepared to accept this position and is only offering a taxable £500 non-consolidated payment in December.

Management is indicating that it is prepared to enter discussions on the PTO scale but is not prepared to move on proposed deductions from salary for members who participate in the MAB.

Since College has indicated that they will not discuss the matter further, we are now consulting you on its current offer even though this has not changed since we last consulted you. We are undertaking an electronic consultative ballot between Friday 1st and Friday 15^th September 2023. Management has made it clear that if members do not accept their offer and end the disputes, then the desultory offer of a £500 unconsolidated payment will be withdrawn.

While we recognise that the additional offer of £500 is a result of members’ industrial action, the negotiators note that College could easily afford a higher offer and that the current one still reflects a significant real-terms pay cut. The JTU negotiators are therefore recommending rejection of this offer. We have also come to the conclusion that, given the intransigence of management, to obtain any more concessions, we would need to undertake further sustained and effective industrial action.

Ballot question

The pay offer put to us by management is the same as it was when we last consulted. The union is still recommending that you vote reject. The offer is:

• A payment equivalent to a one-off lump sum of £625 in July 2023.
• An increase in pay of 5.5% in August 2023 with a floor of £2,500 and ceiling of £5,000.
• A one-off payment of £500 in December 2023.

Do you accept this offer?

Yes/no

UCU negotiator Charlotte Kestner gives an overview of the situation as it stands:

The next few days and weeks will be crucial. Please do what you can to support.

Dear all,

this is a message from the Imperial College branch of the UCU to say THANK YOU to the student body of Imperial College for your support over the last few years in the battle to save our pensions. The problems started over 10 years ago, and came to head in 2018 when the union went on the first of a series of strikes over proposed cuts which would have destroyed the pension scheme. 

We are pleased to say, that after many years of strikes and negotiations, it looks like our pension benefits are set to be restored. This is conditional on events that will happen over the next few months, but the forecast is very positive. 

Two things are for sure though:  

(i) if we had settled for the management line, and not taken strike action over the last 6 years, our pensions would now be worth a lot less, and, 

(ii) the strikes would not have been anywhere near as effective without the support of the student body.

There are further fights to be won in Higher Education – our local dispute over pay continues for example – but this is significant, so our thanks for your continued support.

Regards,

Imperial College UCU

We are grateful to Jonathan Pinto & Roddy Slorach for representing the branch at this meeting on 27/5/23 to 29/5/23. Full conference information can be found here and our delegates’ report with voting records is below.

Congress 2023 Report – RS and JP

How much is Imperial’s pay offer really worth compared to UCEA’s? Less than you might expect.

Imperial College management claim that their 2023-24 pay offer is significantly better than the national pay offer from the University and College’s Employer’s Association (UCEA) 2023-24 offer to the institutes involved in national pay bargaining. Here we refute this claim.  

There is little doubt that Imperial is better off financially than the average UK university, as past surpluses confirm. In fact, it would be a source of embarrassment if we lagged behind given our deserved reputation for attracting research funding and students, a good proportion paying overseas fees. So, it is fair to ask how much more is Imperial’s 2023-24 pay offer worth compared to the UCEA offer, which, necessarily has to be affordable not just to the average UK university, but to those struggling financially.

We have used College’s figures to make a direct comparison between the two offers, applying the terms of both offers to the same distribution of staff pay at Imperial. By adding together the costs from each quantile of 250 staff, grouped in salary order, we can compare the overall cost of the two offers.

First, it is important to understand what each offer amounts to: UCEA’s gives an early payment in February and then tops that up to 5% in August. Imperial has an early payment in May, and then tops it up to the larger of 5.5% or £2500 in August.  Hence UCEA’s offer gives three months of extra payments compared to Imperial’s. To take that into account in a fair manner, we calculate the total cost of either offer from February 2023 to August 2024, when the next pay settlement is due. We also apply the terms of both offers to all staff. All UCEA members we are aware of have already started paying the February element of the offer to all staff, even though UCU nationally are in dispute over this.

In fact, the details of each offer tend to play off against each other’s – UCEA gives a smaller early payment but in February, not May, and, while Imperial is offering 0.5% more, it also has a maximum of £5000 while UCEA members are applying 5% across the board. Taking all of these effects into account, Imperial’s offer will cost it just 0.24% more than UCEA’s up to August 2024: while the Imperial offer is worth more than UCEA’s it hardly reflects the ability of Imperial to pay its staff more.

Finally, some of you may have noticed that Imperial is claiming its offer is worth on average 7.1%. That is quite a remarkable number considering the cost of the offer, according to College, is significantly less than that. In fact, that 7.1% figure has been calculated by combining the May increase as a lump sum, and then adding that to the 5.5% increase in August (plus a small error in weighting the lowest paid quantile that adds 0.1%). Apart from the error, this approach might be a valid calculation in comparing the Imperial offer to UCEA’s but it is not actually what the offer amounts to as a consolidated salary rise: it effectively inflates the 5.5% rise with a one-off payment.

Imperial’s management are trying to give the impression that their offer is worth significantly more than the 0.5% difference in the headline rate of 5.5% compared to UCEA’s 5.0%. In fact it will cost them 0.24%, slightly less than half of 0.5% more to implement compared to UCEA’s. Imperial can afford to do rather better than that.

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Full calculations can be seen in this spreadsheet: ImperialvsUCEAOffersCompWeb