1) Next Steps: Our Boycott
As the threat of pay deductions becomes a reality, and with the prospect of our MAB continuing over the Summer, members are asking: what is the point of MAB-ing now?
Fundamentally it hasn’t changed from the first day of the boycott on 20th April.
In not marking, and preventing the award of degrees, degree classification and student progression decisions, our boycott stops the University’s core business: the provision of UG and PG qualifications. In stopping such business, the University-employer will be forced back to the negotiating table, to improve its current counter-offer to our headline demand [link]: a meaningful, inflation-matching pay rise and an improvement upon March’s ACAS-facilitated terms of reference rejected in April’s member’s consultative ballot [link].
Continuing to MAB continues to put pressure on university employers to return to business-as-normal/end the Great Disruption of 23 by settling this dispute. We see UCU and UCEA now resuming talks.
2) Local Dispute/Strike Action: Punitive Pay Docking
In our dispute over the extent and level of punitive pay docking at the University of Bristol, the branch Executive Committee agreed that the University’s ‘concession’ on pay docking (10 days at 50% of pay before July 3rd; 50% every day thereafter) does not constitute grounds to end our dispute over deductions.
University management need to do a lot more to settle this dispute.
On targeted strike action, Exec agreed to threaten industrial action at the beginning of Welcome Week, w/c 18th September, unless the University makes further concession in their policy on withheld pay.
3) MAB Salary Share Scheme
The branch will shortly be launching a Salary Share Scheme.
Every non-MAB-er will be asked to contribute 10% of monthly wages to a MAB-er in a prioritized School/Department having pay withheld. For example, a Grade J non-MAB-er pays £250 pm; Grade M1 pays £420.
This does not mean that where degrees have been classified under amended regs we give up the ghost. But there our leverage is primarily reputational damage — Wall of Shame [link]; student media [link].
Branch Officers will, in the first instance, also draw up a list of prioritized workplaces, a rubric, based on record of MAB impact.