Tuesday 22nd January

Pay errata

Sally has announced she will only be doing seven more election hustings and is establishing a virtual hustings. I have therefore written to Sally to pick up on a couple of statements on pay made at the hustings held so far.

I am publishing the letter here and undertake to publish her reply on my web site.


Dear Sally

Pay and the election hustings

You’ve made a couple of points on pay in the hustings so far which I’d appreciate some clarity on.

I’m writing because we should be moving on to what we do on pay in future. This is difficult if we don’t acknowledge what has happened so far.

The quotes below are from my notes, carefully checked with people present.

1. At the SOAS hustings on 8th January you said “before people criticise what we obtained in the HE pay dispute, don’t forget we did force the employers to pay twice what they were intending to pay before the dispute, and what we got is above the going public sector rate”.

In fact, the final offer for 2006-7 is 3.5% in cash terms (3% plus 1% in February). The previous year the employers offered 3.0% without any hint of a dispute. Given there was more money in the system in 2006-7 there was never any indication whatsoever from the employers that they were going to offer less than 3.0% so I am not sure about the provenance of this claim.

Could you please clarify?

In fact, of course, with inflation now at 4.4% for December our members actually face a pay cut and the pay gap with our comparators identified by the Bett Report has actually widened since you have been in office.

2. At the St. Andrews hustings on 17th January you responded to my statement that it is important that in post-92 institutions no agreements have been signed that don’t guarantee all hourly paid lecturers are on grade AC2”.

You said in response that “the problem with the approach taken by NATFHE on the Framework is that there are currently only nine post-92 institutions where the Framework Agreement has been finalised.”

I’m not sure if this is what you meant to say but I have now checked this figure and in fact twenty (not nine) agreements have been signed off with more in the pipeline.

Can you please confirm you accept these figures, and confirm that you endorse the decision of the Higher Education Committee to adopt the former NATFHE approach?

I should add, of course, that so far not a single member has been red circled in post 92 institutions as far as I know.

Best wishes


Roger

PS I will be making this letter public and I undertake to publish your reply on my web site if you so wish.