Marking boycott comes to an end

After a fortnight of industrial action, the University and College Union (UCU) and Universities UK (UUK) have reached an agreement on Wednesday to a series of negotiation meetings.

Through this, UCU and UUK have jointly agreed to suspend industrial action (a marking boycott that had taken place at Universities across the UK) from the Wednesday onwards. UCU members had launched the marking boycott in protest of proposed pension reforms in the USS, which would have seen contributions drop and members’ final pay-outs dwindle in an attempt to make up a shortfall in the USS pension pot.

The suspension is to last until after the next joint negotiating committee (JNC) meeting scheduled for the 15th of January, 2015, with the negotiation meetings that UCU and UUK have agreed to taking place between now and then.

In a number of statements on their website, the UCU states that “the purpose of these meetings is to close the differences between the stakeholders’ negotiating positions, with a view to reaching agreement. This will include a meeting between the respective actuaries of the USS Trustee Board, UUK and UCU.”

They also say that: “both parties are pleased that the agreement to suspend industrial action at this early stage will mean that students will not have been adversely affected and members of staff will not have had pay deducted.”

This is on the basis that “at this point, institutions will not have found it necessary to apply their policies to withhold pay for the assessment and marking boycott and that individual members of staff who were participating in the industrial action will have been able to remedy, within a reasonable time scale, any backlog of work that actually resulted from the industrial action between 6 to 20 November.”