Lecturers Form Plan Of Attack On Pay

Wed, May 10, 2006

Source: Guardian

Lecturers attending the last Association of University Teachers (AUT) conference in Scarborough today had been hoping to celebrate securing a significant pay claim.

Lecturers attending the last Association of University Teachers (AUT) conference in Scarborough today had been hoping to celebrate securing a significant pay claim.

Instead, top of the agenda at the final AUT council meeting before it merges next month with lecturers' union, Natfhe, will be the increasingly bitter industrial dispute.

The AUT general secretary, Sally Hunt, will report back to members on the stalled pay negotiations with the Universities and Colleges Employers' Association (Ucea) on Monday. Ucea offered 12.6% over three years but AUT and Natfhe wanted 23%.

Ms Hunt had wanted to use the farewell AUT council meeting to boast to members that they had emerged victorious from the lengthy battle with employers. Instead, all attention will be turned to the stalemate and the AUT's next plan of attack.

Ms Hunt indicated she would have accepted a "reasonable" offer from Ucea and could have called an immediate end to the marking boycott, which is threatening to cause chaos on campuses across the UK and prevent final year students from graduating.

However, Ms Hunt said Ucea's offer on Monday was "incredibly disappointing" and failed to match in real terms the offers made to two Scottish universities.

Late last week, St Andrews and Aberdeen universities offered academic staff a 12.5% increase over three years but the local members rejected the offer after Ms Hunt urged the local branches to remain committed to negotiating nationally.

Ms Hunt will give her final address as general secretary of the AUT to members tomorrow. The new union will be known as the University and College Union and will have 120,000 members. Ms Hunt intends to stand as its first general secretary.

Although the other issues on the agenda are likely to overshadowed by the breakdown in pay talks, members will also debate plans by the chancellor, Gordon Brown, to scrap the research assessment exercise (RAE).

The RAE, a huge task in which the work of every active researcher is assessed by 67 different subject panels, is used to distribute billions of pounds in of funding for research. Some universities, such as including Oxford and Cambridge, would gain millions of pounds from the proposed changes while others like Imperial College, University College London, Leeds and Newcastle, would lose out.

Ms Hunt said the issue of academic freedom was also on the agenda in the wake of the suspension of Leeds University lecturer Frank Ellis. He caused outrage in March after insisting that black people and women were genetically inferior.

The three-day conference starts this afternoon.

www.Guardian.co.uk