Dear all,
The USS Joint Negotiating Committee meeting is continuing today after a full day of discussions yesterday. Please spare a moment to think of those who represent UCU and who are negotiating hard on your behalf. News will come out as soon as there is any. AND HOT OFF THE PRESS: negotiations will continue now till 23 January – the team can claim some success!!! This means that a decision will not be taken by UUK until after the result of the strike ballot – and it may well be our threat of sustained strike action which has made them pause for thought, so this makes it ESSENTIAL that we get as many votes as is possible on the ballot. HAVE YOU VOTED??
As we move towards the Christmas break, and desks are tidied, clutter is decluttered and there is room for sustained concentration, please make sure that you have a) received your ballot paper, b) filled it in and c) posted it. If you have not received your ballot paper, please go to https://www.ucu.org.uk/ussballotrequest where you will need to quote your name, email address and branch, and will be able to give an address that will work for you over the University closure period. This form goes to UCU Head office who will then send a file of details to Electoral Reform Services who will send out the replacement ballot paper. The link shows a photo of what the envelope will look like – please bear in mind that if you are asking to have the paper resent to an address outside the UK, there may be legal implications for receipt of union papers and we’d strongly advise checking the laws of the country you’ll be in.
There is plenty to read out there on the subject of the USS dispute. Most of you will, I’m sure, have seen John Brady’s message to all staff on the university staff homepage (http://www.reading.ac.uk/internal/staffportal/news/articles/spsn-751419.aspx). UUK also issued a statement which is similar in tone. We could happily spend time pulling John Brady’s statement apart, but Sheffield’s branch of UCU have done a far wittier takedown of the UUK statement, which can be found at http://ucu.group.shef.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/uss_pensions_5_opinions.pdf. Enjoy!
Other things to read: the employers have now prepared modelling of what pensions would look like following the proposed changes. The link is here –http://www.employerspensionsforum.co.uk/sites/default/files/uploads/aon-hewitt-modelling-proposed-uss-benefit-changes.pdf. Page 3 is the good one, but do read through carefully. You’ll see that in every single example, the projected annual pension income, for any group, issignificantly less than it would be on the current basis. And remember that this is the document commissioned by UUK, in support of their argument. Worse still for their argument, the base calculations that they’ve used are not the same ones as have been used by USS to model the pensions going forward for the benefit of the pensions regulator – they’re better figures. In other words, UUK insisted on sticking to a valuation of the pension scheme which they’ve claimed makes it unworkable: but they have then used different figures to predict what your pension would be if they managed to force through their changes – and the final outcome is still startlingly bad…. Mike Otsuka of LSE has put up a new blog post which analyses the analysis – https://medium.com/@mikeotsuka/uuks-actuary-s-best-estimates-eliminate-the-uss-deficit-33dad2afc24b and his conclusion is that if the (better) figures used by Aon in the analysis above were to be applied to the overarching fund, then we would all be very happy.
The modelling that UCU had done is at https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/8916/TPS–USS-no-DB-comparison-First-Actuarial-29-Nov-17/pdf/firstacturial_ussvtps_nodb_29nov17.pdf but the thrust of that was to compare USS pensions to the TPS pensions for the post-92 universities.
Sally
Sally Pellow
Secretary
Reading UCU