Duncan Moore and Marco Tesei, UCU NEC members, personal capacity
Many University and College Union (UCU) members will welcome the announcement of £485 million additional funding over two years for further education (FE) colleges in England, to ‘help match pay rises for schoolteachers’. But it is not enough.
This concession by a weak government has come about because of the campaigning of our members in FE and the escalation of UCU’s campaign for better pay, funding and national agreements on pay and workload. Our strategy of building for aggregated strike action this year, which Socialist Party members in UCU have been leading the call for, has already won us important concessions.
But there is no guarantee that this money will fund all FE staff getting the 10% increase that UCU demands, which would start to bridge the gap between FE and schoolteacher pay, as individual college bosses will make those decisions. And it is unconsolidated – a one-off payment not a permanent pay rise.
And it will definitely not be enough to even begin to restore the devastation of years of cuts.
To make sure this money goes where it’s needed – our members’ bank accounts, to win the funding needed to end the crisis in FE, and to win the national pay bargaining our members demand, we need to keep on the pressure.
The UCU has emailed members to confirm that the plans for an autumn aggregated strike ballot are going ahead. All branches – get ballot-ready for October!
