Pensions

Trinity College, the richest college at the University of Cambridge (net worth £1.5bn), recently took the decision to remove itself from the USS pension agreement — the same agreement that saw 2018’s mass industrial action on dozens of university campuses.

This verdict, taken based on flawed financial grounds and with disregard to the wider education sector, puts at greater risk the pensions of over 400,000 university workers across the UK, and is already leading other universities to re-consider their long-term commitment to the scheme.

GMB and Unison picket lines covered Glasgow on Tuesday 23 and Wednesday 24 October in a two-day strike by City Council employees.

A lunchtime demonstration on the first day of the strike also saw four thousand people march through Glasgow to a rally in front of the City Chambers.

It was the biggest strike for equal pay in British history. The target was years of pay discrimination against City Council women employees, resulting from the Workforce Pay and Benefits Review (WPBR) which was introduced and defended by successive Labour administrations

Protests are growing among women now in their early 60s who find their state pension age receding fast as they get older.

Although Britain’s first old age pensions, from 1908, were payable only over 70 years old, for many decades after Labour’s welfare-state reforms from 1945 the pension age seemed fixed at 65 for men and 60 for women.

University and College Union members are voting on a deal that would see strikes in over sixty universities called off in return for an independent review of pension provision. Voting ends on 16 April.

Fourteen days of strike action in February and March forced university bosses UUK to ditch a plan to end guaranteed pensions. But now strikers are being asked to put their trust in a process that may produce nothing better.

On Monday 12 March Universities UK and the University and Colleges Union (UCU) announced they had reached an ″agreement″ at ACAS in the ongoing dispute over the USS pension scheme.

As details of the ″deal″ came to light UCU members across the country were at first confused as to why the UCU would have agreed such a deal, and then angry.

Student occupiers, anti cuts activists and UCU members from across the UK spoke to Workers' Liberty

Bristol students occupation

An occupation of Bristol University Senior Management’s offices has forced the university to concede to most of their demands. A Bristol Uni occupier writes...

By Dan Davison, NCAFC Postgrads and Education Workers Co-Rep

On Monday 19 February, Theresa May launched the latest funding review for higher education.

See more coverage of student protests here.

As Solidarity goes to press, staff at 64 universities are on the fourth day of strikes over pensions which began on Thursday 22 February. Seven more universities are due to join in coming weeks.

There has been a strength of feeling on the picket lines unprecedented in recent university disputes. A thousand people joined a protest at Bristol, and at many other campuses numbers have been in the hundreds.

If like me you’re between 39 and 47 years old then the recent government announcement that you will have to work 18 months longer before you can retire will have angered and depressed you. Yet again as the government has moved the goalposts for workers. An increase in the retirement age to 68 was due to apply to people born after April 1978. The government now says the new standard of 68 will be introduced in 2039, which will affect those born between April 1971 and April 1978.

On 22 March, Brazil’s coup government of Michel Temer brought forward a law, previously shelved, to legalise the expansion of outsourcing. Businesses will now be able to outsource workers for their primary activity (for example, teachers in a school). Government owned institutions can now use sub-contractors, opening the door for private sector interference in nationalised sectors.