Dear members, colleagues,

This message comes ahead of next week’s strike action, it will provide more evidence supporting the need to withdraw your labour with us. We sent an open letter to the Principal expressing our dismay at the cuts to our pensions. We heard back from him this week. The letter is cold comfort and we are left again wondering at the double standard between the stated visions for our institution and the actions of those who purport to lead it. Given the very clear information both we and our employer have about the entire process leading to the imposed cuts to the living standard of our retirement, we consider this gaslighting.

We think we can summarise the most outrageous aspects in 4 key points:

1. Ignoring and misrepresenting our real and valid concerns. From the outset, the Principal implies that our stress is due to the delay in finalising the March 2020 valuation. This statement completely ignores the fact that we fundamentally disagree with the concept of valuing the pension fund on the worst performing day in the pandemic. Moreover, the whole package of reforms is based on a view of pensions that even the Financial Times has called “excessively prudent”! This quaint pension language should be translated into “excessive, brutal, and unwarranted”.
   
2. Misrepresenting UCU proposals: We are deeply concerned with the misrepresentation of UCU’s multiple proposals. These were a compromise on behalf of the union; Strathclyde management agree that there was an acceptance by the union that we may have needed to pay more for a short time while the woeful governance of the pension scheme was reformed. As a socially progressive employer, Strathclyde should have engaged with these proposals. The lack of such engagement puts the lie to management’s claim to have negotiated in good faith, but also to its very own reputation as a place of useful learning. It appears that all USS claims were taken as being intrinsically honest, while only UCU’s proposals were challenged critically.
   
3. Transparency and procedures: We are concerned at the oversight of this decision—when exactly was it discussed in Court, what was the decision process that led to the university’s position? The Principal’s letter refers to an internal consultation with staff but members are not widely aware of this—we now understand that the responses by Strathclyde employees to the national USS survey were returned to the university without it being made explicitly clear that this would happen. The employers saw this, but why did we not get an opportunity to look at our own data?
   
4. Performing an Equalities Impact Assessment (EIA) is not equivalent to acting in line with the outcomes of that EIA: The letter states that an EIA was produced and that it was “submitted … in line with the nationally agreed process”. From what we see in the EIA (available on the Strathclyde Sharepoint at https://strath.sharepoint.com/sites/equality), the assessment was flawed and massively underestimated the equalities concerns to the detriment of groups already disadvantaged by the structural flaws of the higher education workplace. Even with these doubts it manages to express the widespread negative impacts to many categories of staff. But more fundamentally, section 149 of the Equality Act 2010 places a duty on the university to improve equalities, not just count them like unchangeable truths. This means that even the flawed EIA should have automatically led to a rejection of the changes to USS based on Strathclyde’s own assessment of the negative impacts!

We know we can back up these concerns with evidence: to learn more in detail, visit the Strathclyde UCU website over the next weeks. https://strathclydeucu.wordpress.com

While the easy-to-access USS modeller has been closed, you still can check the impact of the changes to the pension scheme here https://www.ucu.org.uk/ussmodeller.  

Our concerns are real, they are material, and will affect #OneOfUsAllOfUs.

Strathclyde UCU Committee

ucu@strath.ac.uk