Universities withhold pay as exam boycott bites

Unions representing academic and related staff — NATFHE, the AUT and the EIS — were maintaining a boycott on exam marking as Labour Research went to press, with AUT members also refusing to set exams.

The unions have rejected a 12.6% pay rise over three years and are seeking increases whose “catch-up and keep-up” elements could lift pay by around 20%.

The AUT points out that academics have taken a 40% pay cut relative to their equivalent professions, despite working long hours with increased workloads and a high degree of occupational stress.

With student top-up fees (which universities lobbied for specifically on the basis that they needed more money to increase academic salaries), additional teaching, research funding and other grants, there is an extra £3.5 billion coming into the sector over the next three years.

Some institutions in Scotland have now said they will impose the 12.6% pay rise. Nineteen universities, including Bristol, Warwick and Liverpool, plan to dock pay if lecturers do not mark their students’ work. And lecturers at the University of Northumbria are planning indefinite strike action after employers deducted 100% of pay when they refused to set exams.

Roger Kline, NATFHE’s head of universities, said the union would write to institutions “warning them of the consequences of deductions and lockouts”, especially as vice-chancellors “have awarded themselves pay increases more than double that being offered to our members”.