- Conference
- 2025 National Higher Education Conference
- Date
- 10 October 2024
- Decision
- Carried
Higher Education pay continues to fall behind, both in relation to the real rising costs of living which our members face, and similar jobs done across the public and private sectors. We’ve been through a period of extreme inflation, which has pushed up the price of food, energy, transport and housing costs, but our wages have not followed, leaving many of our members struggling to afford the basics. Many who can, are leaving universities altogether, with some institutions struggling to recruit.
The higher education sector is facing a continuing funding crisis, with decades of marketisation pushing universities apart, leaving comparatively rich institutions able to afford better wages and relatively poor universities trying to force through job cuts, course and building closures as “efficiency savings”, in many cases to prevent possible bankruptcy.
UNISON has consistently argued that all higher education institutions should be properly funded through general taxation, with the abolition of tuition fees and higher education available to all as a public service. At the very least, we want to see all universities have sufficient funding to pay their employees properly.
What we can’t accept is that it’s either jobs or decent pay, i.e. that by limiting pay rises to what’s “affordable”, we can save our jobs, or by accepting job cuts, we can have better pay. A trade union has to fight for both, for our members to be properly rewarded for all our hard work and for our universities to be properly resourced, spending money appropriately – staff and equipment, not inflated senior management salaries or vanity projects.
The result of the New Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff pay negotiation process for the 2024-25 academic year was complicated, with uplifts to salaries in August 2024 and another due in March 2025. This increased salaries by £900 for all in August, with a further increase worth either £300, £250 or a total of 2.5% on the previous year, depending on grade. As a rough approximation, this equates to a pay increase of between 3.0% and 5.5% for most UNISON members, calculated from the 2023-24 salaries.
As New JNCHES union negotiators pointed out, the staggered nature of the pay award, confuses the issue and makes the actual value of the cash increase worth less during 2024-25 than the stated percentage increases.
At the time of writing, with inflation at 3.6% (RPI July 2024), for some members, the increase does meet one measure of the increase in the cost of living, but of course offers very little to make up for the lost decade of real-terms pay decreases, in particular, the 2022/23 inflation hike. After a recommendation from the Service Group Executive to reject, 79.6% of members expressing a choice, in the consultation conducted during August, rejected the offer.
Depending on the ballot of members, likely to be conducted in the last few months of 2024, New JNCHES talks will take place at some point, one strand of which will aim to negotiate a new spinal point structure, to be implemented at a future date. This will complicate the 2025-26 pay award negotiations, but should not get in the way of UNISON’s attempt to deliver a meaningful increase in pay for our members.
Conference Believes:
For 2025-26, we should aim for full pay restoration i.e. a pay deal which brings university pay back to where it should be, had pay increases matched inflation. We should also recognise that any deal should address the scandal of low pay, and aim to keep pay differentials within a certain limit. That is, aim for higher cash increases for the lower spinal points by promoting the idea of a fixed value award, rather than a percentage-based increase, which will always favour the higher paid.
Conference therefore Instructs the Service Group Executive:
To seek to agree with other recognised trade unions that the joint pay claim should be based on the following.
1)A flat rate increase of £2,500 to salaries, or an increase to bring the minimum hourly rate of pay at universities to £15/hour, whichever is greater.
2)An increase to pay in full from August 2025 (no staggered increases with uplifts made during the latter stages of the academic year).
3)A commitment from UCEA to discuss and agree meaningful actions to eliminate gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps at universities.
4)Continued pressure on UCEA to accept that a standard 35-hour week across the sector is something their members can and should accept.
5)Agreement that all higher education institutions should immediately join 14,000 other employers and become accredited Foundation Living Wage employers (which would make the real living wage applicable to employees of third party contactors and subsidiaries).