LECTURERS at 140 universities and colleges of higher education across the UK took national strike action yesterday, vowing: ‘We will not back down on pay.’
The joint strike by the AUT and NATFHE teaching unions was supported by the National Union of Students and other trade unionists, who refused to cross picket lines.
NATFHE and AUT members handed out a joint leaflet against being ‘Overworked, undervalued and underpaid’.
The leaflet said: ‘The employers have told us year after year that they would love to increase pay, if only funding allowed.
‘The employers even mentioned low academic salaries as a way of convincing many MPs to vote for top-up fees . . . AUT and NATFHE have tried, and continue to try everything to persuade the employers to make an offer which will restore our pay to the level of comparable professionals.’
Despite heavy rain pickets continued throughout the day.
On the picket line at Goldsmiths College in south London, local AUT official David Margolies told News Line: ‘We haven’t had a bad pay offer, we’ve had no offer at all!’
At a rally in Westminster, AUT General Secretary Sally Hunt said: ‘Today we have pulled off the most successful strike action in this sector for very many years.
‘From tomorrow, at every single university in the UK, no assessment is going to happen . . . until we get a settlement that addresses what we think is a reasonable demand.
‘We have taken the biggest step possible and we’re not going to back down.’
Hunt also expressed her support for the locked-out Gate Gourmet workers at Heathrow, who attended the London rally.
To warm applause, she said: ‘There are a number of women here today from Gate Gourmet who have suffered tremendously – simply for asking to be treated with respect – and I think we have to stand by them to ensure that never happens again to any other group of workers, and I commend them to you.’
NATFHE Head of Universities Roger Kline said there were picket lines out at all 69 of the post-1992 universities.
‘We’re quite certain that at none of these universities has a single lecture taken place,’ he told the rally.
He added that Higher Education Minister Bill Rammell ‘was met by 60 pickets at the University of Central Lancashire this morning’.
National Union of Students President Kat Fletcher said that education was ‘chronically under-funded’.