A little USS thread on that £215 per annum augmentation to the USS defined benefit pension that has been negotiated. This one-off flat-rate payment to your DB pension that is of course in addition to the restoration of our USS benefits from April 2024, back to where they were before the 2022 cuts.

Short USS update: I want to offer a short thread that gives three illustrations of what the negotiated USS agreement implies for people at different salary points. 🧵 Firstly, of course, although the estimates are from our actuary, these are only illustrative, and will not accord necessarily with everyone’s circumstances. That said, I hope they are of interest.

USS pension update klaxon. 📢The Technical Provisions consultation data, released today, indicates that the cost of restored pensions from April 2024 will be down to 20.6% of salaries. Read on for details. (Mark and Jackie thread) 🧵 ‘Technical Provisions’ is a term that means the amount that a Defined Benefit pension scheme needs to cover all its accrued liabilities (all pensions earned and promised to date) within a valuation.

I’m a professor of theatre and performance. I have been teaching ‘rip-off’ degrees all my adult life. Let me summarise the pointless skills and experiences my students have accumulated: 🧵 Critical judgement: the ability to find, compare, filter and respond to a variety of texts, inputs, data, experiences, and assert relative values among them.

I want to attempt a tweet thread on the issue of employer good/bad faith, and how we might prepare for different scenarios going forward. I am of course focussing on the USS dispute. Here we go... 🧵 Let’s first start with UUK’s agreement to set full restoration to pre-April 2022 benefit levels as the guiding principle of the 2023 valuation. And to join UCU in setting that in motion with USS through the JNC.

I’m seeing those on HEC who had previously declared an intention to vote no to member vote are saying it was clear the member vote would be singular on two things. 1/ Others who were inclined to vote yes are saying there was enough indication there would be two votes. Yet others say lack of clarity. I’m seeing one yay that saw one vote. 2/

USS negotiation update klaxon 📢

thread... 🧵 Today we have published another joint UCU/UUK statement on the USS pension, following further constructive negotiations. ucu.org.uk/media/13640/A-…

Members will recently have received a communication from USS regarding the change to the salary threshold, It looks like this. A thread.🧵 Thanks to @ArisKatzourakis for alerting me to it. There was an exchange on that yesterday, but it seems worth a thread today to outline what this foregrounds, and what a seemingly routine communication reveals of the 2022 cuts and what we are working to reverse in negotiations.

The parents' lexicon. Baby and toddler version. Here are a series of experiences and phenomena common to all parents, but for which the English language has no words. Suggestions for words welcomed. A thread. 1. Spending time cooking something nice and healthy before realising it will mostly be left to scrape into a bin.
2. The lengthy period of preparations, negotiations and manoeuvres to leave the house.
3. That kind of tiredness you get from sleeping only in two hour blocks.

I want to express my sadness at the new that Steven H. Gale died a week last Sunday, I learned yesterday. Steven was a Pinter scholar with some reach and impact in the community. He was instrumental in founding the Pinter Society, and his name was one of a number of core Pinter scholarship figures that had together established frameworks and terrain in the scholarship that I entered two decades ago.

I want to offer a more considered thread on the blunder by @RussellGroup this morning, who probably didn't check in with @UniversitiesUK before sending out a statement that in small but important detail missed a crucial part of the negotiated statement. 🧵🧵 To put into some perspective, the RG is NOT the body that UCU negotiate with. That is UUK. Perhaps a small handful of RG VCs are pushing for a dilution, or they really didn't check their copy properly over the weekend.

Here is the graph that Jackie, one of your other USS negotiators, has created to illustrate the movement in USS funding with and without last year’s April 2022 benefit cuts. Small thread. What is crucially demonstrated here is that the narrative that some in UUK and some VCs have been pushing, that the benefit cuts are somehow crucial to the creation of a surplus, is demonstrably untrue. Sure, they have helped like taking a hair-dryer to a glacier helps.

So, here we are. The interim joint statement from UUK and UCU on the progress in the negotiations over USS. The dots now need joining, and we then need together, UUK and UCU, to complete the procedural part within JNC. eur03.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%… The USS published the December FMP earlier today, i.e. the monitoring position that acts as a ‘dry run’ of what the 31 March valuation will permit. This shows that restoration is affordable.

Check your email for a message from USS. We have a surplus. On the basis of the latest monitoring report, we can afford to fully restore pensions, recover what has been lost, AND reduce what we pay. More later. I am just being discharged from hospital after a minor routine procedure. Not ideal tweeting time.

To fellow @UniversityLeeds colleagues of
@UniLeedsStaff - here's a short thread giving my own impression on the unprecedented and sector-low 100% pay dock threat issued last week. 🧵 Firstly, yes, an employer can make reasonable cuts to pay if an employee is in breach of contract by way of legal industrial action; for striking that means a day's wage, for partial performance that should mean a deduction proportionate to the harm caused.

A Sunday afternoon thread 🧵on the history of USS and the disputes, for those that are interested. #USSMess; How we got here. The USS pension scheme was established in 1975. It was a ‘final salary’ defined benefit scheme, and remained so, and was stable in that, until 2011. The pension was based on (not identical to) the salary at retirement. So far so good.

I am a working class trade unionist. It was notable to me in doing my family history that the working class roots were deeply embedded across centuries. As far as I could identify, I was first to university in any branch of that tree. 🧵 The ‘batty’ in my surname is a traditional northern surname, but curiously it originates, via my dad, in a small group of Battys from Buckinghamshire with a long history of agricultural labourers or home-working sewing roles.

The money is there. On our own calculations on 30 December gilts, using USS modelling, a full restoration of benefits cuts is affordable and at a cheaper cost envelope than currently paid. 1/ We offered to share and discuss these costings and work on them together with @UniversitiesUK as a basis for negotiating probable and desirable outcomes as a means of bringing industrial action on USS to a close 2/

Last summer, local UCU branches were in dispute and arranging marking boycotts in part to campaign to restore USS benefits that had been unreasonably cut (see my thread on those cuts -

https://twitter.com/cupofassam/status/1616022394178502657?s=20&t=R7q1xztUFqp1BrzAguj4Dw

). This 2nd thread will address the outcome of that action. #ucuRISING Across the country, UUK institutions agreed joint statements (and some in private) with their local UCU branches, and it was on the basis of these commitments that the action was stood down at those institutions.

I want to emphasise the scale of the cuts to the USS pension (broadly the pension scheme for the ‘pre-92’ University sector) and why this is key to the current dispute with employers. This is going to take a couple of threads. This first thread is on the cuts. #USSmess #UCURising The recent disputed cuts were implemented on 1 April 2022 as a consequence of the 31 March 2020 valuation. It is quite usual to take two years between the date that the valuation is based on, and the implementation of any changes.

Just come from The Dwarfs at The White Bear, directed by @mataharifilms This was authentic Pinter, from the grain to the veneer. Compelling from beginning to end. The casting is perfect, which is always half the job done, and the actors have each got under the skin of their characters. This wasn’t just letting the words fall, this was measuring every word.