This is a great piece jointly authored by York UCU and the York VC which captures the immense pessimism which has been growing in me over the last 6 months. There simply isn’t enough money in the system to resolve this dispute and until there’s a new political settlement it’s going to run endlessly, possibly destroying what remains valuable and worthwhile in the university system in the process:
Staff at York and elsewhere – who have always worked with great commitment, and in recent years through particularly difficult circumstances as a result of Covid – deserve more. The risk is that increasing numbers of staff feel they cannot develop good, sustainable and rewarding careers in the sector. We need to change this. As we look ahead to resuming negotiations, we need to find ways to begin to reverse the decline in real wages.
But second, we should also – as unions and employers – jointly recognise that the financial situation of the sector is at risk of becoming precarious. We are grappling with a broken funding system which systematically underfunds the true costs of both home undergraduate teaching and research and leaves us reliant on other unstable funding sources.
Combined with the effects of recent inflation, it has put a growing number of universities in a position where higher pay rises could bring further financial risk. Some universities – even with the below-inflation pay rises of the last two years – are now in a highly problematic financial position.
https://wonkhe.com/blogs/a-shared-perspective-on-pay-and-conditions/
Mark Carrigan 