Sides clash over AUT strike
PRESSURE IS mounting on the Association of University Teachers (AUT) and University and Colleges Employers Association’s (UCEA) to resolve the ongoing dispute involving University lecturers’ pay, which is threatening hundreds of students’ degrees in York, and thousands of undergraduates nationwide.
As final year graduation dates approach, the past fortnight has seen several attempts by external groups to solve the dispute through protests, meetings and discussions. A rally was held on Friday at Liverpool University by students from across the country in protest of the action the AUT is taking, under the slogan ‘We Are Not Pawns’.
The rally is part of a much larger campaign run by Paul Freeman-Powell, a student from the University of Liverpool, who has started a petition for lecturers to back down over their pay dispute. The petition, which has been signed by several York students and over 3000 others across the country, has received widespread national media coverage with the Guardian, Times Education supplement and the BBC all running stories on the campaign since the latest pay offer was rejected.
However some students have also shown their support for the lecturers. York graduate Mike Wood is one of the members of Free-Education, an organisation that supports the AUT and National Union of Students (NUS) in their campaign to increase lecturers’ pay. The organisation argues that lecturers are being “exploited” by their employers and that since students are members of a union we should be supporting union solidarity.
Wood criticised the employers for being “extremely hypocritical” in their actions, adding that York University has “taken the sting out of the boycott” by allowing incomplete degrees to be awarded to final year students. On the subject of YUSU’s recent withdrawal from the NUS’s support of the boycott, Wood emphasised the importance of gathering signatures from York students in order to “show that YUSU does not represent the whole of York”. He has also accused YUSU of supporting the lecturers’ pay claim but not allowing them the “right do anything about it”.
The government has now stepped in on a national scale in an effort to resolve the dispute. The Education Select Committee, an organisation linked to the Commons, called in members of the AUT and UCEA last Wednesday in an attempt to re-open negotiations. However, progress was stagnant as both parties refused to budge, with employers claiming that further increases on their 12.6% offer would result in the loss of jobs.
