Industrial action

We are sorry to inform you that the University of Nottingham is among 150 universities across the country that will experience national industrial action by members of the University & College Union (UCU), in the form of strike action on 1, 9-10, 14-16, 21-23, 27-28 February and 1-2, 16-17 and 20-22 March 2023. Action short of a strike, where staff work to contract and do not undertake voluntary activity, continues. 

To record your participation in strike action, please complete the Strike Action Notification Form on your first day back at work after participating in strike action. You must also separately inform your School/Department that you participated in strike action and a contact in your School/Department will be asked to verify your participation.

The University recognises that any period of industrial action will be challenging, appreciates that colleagues do not undertake industrial action lightly and respects their right to participate.

Where ASOS takes the form of the withdrawal of labour for part of a day or from contractual duties, either as a one-off or on a continuous basis, this could constitute partial performance, where the University reserves the right to deduct a full day’s pay at the rate of 1/365th of salary for each day of ASOS.

The University will maintain pension contributions during this period of industrial action. Where staff participate in industrial action, they will be deemed to have agreed to fund their pension contribution at full pay for periods in which they participate, which will be deducted from salaries at payroll as usual, unless they notify Payroll that they do not wish to fund their pension contribution.

The University ensures that salary deductions are fully reinvested in activities and equipment to support students.

Local University/UCU branch Agreement 

Notwithstanding the current industrial action, we will continue to progress the agreement reached with the University’s UCU Branch on issues surrounding USS pensions, staff pay, pay gaps, casualisation, and staff workload.

You can read the full agreement here which included commitments to:

  • raise the current maximum spine point of Level 4, Level 5 and Level 6 by one point. This provided a 3% uplift for staff at levels 4, 5 and 6 on the maximum points of the scale (around 27% of staff at levels 4, 5 and 6) in addition to 65% who received an increment due to satisfactory performance. In addition, the University remains committed to pay the Real Living Wage to all staff.

    With regards to USS pension:
  • support the improvement of member contributions or benefits (subject to consultation) without destabilising the pension scheme.
  • call on the USS Board of Trustees to ensure that all future valuations are evidence-based and employ a reasonable, mutually agreed upon level of prudence.
  • working together at national level to explore the feasibility and promise of conditional indexation as a more cost-effective means of providing inflation protection as opposed to a cap on CPI revaluation; develop a solution that addresses affordability and access to pensions; and proposals for governance reform in advance of the next valuation to ensure that USS is more accountable, transparent, and collaborative with the higher education sector.
  • ensure that any future proposals of changes to benefits are preceded by a thorough analysis of their impact on women, minority groups and early career staff and are accompanied by concrete and mutually agreed upon measures to protect these groups from disproportionately negative impact.

There are further commitments to review workloads; tackle casualisation with the continued roll out of the Graduate Teaching Assistant Model, and to continue to work constructively and collaboratively to eliminate gender, race and disability pay gaps, in particular to accelerate work to deliver a reduction to the race pay gap by 2024; sharing data with unions and ensuring paid time or workload allocation to the chairs of the staff networks.