Thursday, May 20, 2010

Latest Pay News

Pay latest

After the first  three meetings with JNCHES  the TU side have managed to shift the UCEA position by a mammoth 0.15 %.
Although statistically this represents a whopping  60 % increase in the original offer this is somewhat akin to Manchester United claiming to win the premiership on the grounds that they have more seats than Chelsea . (Fill in your own election coalition here)

It is disappointing that the TU side whilst collectively agreeing that any unconsolidated increase is not worth accepting have not made any progress on this issue so far.  There is, however, a further meeting arranged on May 28th and given that we have yet to hear the words full and final offer we may yet be surprised.

There are a couple of issues going on in the background  not the least being the continual efforts of Unite to put forward the case for low paid staff. This whilst we have yet to agree on the size of the biscuit let alone the proportion of the crumbs we get.
For info the original offer worked out as roughly £35 pa for our low paid staff but this could be pushed to a flat £65 if everyone accepted. UCU and EIS have both indicated that they are not willing to look at that kind of breakdown.

On the separate issue of the seats at JNCHES we have made no further progress on resolving the reduction from 18 to 16 but UCU have raised the stakes by indicating that they want it resolved by going to the TUC. Alienating the TU side when we are working towards some kind of joint action seems to me to be perverse but UCU sometimes don’t seem to operate on the same wavelength as other staff. The current JNCHES delegates are Mike Robinson, Dave Jones , Sandra Robinson, Diane Massie, Jo Westerman, Dave Crowe and Tony Britton. Following a ruling of a previous NEICC it is accepted that one of the delegates will be from the old T&G section and as Dave Crowe has been ill then Mike Baxter has been drafted in as a replacement.

There will be another NEICC meeting in June and I suspect that the official Unite line will be circulated in time for that meeting