It is with dismay that we read David Duncan’s update on industrial action on 20th June. Instead of genuinely engaging with us, Senior Management prefers to offer statistics. We have our own.

Hundreds of actual staff members, not statistics, have taken part in the boycott, fighting for all of us who have seen our pay cut in real terms year in year out for well over a decade. The latest 5.4% real-terms pay cut (even CPI inflation – never mind the higher RPI – was 10.4% in February when UCEA imposed the 5% pay settlement on UCU members) is just the icing on the cake of the never-ending spiral of worsening pay and conditions for staff in higher education.

Here’s another one – we’ve seen staff (without marking so not on the MAB), whose “official” workload is already well over 110%, being told that they need to do cover marking because it “wasn’t at 120%” (yet!). A 120% workload is a 6-day working week – not as a one off, but as an average over the year – something we thought we had got rid of for good in the early 20th century! We need action on overwork at Glasgow now, not still higher student numbers in 2024/5 and the promise of cake tomorrow in some mythical future utopia.

Meanwhile management’s statistics mask the devaluation of those degrees that are being awarded through marking without full quality assurance by the wrong staff, risking a tsunami of preventable mistakes and appeals, and even compromise of degree accreditation processes. Reports of chaotic exam boards, collective letters by staff members detailing the disregard for academic standards, and external examiners refusing to sign off on the integrity of mitigation processes should be indications of the need for a rethink by SMG.

We are instead told that the sector cannot afford anything but the continuation of the practice – established since 2009 – of making real-terms pay cuts every academic year. In the week after the public learned, many for the first time, about the eye-watering sums being raised by Scottish universities, largely through unsustainable rises in overseas PGT student numbers, such words ring hollow; this is the same strategy that left our students homeless at the start of the year and now UofG proposes to graduate them with IOUs instead of degrees. The “justification” for our senior management’s refusal to encourage compromise is that some universities were not so lucky – but poorer universities like Glasgow Caledonian have publicly called for UCEA to return to negotiations*, so why can’t ours? And the sector negotiation framework in any event allows for individual universities who cannot afford an increase to defer them until they can, so this can’t be used to stop a better sector-wide deal.

With PGT marking now on the horizon, we are likely to see further disruption in an area that universities across the UK see as the cash cow of their institutions. It is not too late for our senior managers to change course. Doing so requires constructive engagement with our branch – working together to promote what would be best for the University of Glasgow and for the sector. We believe the first step along that path is a public commitment to negotiations and a statement that we all believe that the staff who kept the university going through the years of the pandemic deserve better in the context of the biggest cost of living crisis in memory.