Philip Inman gave a misleading account of the University and College Union’s campaigns to defend university pensions and fight for job security and a manageable workload (“Academics are fighting the wrong battle over pensions”, Business). It is not correct to suggest that we are focusing on the fight to save our pension scheme at the expense of seeking better working conditions and more secure contracts for university staff, especially junior staff. In fact, UCU and its predecessor unions have campaigned against the casualisation of higher education for more than three decades. We are running an industrial ballot covering this very issue as well as the work overload that so many university staff endure. One of our central demands is for the reduction in zero-hours contracts which Inman says the union should be asking for.

On pensions, Inman claims that UCU is dissenting from an industry orthodoxy that guaranteed, defined benefit pensions are not sustainable. In fact, our concerns about the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) valuation process were corroborated by an independent panel of seven pensions experts, which found that USS could be funded with a much lower level of contributions than that previously proposed by USS itself. We remain convinced that support for defined benefits from employers is a question of priorities rather than practicality. A decent pension in retirement should be the right of every worker, not just those represented by UCU.

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