Mark Taylor-Batty
@cupofassam
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I'm a father, not a dancer. UCU USS national negotiator. These opinions are my own. Maybe yours too.
Learn to love. Pass it on.
Joined October 2008
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A long thread on all the texts I have translated for the new edition of The Theatre and Its Double, published last week by
@MethuenDrama
, considered in the chronological order in which Artaud wrote them. 🧵
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I’m a professor of theatre and performance. I have been teaching ‘rip-off’ degrees all my adult life. Let me summarise the pointless skills and experiences my students have accumulated: 🧵
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My son was feeling sad a bedtime, so I suggested that he write a list of all the good things that he has. He’s now gone to sleep feeling better.
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Today is my daughter’s birthday. She lived for only until a couple of weeks after her first birthday. She’d be a teenager today if she were still here. Here is her story, her life, which was only possible because of the NHS.
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Surely there could have been a technological solution, rather than a hard border.
Extraordinary sign of the times. Tory Conference behind a ring of concrete and steel.
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And beyond all that - having the space between degree activities to meet people, make friends, fall in love, be reckless, be adventurous, be amazing, be oneself, be a full, rounded, decent human. The extra-curricular nourishes the co-curricular, nourishes the curriculum.
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May I politely suggest to non-UCU members who benefit from the pending USS changes, to the tune of tens of £000s (and to those members who for whatever reason did not strike), please consider supporting those who took action and lost salary for your gain:
Donate to the fighting fund
UCU's fighting fund supports members involved in disputes
www.ucu.org.uk
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Am remembering the time, 4 days before campus closed to Covid, 4 hours before the university conceded that it should, 3 hours before govt. advised it should, when three female UCU reps were accused of being ‘hysterical’ by senior management for recommending campus should close.
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If Boris Johnson has five children, and then he fathers another one, does that mean he has six new children? Asking for a nurse.
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So, students, so you know, I’m working my full contractual hours, with Covid, but
@UniversityLeeds
tells me they might dock my pay if I don’t find extra hours, hours that even timetabling staff can’t find, to do work I haven’t been paid for during strike days.
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Critical judgement: the ability to find, compare, filter and respond to a variety of texts, inputs, data, experiences, and assert relative values among them.
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Team work: working together in a group, agreeing and articulating objectives, applying different ranges of skills toward a common goal, meeting a fixed deadline together.
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Social awareness: seeing the world as connected relationships, how culture connects to economies, how individuals are formed by social matrices, and can impact on/resist cultural formation.
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Intellectual engagement: discovering, nurturing, and feeding individual fascinations with texts or other cultural artefacts, recognising them as products of contexts, and speaking to/asserting critiques on those contexts.
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Just a quick, small anecdote thread about how
@UniversitiesUK
disingenuous behaviour infects and corrupts university management. I was on the university council at
@UniversityLeeds
until recently, its governing body.
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Personal awareness: seeing oneself in a range of social, familial, domestic, economic, sexual, leisurely contexts, with responsibilities and a right to assert individual fixed or evolving identities, and how these mirror/flex/resist their environments. Knowing oneself better.
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The best way of summing up the USS pension dispute is to say that Universities want their younger staff (mostly) to pay off a debt that no longer exists, using their future retirement income, and the the UCU is saying let’s do the sums again on a sensible basis and recalibrate.
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Empathic and ethical models: recognising social matrices that advantage/disadvantage/render precarious individual experience, and identifying routes to foregrounding injustices in ways that facilitate or demand correction.
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I’ve only gone and been elected a national USS negotiator, haven’t I?
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I have lost about £1000 from my take-home pay in today’s salary slip. If I strike for about five years, losing all that salary, I still won’t have lost as much as much as they have taken, without justification, from my guaranteed retirement income. Vote yes/yes/yes/yes.
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Research skills: the ability to form questions around perceived gaps in knowledge, identify methods and resources to approach those questions, construct a set of responses in text or through forms of creative expression or practice.
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Accumulation of knowledge, and not within self-defining and self-justifying systems (learn this to pass that), but to better fill out and enrich all of the above processes.
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So, my employer
@UniversityLeeds
- without consultation with Senate, staff, union or learning and teaching committees - has decided it would be a good idea to add online discussion boards by default to all modules where students can post anonymously about the module.
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I want to emphasise the scale of the cuts to the USS pension (broadly the pension scheme for the ‘pre-92’ University sector) and why this is key to the current dispute with employers. This is going to take a couple of threads. This first thread is on the cuts.
#USSmess
#UCURising
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I am the Leeds UCU pensions officer. As part of their obligations under trade union legislation the University subsidise my school 10% of my time to do this. The number of times I have been invited to consult on USS this academic year: 0.
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I see the University of Leeds has come out with a 100% pay dock threat for Action Short of a Strike. They have surrounded it with vague conditions around deadlines and priorities, but, there you go; one of the most extreme pay dock threats in the University's history.
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(Some of) your negotiators go for a post-JNC pint (or two) and curry (or few) to mark, celebrate even, an important threshold. Your pensions shall be restored. Your loss from April 2022 will be compensated. You did this. Negotiating teams since 2018 worked tirelessly for this.
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If you’ve been working in a pre-92 University with a USS pension, you guaranteed income in retirement was protected by successful industrial action in 2018. This is a fact. When you finally retire, you can thank colleagues that took action on your behalf in 2018. Now…
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@sophielouisecc
@ITV
@Ofcom
In what way was it a pro-Labour statement? Are you saying that you are pro-poverty and pro-poor housing conditions? Is that right wing?
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Hey
@officestudents
Did you know that
@UniversitiesUK
have decided to pay £570 million in 'deficit recovery payments' next year, when they know that the deficit recovery is now valued at 0%, rather than agree a key UCU proposal to use an up-to-date pension scheme valuation?
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@365Jeffrey
The debt is the government’s choice - creating the most expensive public HE system in the world. The degree of course does so much more than I outlined. If it were possible to do in a few hours a week evening classes (it obviously is not), I’d be teaching them.
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Check your email for a message from USS. We have a surplus. On the basis of the latest monitoring report, we can afford to fully restore pensions, recover what has been lost, AND reduce what we pay.
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We’ve had nearly a week of pickets, and I want to reflect on University over-sensitivy to witty expressions of concern over pay and conditions. Take for example this image which has resulted in emails to the UCU executive here from University management here. I kid you not.
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The
@UniversityLeeds
will be paying a USS deficit recovery payment of £12,431,900 in the 2022/23 academic year, even though they now know from the USS directly that the deficit recovery cost is 0%. Why do you think they want to squander money like that?
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Seven years ago today, when I was the president of the local
@leedsucu
branch, we launched perhaps one of our most audacious campaigns on an open day.
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A few facts on the
#USSmess
situation, which has brought strikes to HE institutions across the country. Thread:
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Some commentators say that we are lucky to have the USS pension, to have any DB at all. But… 🧵
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Leaving work late, surprised you see graduates still on campus. But this is hands down one of the best graduation photo sessions I’ve seen in a while.
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Well, if my inbox is anything to go by, the VCs
#townhall
meeting today has generated more UCU members and got people motivated to send in their ballots full of yeses.
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A Sunday afternoon thread 🧵on the history of USS and the disputes, for those that are interested.
#USSMess
; How we got here.
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But the story here is one of the NHS, without which I am certain she would not have survived as long as she did, and as comfortably as was possible. And to ask you to send a birthday present to Anna via a donation to Martin House Children’s Hospice
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I am thankful, as a USS negotiator, for the show of confidence that members have given the negotiating team with the 85% voting to Note our progress in the USS dispute (87% of members in the USS dispute only). This allows us to get on with the work of assuring restoration.
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Two friends, two PhD students. On gets a job at University of Leeds, perhaps as one of the new Curriculum Redesigned posts; the other gets a job on the same salary at Leeds Beckett. The colleague at LB now can expect twice the income in retirement than the UoL colleague.
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In case you’re wondering how the VC’s Town Hall meeting is going
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We know from incontrovertible statistical evidence that student feedback is broadly more judgemental of women, of anyone with a foreign accent, of people of colour. My colleagues deserve better than our employer making that easier and quotidian.
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Members will recently have received a communication from USS regarding the change to the salary threshold, It looks like this. A thread.🧵
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Anybody who looks at the numbers, the costs, the analyses, the projections, the assumptions in any detail can only conclude that universities backing the UUK proposal (and rejecting outright the UCU compromise proposal for tackling USS) is a political not financial decision.
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And here she is, beneath a beech tree, through the years since.
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I have performed an Equality Impact Assessment on unnecessary and unjustified UUK cuts to our pension, because
@UniversityLeeds
hasn’t and probably won’t. Result: disproportionate discrimination against the youngest employees.
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UUK has made a statement on USS: 'It is hoped that this might allow for changes to the scheme which could include a possible return to a comparable level of future benefits as existed before the April 2022 changes’.
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I see that
@UniversityLeeds
is trashing its reputation further by threatening to dock 100% of pay if we boycott 10% of our work.
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The money is there. On our own calculations on 30 December gilts, using USS modelling, a full restoration of benefits cuts is affordable and at a cheaper cost envelope than currently paid. 1/
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USS pension update klaxon. 📢The Technical Provisions consultation data, released today, indicates that the cost of restored pensions from April 2024 will be down to 20.6% of salaries. Read on for details. (Mark and Jackie thread) 🧵
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A reminder, colleagues, that cost to the University of Leeds of the UCU’s USS pension proposals was £3.4m. The last reported surplus was £110m. The UUK proposals were based on a deficit they know no longer exists. It could cost you 35% of your guaranteed income in retirement.
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Hey
@nusuk
Did you know that USS Universities have decided collectively to pay £570 million in 'deficit recovery payments' next year, when they know that the deficit recovery is now valued at 0%, rather than agree a key UCU proposal to use an up-to-date pension scheme valuation?
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Remember, colleagues: never, ever, feel loyalty to your institution. To your students, yes, to each other, to your union, to your research, to your mentors and those you mentor, but never to the institution. They will never be loyal to you. They will forget you. They forget you.
So it's confirmed: unlike the more compassionate policies of the likes of Cambridge, City, Sheffield, UCL, St Andrews Essex and Royal Holloway, Leeds University will be deducting all of our
#ucustrike
#ucustrikesback
pay at the end of January. But there's more.....
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The cost to
@UniversityLeeds
of the UCU proposals over UUK original proposals up to April 2023, minus the savings they made from cancelled October rises, is less than £4m. Compare this, for example, to the projected cost of Curriculum Redefined (over ten times that amount).
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At a Uni meeting the other day, after we did that thing of going round and giving our names, a colleague leaned in toward me and whispered: 'Ah, you're the pensions hero'. Nice to have one's work acknowledged.
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Quick summary of the
#ussmess
situation. USS calculated a deficit in 2020 by looking at the value of the pension funds assets at the most anomalous dip in stock market value of the last century. UUK propose to pay the resultant forecasted debt with our retirement income. 1/3
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I am very pleased to have been elected by delegates of the UCU congress to continue the work of restoring your pension benefits. I look forward to working alongside the new team.
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The 2020 USS valuation was based on a huge market anomaly. The cuts to our pension are therefore an anomaly. The scheme can afford to turn back the clocks, and restore benefits to previous levels. And I’ve wanted to say this for years: we will rectify the anomaly.
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So, here is the room in London recommended for a seasoned academic by Keytravel, and which I was obliged to book through them rather than finding a better, nicer, cheaper place and getting expenses reimbursed, like any other professional adult.
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Thank you to the students who wore sashes supportive of the UCU at today's English graduation. It means so much more than you might imagine - to take your special day and help support an argument for justice is a huge gesture to make. Your act was very much appreciated.
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Potentially a busy week, with USS supplying JNC with the latest data on Monday or Tuesday which will outline the valuation headwinds. UUK will want to speak sharpish, what with UCEA at ACAS. The settlement is easy - pensions returned. Getting my ducks in a row today.
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@RogerHelmerMEP
Why do you need a period of adjustment when you hold all the cards in the sunlit uplands with a guaranteed US free trade deal and lots of British driving jobs for British workers and abundant cheap fresh food?
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At an away day. The Head of School has just announced to colleagues that I have been promoted to professor. So I might as well let you all know. Only those of a certain age will get why this image is jangling round my head.
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I just want to send a hug to all activists and UCU staff, whether we agree or not, whether we've met or not, after what has been one hell of a week. Adopt whatever pose, whatever beverage, whatever distraction you now need and do the weekend.
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The patterns are appearing. VCs who claimed they had no power to influence others are clearly working together. The 100% club are using cut and paste text to communicate their bullying threats to staff, and, within those, it is clear which are adhering to which versions.
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So, here we are. The interim joint statement from UUK and UCU on the progress in the negotiations over USS. The dots now need joining, and we then need together, UUK and UCU, to complete the procedural part within JNC.
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I have been involved in the arguments and disputes following the 2011, 2014, 2017, 2018 and now 2020 valuations of the USS pension. I think our arguments and proposals have never been as robust, detailed and substantiated as ever before. 1/3
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If you still haven't voted in the UCU ballot, let me give you a reason if you have a USS pension. Short thread 🧵
#ucuRISING
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My car, a USS DB/DC hybrid, ran out of petrol. The petrol station was just 10 yards ahead. There were five VCS at the side of the road. I asked them to help push me those 10 yards. /1
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Some people are facing the equivalent of 8 years’ salary loss from guaranteed retirement income, on the back of universities supporting extreme prudence in valuation calculation and an insistence on universities paying deficit recovery payments to service a debt that has gone 1/2
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@PolhomeEditor
@JPonpolitics
My bank tells me that once I've reached the limit of my overdraft, they won't extend it any further. But my attitude is that 'they would say that wouldn't they' so I'm booking that cruise anyway.
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We received a delivery of her care equipment and resources. Yes, my US friends, all of this was given by the NHS.
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What you need to know about
@UniversityLeeds
pay docking threat, and what it tells us about chaos on level 13. A small thread.
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VCs, including our own, seem to have agreed a statement about how they, individually, are powerless to influence the USS strike because it is a national dispute. Some thoughts in a mini-thread.
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@JosephineCumbo
This was predictable, given the January and February interim valuations, and UUK should be ashamed of their knowing misrepresentations. Hopefully we can move immediately to restore benefits.
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Today my daughter would have turned fourteen. This, from last year, is the story of her brief life.
Today is my daughter’s birthday. She lived for only until a couple of weeks after her first birthday. She’d be a teenager today if she were still here. Here is her story, her life, which was only possible because of the NHS.
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Please share: An important briefing for members of the USS pension scheme from elected UCU negotiators:
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I can’t remember our first visit there, but we were offered occasional weeks of respite care at the absolutely marvellous Martin House Children’s Hospice. I think we had three stays in total. I can’t sum up the value and kindness of Hospices like Martin House.
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I went to visit my daughter’s grave (in a woodland burial site). There’s a single bluebell pushing up from her. Such a powerful little symbol.
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Last summer, half of all USS universities committed publicly and unambiguously to prioritising USS benefit restoration over their contribution reduction in order to bring an end to marking boycotts. 1/
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Quick word to those running
@UniversityLeeds
accounts. If you have a USS pension, it is now proven that your employer is asking you to pay a debt that they know no longer exists, by removing tens of thousands of £ from your retirement income. You'd be welcome to join the strike.
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If you took the statements from
@UniversityLeeds
and other unis about why they supported the unnecessary UUK cuts to pensions, and put them through Turnitin, you would find evidence of widespread collusion. Or, rather, they just unthinkingly parroted what UUK told them to say.
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I’m going to address the unfortunately misleading statements in the UCU Left statement regarding the negotiated position on USS. A mini-thread. 🧵
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A colleague dropped by my office to give me a thank-you for the work on restoring the pension. Very touched. I’ll raise a glass to the whole team involved.
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Or donate to one of their shops. Or buy something there:
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USS update klaxon. 📢 UCU and UUK today release a joint statement concerning the restoration of pre-April ‘22 benefits in April ‘24, an augmentation to benefits accrued ‘22 - ‘24, and a reduction in contribution rates planned from January, subject to member consultation.
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Recently,
@UniversityLeeds
published its new values. Are these window dressing, or will the university management’s behaviour be guided by them? On the basis that action is the proof, not words, let’s look at the response to the recent industrial action. Thread.
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In a communication to senior members today in the School of English, Faculty AHC,
@UniversityLeeds
individual colleagues were identified as UCU members.
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Update on the USS update. So, today, UCU and UUK released a joint statement on USS. The most important of all so far. 🧵📢
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