Strike vote at Sheffield Hallam over plan to axe pensions

The vote is over a complete gutting of the university, including:

• proposals for up to 200 academic job losses
• forcing current teaching focused staff off Sheffield Hallam contracts and employing them through a private company, enabling management to kick them out of the industry standard Teachers' Pension Scheme (TPS)
• ceasing to offer TPS to new academic starters and only allowing access to a defined contribution pension scheme instead
• forcing research contracted staff out of TPS and moving them onto the Local Government Pension Scheme
• scrapping agreed terms and conditions over maximum teaching time
• ending nationally agreed pay progression.

Management's rationale for attacking jobs, terms, learning and working conditions is a supposed need to make £26.6m of cuts next year. Only teaching staff with significant responsibility for research would be left in TPS.

This is the third consecutive year Hallam has slashed jobs, and the university's own financial statements show the workforce has already fallen by over 800 due to the cuts.

UCU general secretary Jo Grady said: 'Our members have no choice but to vote for strike action if Hallam refuses to change course. Staff are already at breaking point after years of severe cuts.  They are rightly outraged that management now wants to slash pension benefits, tear up local and national agreements and divide the workforce. The changes are an attack on learning and working conditions and must be stopped.'