Kingston UCU members will be balloted on extending the national Four Fights pay & equality dispute over unsafe workloads, casualisation, pay deflation, and the gender, ethnicity and disability pay gaps beyond our current remit for industrial action which ends in May 2022. This would allow us to escalate action to achieve our goals, e.g. in the form of a marking boycott. This ballot takes place alongside a further ballot over USS pensions at other institutions.

Only sustained action and a strong renewed mandate will make employers take our demands seriously and move to resolve this dispute. We need to fight to win – as branches like RCA UCU have done, escalating action to force concessions. These issues have not gone away, in fact they have gotten worse. We either act or we accept.

The ballot will run Wednesday 16th March to Friday 8th April.

If you need to update your membership details, or check which address your ballot paper has been sent to, visit My UCU or phone 0333 207 0719.

Click here to order a replacement ballot

See here for details of how to cast your vote and why it is so important (50% of the membership must vote for it to count)

See here for more information about what the dispute is about and how these issues relate to staff at Kingston. They have not gone away so we mustn’t.

The National Union of Students (NUS) is fully supporting the UCU. So far our action has seen strong support from students locally and nationally. In the Union of Kingston Students referendum in February 82% of student voted in favour of supporting the UCU strike with a huge turnout of 1,286.

If you want to help with the campaign to Get the Vote Out at Kingston, please sign up to our discussion list: www.jiscmail.ac.uk/UCUKINGSTONDISCUSSION