Letter to UCU Senior Management

We, members of QMUCU branch committee, learnt with dismay about UCU Senior Management’s threats of 100% deductions for ASOS against UCU Unite members. We are writing to express our solidarity with Unite UCU members, and to call on UCU Senior Management to revoke these threats and recommit to protecting all workers from disproportionate deductions.

As fellow workers, as members of the Universities & Colleges Union, and as employees who have recently suffered the threats and consequences of disproportionate deductions we have severe concerns that our own union is now replicating the worst behaviour of our sector’s employers. On 4 September 2025, we learnt that Unite UCU members, currently engaged in a dispute with their employer, are threatened with 100% pay deductions for each day that they participate in Action Short of Strike. We at Queen Mary know from recent and painful experience how harmful these threats are, with our treatment meriting condemnation by the then deputy leader of the opposition. We would not wish them on anyone, and certainly not on the people who are so brilliant in keeping our branches running. 

We strongly oppose these threats on three grounds:

1. UCU HQ’s threats are a breach of six years of adopted policies voted on at UCU Congress, with motions calling for legal and other actions to be taken against such deductions. Most recently, UCU Congress 2025 passed a motion calling for action against disproportionate deductions for ASOS as a kind of prohibited detriment for industrial action. This builds on motions establishing our union’s denouncing of punitive deductions as undermining workers’ rights and calling for collective work to challenge the practice. Our union passed motions at Congress 2025 (69);  Congress 2023 (11); HE Conference 2023 (HE6); Congress 2022 (6); HE Conference 2019 (L1; HE5). In making these threats, UCU Senior Management contravenes our union’s own policies.

2. UCU Senior Management is now copying the worst employer behaviour and lending support to ‘custom and practice’ of disproportionate pay deductions, and the employers’ effort to make them legal through practice. It is a union-busting measure that clearly contradicts the spirit of rights to assemble as trade union members and engage in industrial action under Article 11 ECHR. The fact that such measures have not yet been found to contradict the letter of the law is a well recognised and criticised gap in domestic legal protections. Trade unions have long campaigned to close this gap, including through UNISON’s support for Mercer, and the TUC campaign for the Employment Rights Bill. Indeed, the Bill will close this gap and extend protection from employer detriment to such deductions for ASOS when it becomes law. If UCU Senior Management does implement 100% deductions for ASOS, they directly contradict our union’s campaigning.

3. The threats fly in the face of UCU support for members’ legal challenges to disproportionate deductions for ASOS as inflicted by university employers. UCU legal is currently supporting two QMUCU members’ cases currently awaiting hearings on deductions in the Employment Tribunal, and one QMUCU member bringing a breach of contract claim in the county court. The threats and their potential implementation are what our lawyers have been building cases against.

We therefore call on the General Secretary and the UCU’s senior management to (1) revoke these threats of 100% deductions for ASOS immediately and (2) publicly recommit to challenging disproportionate deductions in all its forms, as set out in democratically-passed Congress motions, and (3) enter negotiations with Unite UCU without preconditions. 

We will be discussing with the branch what further steps we can take if our concerns are not addressed. [update 24 September 2025: our branch unanimously voted in support of this motion in an Emergency General Meeting on 23 September]

Yours sincerely

QMUCU branch committee