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Higher Education Dispute - more unmandated strike 'pauses'

Unison, Unite, EIS, GMB and UCU have all proceded to cancel their strikes as a result of decisions by their union General Secretaries or Executives, a position that emerges out of the ACAS talks. To the majority of members of these unions, it's not clear exactly what they've been offered beyond a "limited improvement" to the pay offer for 2022-23. After so much sacrifice, this doesn't sound great. For Unison, as with UCU, there was no consultation with members and branches before the 'pause' was agreed.

SFEU statement on UCU secretary decision to pause members' industrial action

The Solidarity Federation Education Union (SFEU) condemns the decision made by the General Secretary of UCU to suspend the current strike action, a step that has been taken in UCU's words "To allow our ongoing negotiations to continue in a constructive environment we have agreed to pause action across our pay and pension disputes for the next two weeks and create a period of calm". Nothing concrete, as far as we can see, has been agreed by the employers. Even on the pensions front, according to the UCU statement, we are told that we are only "at the start of a process" that will restore benefits. We believed that the start of the process was when we were considering to ballot for strike action, not now after several days of lost pay and management threats.