Cardiff UCU MAB Fighting Fund

Staff at Cardiff University are engaged in a marking and assessment boycott (MAB) because our employer and its representatives are refusing to make an acceptable offer on pay and conditions after nearly 15 years of real-terms pay cuts, increasing casualisation, overwhelming workloads and gender and ethnicity pay gaps that have barely moved. To sustain our action we need to boost our local fighting fund.

We are asking each member without marking duties to give £50 to the branch GoFundMe, with the goal of raising £25,000 for it in the first instance. Participating in the MAB will cost your colleagues thousands of pounds. Much smaller sacrifices from members not participating would help ease the burden and help them to sustain action on your behalf.

Marking boycotts take time to build pressure on employers. The longer that we can collectively support colleagues to stay in the action, the more pressure we can collectively exert on our employers.

Our branch treasurer has done some rough calculations and found that a Grade 6, Spine 33 member engaged in the MAB is losing approximately £1200/month. To fully compensate everyone participating is not what we are aiming to do – not all members will need this level of support, even if we had the funds to provide it. But we do need to grow our local fighting fund in order to support members most financially affected by their participation.

The Birmingham UCU branch has raised a local fighting fund of £50,000. If we could raise even half of that we'd be in a much stronger position when it came to supporting members in the most difficult positions. If every member not participating in the MAB made a £50 contribution, we'd breeze past £25,000!

Although the main focus of this fundraiser is Cardiff UCU members who are not participating in the MAB, we are of course very grateful for donations of any size from anyone generous enough to make them. Thank you.