Endorsement from Professor Alastair Hudson, University of Strathclyde UCU Neogiator, and Academics for Pensions Justice

Here is Alastair’s endorsement video for the #Grady4GS campaign! Thank you for your support!

You can see it on Twitter or on YouTube (below). The transcript is at the bottom.

Transcript

Hello my name is Alastair Hudson, I’m endorsing Jo Grady for General Secretary of UCU.

I came to know Jo through the strike, and I was always very impressed by her commitment, her determination, her knowledge, and her judgment. I’ve had the chance, as I’m sure many of you have, to read her manifesto in the meantime. And I’m impressed, I’ve got to say. This suggests to me someone who, I admit, I was always going to vote for anyway, having had a chance to discuss a lot of these issues with her online over time, but seeing her manifesto, and seeing her clarity of vision—how she’s identified what are the key issues that are facing the HE sector and the FE sector. The issues that are facing established academics and people at the beginning of their careers, people on casualised and precarious contracts. The problems we’ve got with pensions. The problems we’ve got with an increasingly corporatised HE and FE sector, that’s borrowing huge amount of money for signature building programmes, that’s trying to increase profitability by cutting back pensions, worsening terms and conditions, putting people on fixed-term contracts, 10-month contracts, precarious contracts, increasing workloads, increasing stress—all of the things we know about from the sector, Jo has diagnosed these problems and suggested in her manifesto very, very clear ways of dealing with those issues and others. Her agenda for equality, her agenda for the role of the General Secretary within it, a union that works much harder, I think, branch by branch, campus by campus, that draws together what we all need across the sector. I think Jo is a very, very, very strong candidate indeed, and I think we will be a much stronger Union under her leadership. So I’m endorsing Jo without any reservations whatsoever.

Published by Jo Grady