Welcome Back!
Happy New Year?

Welcome to our new members who have recently joined us and of course thank you to those of you who continue to support us in our work to create a better working environment for your colleagues.  

Thank you too to those of you who have sent lovely letters and e-mails – your words of encouragement never go unnoticed.

The first days of a new academic year feels like the other “real” New Year in so many ways.  

A time of new beginnings, it should be a time of optimism and a time when we and those we teach and those with whom we conduct research should feel the thrill of new challenges and new horizons.  Certainly that is what we, in IFUT, wish for you, your students and your colleagues.

In recent IFUT Newsletters we have been proud to tell you the stories of some personal, individual victories secured with the support of our union and also of some more structured achievements such as the agreement reached between IFUT and the IUA negotiated by IFUT though the Cush Report aimed at reducing the incidence of exploitative precarious employment for Lecturers. 

We have highlighted successes in achieving Equal Pay and equal treatment for women academics and we have recorded modest gains across a wide spectrum of cases of disrespectful treatment of staff who, until they turned to their union, thought that they were alone, isolated and defenceless. 

In this coming term and for the foreseeable future IFUT, with your support, will keep up this fight and these struggles. We could not do so without the exceptional and selfless dedication of our unpaid volunteer leaders. 

Will you consider joining them and fighting with us for better treatment and more respect for you and all your colleagues?  We and they will welcome you with open arms.  And we will provide support and training.  In fact, we recently completed a Training Programme this month for all IFUT Representatives on September 12th & 13th.  If necessary and if there is a demand, such courses can be repeated again over the course of the year on different campuses.

IFUT is not a big union but it is an extremely active one. We have ambitions to be even more active and more successful. 
Will you join us in this ambitious programme? 
You won’t regret it.

Oh!, and Happy New Year!