Strike action over ‘unrealistic’ REF targets looms at Liverpool

So, as the final sentence of this article reveals, REF has this covered and shown greedy managerialist league table obsessed bonus chasing VCs and their "only following orders" sociopathic middle management toadies the way out. Simply make staff redundant. This is already happening now in the university sector. George Orwell's pigs have taken over everything in the university sector.

These one-size-fits-all performance targets and expectations do not take into account the significant variations between disciplines and even subject areas within a discipline in terms of publishing practices (and opportunities). In my subject area, for example, it is now almost impossible to get published in any of the (American) top journals (4*) without a co-author based in the US and using quantitative methods and a very narrow paradigm. This is important because within my discipline the assessment of individual "outputs" is explicitly or implicitly gauged from journal rankings/lists despite the REF guidelines suggesting that a work should be judged on its merit alone. Further, it can take up to two years or more to get through the review process of top journals and even the middling ones (not counting the time needed for actually carrying out research and drafting and polishing a paper before submission). This is particularly challenging for ECRs without the "pipeline" of papers already established. With rejection rates of above 95% there is no guarantee for a paper being eventually published even after the review. A parallel submission of the same paper to several journals is not good practice and is not a feasible strategy to speed up the process. The naivety of the assembly line model of research that underpins such performance targets shows that the people devising them are not very conversant about the vagaries and pitfalls of research, writing and publishing. Too much of this is dominated by the Lab sciences and their mode of inquiry really (and I doubt it applies even there) without due consideration for other fields. Of course, the corporate bean-counters and metrics-monkeys who run academia now do not really care about such subtleties. They rejoice in having been provided with yet another stick with which they can whack academics and which allows them to "cut the dead wood" who do not produce papers (which they usually mistake for research or scholarship) like sausages in a sausage factory (whatever the REF guidelines say or what its intentions are).

Is this condition explicitly stated in their contract of appointment? If not, is it a breach of contract (regardless of any wishy-washy wording)?