Members please check your address!

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Leeds UCU members, please check that UCU has your correct postal address. This is a bit boring but very important. As you’ll have seen from recent UCU emails about pensions and about pay, equality, workload, and job security, we will be balloting for industrial action in September/October. Before then, we need to make sure that our membership records are absolutely correct, so that the union can send the ballot papers to members at the right addresses. Make sure your vote is included!

MyUCU

Log on to MyUCU (www.ucu.org.uk/myucu) and check that it shows the postal address that you want ballots sent to. It’s up to you whether you prefer that to be your home or work address. Whilst you are on MyUCU, it’s a good idea to check that your other details are correct. Thank you!

Who should be the UCU department rep / UCU anti-casualisation rep / UCU postgrad rep where you work?

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In preparation for the next academic year the UCU committee is looking to fill department rep vacancies, including anti-casualisation reps, postgraduate reps and workload reps, and also for some more members to be trained to support colleagues with individual casework. The roles are:

Department rep

To raise local issues affecting members with the UCU officers/committee and to feed back to members, and to welcome new staff and let them know about UCU. (Monthly meetings but not required to attend them all.)

Department anti-casualisation rep

To raise local issues affecting members on casualised contracts (such as fixed-term or hourly paid) with the UCU branch’s anti-casualisation working group and to work with that group to help tackle casualisation across the university.

Department postgraduate rep

To raise local issues affecting postgraduate with the branch committee’s postgraduate rep and the anti-casualisation working group.

Department workload rep

To raise local workload issues at the branch workloads working group and to work with that group to help tackle excessive workloads across the university

Caseworker

To support and discuss options with members having problems at work. Training and mentoring provided. This isn’t a department role – caseworkers don’t usually represent members in their own school or service.

Health and safety rep

To raise local health or safety issues with local management and represent UCU on the local health and safety committee.

Nominations

To nominate a colleague for one of those roles please email me by 12pm on Monday 30 September. Roles can be shared. Nominations need to be from a member of UCU in your school/service, except for the caseworker role for which nominations can be from any UCU member in University of Leeds.

You can check if all those roles covered where you work at leedsucu.org.uk/departmental-representatives

Equality working group

The committee is also looking for more members to join the equality working group. If you want to help progress the union’s equality agenda and you have an interest in issues affecting black members, women members, disabled members, LGBT+ members and intersectional equality, get in touch.

If you’ve read to the end: please check your details are up to date on ‘My UCU’ because there’s a strike ballot coming up.

Heads of School recruitment and the spurious use of ‘equality and inclusion’

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Many of you have expressed your discontent at the recent blanket policy of Head of School positions automatically going out to external advertisement, and in some cases the use of headhunters in the recruitment process. The committee shares these concerns and the strength of feeling against this policy. Our wider opposition to this policy and motions passed by the branch on the issue are laid out here. In this email, we wish to draw attention to a particularly pernicious element of management’s justification for the imposition of this policy: the spurious deployment of the equality and inclusion agenda.

In negotiations on this issue representatives of the university executive group have argued that the blanket policy of external recruitment was justified because it would bring about a greater diversity in senior management. While in some specific areas of the university the external recruitment of Heads of Schools may have led to greater diversity in the senior management team, the notion that a blanket policy will achieve this aim is not credible. In many disciplines the wider pool of likely candidates within the sector is highly skewed towards white men. In addition, in some schools external recruitment represents a marked change in practice and will be an obstacle to the career progression of current staff from underrepresented groups. The university has provided no empirical evidence to support the claim that this blanket process will result in greater diversity.

Moreover, we are alarmed at the casual and, seemingly, instrumental deployment of such an important agenda. In the context of the failure of the university to enter into formal negotiations on either our gender pay claim or our anti-casualisation claim (HESA data shows that women and BAME staff are over-represented on these insecure contracts), which the branch submitted over the last academic year, it is especially disappointing and objectionable.

As a result, we invite members performing equality and inclusion roles for the university to consider whether the cause of equality and inclusion is best served by their continuance in these positions while the imposition of externally advertised Head of School posts remains.

Motions for Wednesday’s extraordinary general meeting + other news

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Text of email sent to all members 5 July. (Agenda not published on the website; if you’re a member and haven’t received the agenda please email ucu@leeds.ac.uk)

Extraordinary general meeting 12pm Wednesday 10 July

The committee called this ‘EGM’ for all members because of a load of urgent issues going on now which they think members should have the opportunity to take a collective position on.

It’s 12pm – 1pm on Wednesday 10 July in Michael Sadler seminar room LG15

The attached agenda includes all motions on those subjects for members to decide if they agree these should be branch policies/strategies. The meeting was called to discuss:

  • USS pensions dispute
  • Pay and Equality dispute
  • Head of School appointments
  • Misuse of lecture capture by the university
  • UniForum (another round of collecting benchmarking data on “the efficiency and effectiveness of administration and support services”)
  • Discussion boards for in-course feedback
  • Timetabling (which includes a motion on workloads negotiating principles)
  • Centralisation of admissions

Please update your details before the strike ballots

If you’re moving institution or changing jobs, or if you’re a postgraduate student who will start doing paid teaching so be eligible for full (free) voting membership, or you want to get your post or your emails to a different address, please log in to ‘My UCU’*, top of the front page at ucu.org.uk.

(*If you can’t do it online you can phone the membership team on 0333 207 0719.)

If you wouldn’t be able to strike if strikes are called in the period November to April because, for example, you’re on long term leave for that whole period, please let us know (because by law we can’t ballot people who are unable to strike).

Leeds Trades Unions Council conference on climate change

Members may be interested in ‘How can trade unions meet the challenge of climate emergency?’ a conference on 19 October organised by Leeds Trades Union Council.

Council of Europe LGBTI survey

The UCU equality and participation unit is encouraging LGBT+ UCU members to participate in the Council of Europe LGBTI survey / Enquête de l’EU sur les LGBTI to help the survey reach as many people as possible.

Support: sexual harassment, stress, debt, migration issues

UCU sexual harassment support helpline 0800 138 8724

Counselling, support, advice on stress and debt is available for UCU members through the Education Support Partnership (day or night) 08000 562 561

Migration legal advice is available on the UCU website in ‘Working in the UK – a guide for EEA and non-EEA nationals’ and if that doesn’t answer your question there is a form in the guide to submit to get specialist legal advice.