UCU paper for Senate on IT

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Below is the content of the UCU paper on IT given to members of the university senate before their 16 January meeting.

Below is a summary of comments from academics, IT staff and UCU Committee members, many of which have been raised multiple times at various meetings across the university.

IT Reorganisation

The IT reorganisation was undertaken without sufficient analysis of:

  • the services IT needs to deliver
  • the skills and resources required to deliver those services

The predictable result is loss of service rather than the increased efficiency that may have been possible with a more professional approach

This is why the £3million saving was not a saving – it was cutting costs without understanding or anticipation of the impact, for example:

  • The number of ‘single points of failure’ within IT has risen significantly. This substantially increases the University’s risk profile. If a service goes down or a statutory obligation is not met as a result of the sole support being unavailable, the resultant cost could exceed that £3million ‘saving’. This implies overly simplistic risk evaluation and planning.
  • Because these are potential costs rather than known recurrent costs, it is all too easy for management to disregard them. 
  • Reorganising IT isn’t the problem here, the problem was the reorganisation being done without deep and thorough consultation, with the emphasis given to cost and staff reduction, through overly simplistic understanding of the sector.

Importance of Specialist IT in Faculties

Individuals working in faculty IT typically have extremely valuable subject specific qualifications in that area, which enhances their collective efficiency, minimises delays and costs and reduces stress and time for all concerned. This applies both to the academic-related IT staff and the technical IT staff. Unfortunately, those staff have all but left the faculties now and indeed, more will leave in the first week of the New Year.

The idea that because you can do IT in MAPS, you will be able to translate this model easily to, for example, Medicine is wrong. This might apply to a generic service typically found in some commercial organisations, but to support world class discipline specific and specialist academic research and teaching, it is an essential requirement to have IT staff who are qualified and familiar with the subject area and are fully supportive of and motivated by the key local research and teaching needs. This means that a difficult path has to be followed. Not only do the changes need to stop but they need to be reversed. And those specialised staff who have been physically moved out of the faculties need to be physically moved back.

Admin rights

In relation to restricting admin rights, this would be a policy which might work if there were sufficient IT staff with admin rights as well as the relevant experience on-hand to react quickly and effectively to such requests and resolve the problem, even outside core time. There are not and this risks reputational damage and network security.

Backlog of IT requests

There are now insufficient staff to deal with issues in a timely way.  The ticketing system is not only cumbersome for the user, but doubly so for the IT staff and has resulted in an economy all of its own, with tickets being closed prematurely or not addressed in a timely manner.  Many IT staff have used ticketing systems before which are much more efficient, cheaper and usable than the current system.  

The IT Service Desk is severely understaffed, and IT staff from other areas are routinely dealing with calls and emails about issues they don’t have the skills or experience to understand.  Requests and problems are often allocated to the wrong team which can cause significant delays for users.

Essential Infrastructure and Investment in Staff

IT must be seen as essential infrastructure; more essential than new buildings. A major spending programme must be initiated, along the lines of the major building programme.  Spend money on IT infrastructure rather than on outsourcing.  Outsourcing reduces the prospects of learning what works and doesn’t for each academic need, given the local constraints, hardware and exposed vulnerabilities to external changes in third party capability, costs and motivations.  This investment must include recruitment of experienced staff from the HE sector, who are given the resources and skills investment to do the job. The pressure to downgrade staff and/or keep staff at the same grade, but overloading them with additional duties, must halt. On the contrary, to retain the experienced staff who remain, there must be a pressure to upgrade staff, and in particular to recognise, develop and reward the professional specialists again. If we do not do this, our competitor institutions will continue to overtake us and precipitate the departure of leading academic colleagues in the same numbers that IT staff have left.  We believe this poses a severe and immediate corporate risk to the university that Senate should be made aware of.  We are currently on the cliff edge of significant reputational damage being caused to this university.  We are told that the IT reorganisation has saved £3million, but there seems no accountability for how much this has cost the university in terms of lost research and additional workload.

Linux/Unix

We must also stop ignoring government policy on the use of open source (free) software or simplistically interpret such advice.  Indeed, academia should be developing, with appropriate expert as well as commercial input and involvement, strategies to adapt and develop such leading edge software and hardware tools, which is surely a key aspect of our research mission both locally and nationally.  This will inevitably imply a greater emphasis on Linux/Unix, particularly in Research IT, and will mean that the number of supporting staff will have to be increased. However the overall cost savings, in terms of using free software, should not be trivialised.

IT Staff

IT staff morale is in free fall.  IT staff are either being encouraged or forced to take on new roles. This increases the loss of experienced staff because the existing experienced staff are being asked to take on roles which they have never done before and to suffer the stresses of change and simultaneous performance management. It has resulted in an IT experience drought and there is no prospect of this coming to an end, unless staff are moved back to their areas of expertise. This would involve a complete reversal of the changes which have been initiated.

Many IT staff in new roles are seeing that their old roles are not being filled, leaving them feeling obliged to continue their old role whilst attempting to do the new role, therefore trying to complete two jobs at the same time. This is an intolerable situation and again, highly stressful and demoralising for the staff involved.

IT has been reorganised into a number of new teams. The responsibilities of these teams are not clear.

The new teams are short of staff, so few, if any, teams are able to take responsibility for anything more. Yet staff have left and IT systems are supposed to be moved away from the faculties.

Comments from Academics from three different STEM Faculties:

Academic 1

The key concerns for us as IT users are:

  • The Service Now system can lead to even urgent jobs taking a very long time to be fixed, losing valuable research time.
  • The loss of admin rights.  While security reasoning for this may be understandable, such a policy does need to be supported by a fast response from IT. For example, we do a lot of programming and often need to download programs or add-ons in order to be able to continue with our research. This wasn’t a problem when the support we had was more tailored to our needs.

Academic 2:

  • One can spend £550 million on buildings, but if you do not spend money on research computing support, then this will be a waste
  • The university is not spending money on computing infrastructure and this will have a bigger impact than not spending on buildings
  • IT Staff are demoralised in this area.  Our School has lost 2-3 good members of staff (out of 5).  There are now problems as they have not been replaced.  Research computing needs linux/unix /Macintosh support.  There now is very little and academics cannot get the support.
  • IT is set up to support Windows.  Research computing is different e.g. the SPSS software package.  I wanted it for a student to run on a Mac. The university has bought a software licence, but there is no support and no way that I can effectively download it on the Macs.  The university NSS scores will drop because of this.
  • It is questionable whether IT centrally can ever supply the flexible linux type research computing support.  If someone works in IT and is good at Linux etc., then they can get a lot more money working outside. 
  • There has to be a close relationship in research computing with the scientists, and I believe this is best served in faculties.
  • The new head of research computing was good, but as predicted, within 9 months he has left, due to lack of resources and an inability to be able to do anything.
  • The university has to make a conscious decision as to whether it wants to stay in the premier division of teaching and research (and research computing), or become a 2nd division team. 
  • IT and research computing staff are expensive, and can get well paid elsewhere.  The university has to accept this fact.

Academic 3:

  • IT qualified staff need to be based in the School they support because timely and appropriate access, particularly in laboratories, is essential and cannot be provided at one remove.
  • To give a recent example, as a result of the power outage last week, the settings on our lab computers have disabled numerous instrumentation and without admin access I am unable to fix the problems which I could do in minutes. Instead I am forced to put in numerous support requests which are estimating a 23 day response time.
  • In the meantime our laboratory is disabled for the sake of an archaic security policy.
  • Some of my support requests are months old, nearly all of them I could deal with myself if I had permission.

International staff survey

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UCU University of Leeds international staff survey

Please promote this link to international colleagues at University of Leeds, whether or not they have joined UCU yet.

We’re delighted to announce the launch of our International Staff Survey. By international staff we refer to both EU and non EU academic, academic related and postgraduates who do paid teaching for the university.

We would like to encourage all international staff to please fill out the anonymous survey and get in contact with us if you would like to take part in our international staff activism here at Leeds (contact Laura Loyola Hernandez). This survey has come out of our Equality working group lead by Dima Chami, if you are interested in joining please contact her.

We would like to point out that the intersection of gender, race, ethnicity, (dis)ability and being part of the LGTBQ+ community exacerbates the experiences of being international at the University of Leeds, so please include any comments at the end of the survey if relevant. You can complete the survey here: https://yoursay.ucu.org.uk/s3/leeds 

It will take approximately 10 minutes to answer. Most of the questions are tick box and a free text question where you can comment on any concerns not otherwise covered in the survey.

This anonymous survey will enable us to have a better understanding of the experience of being an international staff at the University of Leeds. We hope to gather evidence to inform the local branches negotiations with the University senior management, and to strengthen the UCU nationally to be more responsive to the concerns of International staff. We are especially keen to learn more about your experiences of the following issues while at the University of Leeds:

  • Support (or lack of it) for staff and dependants’ visa fees and NHS surcharge.
  • Bullying, sexual harassment or victimisation, and being afraid to report it because of immigration status.
  • Precarious employment and fixed term contracts. As we know, across the sector international students and postdocs are among the most exploited, often not paid on time, or simply are unable to apply for jobs that are under 12 months or are under the £30,000 threshold.
  • The implicit and explicit racism and legacies of colonialism in how universities’ implement UK government policies on immigration, particularly the current “hostile environment” policy which requires surveillance of staff and students.

We hope that this information will help develop UCU guidance for members (especially managers) who are being expected to perform these functions.

Thank you and best wishes,

Laura Loyola Hernandez (International representative UCU Leeds)
Dima Barakat Chami (Equality Officer UCU Leeds)

We are international. Let's keep it that way.

UCU anti-casualisation claim submitted to University of Leeds

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UCU regional official Julie Kelley has formally submitted our anti-casualisation claim on behalf of the union. The claim sets out clearly what we want the university to do to end job insecurity at the University of Leeds. We have requested formal talks with the university senior management.

The text of the claim is available in full below or to download as a PDF

Full text of our anti-casualisation claim

University and College Union: University of Leeds

Casualisation – formal heads of claim

1.             Introduction

The issue of the use of insecure contracts in the higher education sector now has a very high public profile. This is an issue of national priority for the University and College Union, and for this branch at the University of Leeds.

We believe that we have a common interest in improving the contractual terms of employment of staff in higher education. While a few individuals are likely to find them appropriate to their circumstances, the truth is that for the majority insecure contracts have a seriously detrimental effect on the wellbeing of university staff. In a UCU survey of staff on insecure contracts 42% said that they had struggled to pay the bills. More than a third (35%) had had problems keeping up with mortgage or rent commitments and one in five had had difficulties putting food on the table. This is one major reason why whenever they are surveyed, staff invariably express the desire for more secure employment.

In addition, a growing body of research indicates that any so-called ‘efficiency’ gains from hiring teachers on the cheap are in fact illusory. Recent research into the use of flexible labour has suggested that ‘easy hire and fire’ is a false economy that saves money only at the cost of organisational learning, knowledge accumulation and knowledge sharing, thus damaging innovation and labour productivity growth’.

Finally, staff on insecure contracts also tell us that their fixed-term and casual terms of employment place major obstacles in the way of them delivering the quality support their students deserve. This has been mitigated thus far by their extraordinary efforts to maintain a high standard of education. This cannot be expected to last forever, unless meaningful action is taken.

The University of Leeds employs 65% of its research staff and 36% of its teaching only staff on fixed-term contracts, as well as employing 1,343 academics as atypical workers. Many of the ‘atypical academics’ are postgraduate students working as teaching assistants and employed as temporary casual workers. These casual workers are effectively on zero hours contracts as their hours are not predictable beyond a few weeks and they have limited or no sick pay, holiday pay and other employment benefits. These statistics should be a source of shame and concern for a large, elite University in the UK.

Once damaged, reputations are very hard to rebuild. Students entering the higher education system deserve to know that the people that make their education possible are being employed on contracts, pay rates and terms and conditions that enable them to do their jobs properly. A good student experience is not guaranteed by the quality of a building but by the quality of the educational experience. Secure staff employment is the best underpinning for a high quality student experience.

2.             Statement of intent

Our claim is for the university senior management to agree a joint statement which:

  • Allows for a joint review of working practices;
  • Accepts the need for time-limited negotiations;
  • Commits to negotiate a review of relevant polices and working practices;
  • Accepts UCU’s right to negotiate for all who provide teaching and research at the University of Leeds.
  • Provides the leadership across and within schools and colleges and commits to the provision of sufficient resources (people and money) to achieve the agreed objectives.

3.             An end to the use of ‘worker’ contracts:

It is unacceptable and unnecessary for teaching and research staff to be employed as temps any longer. Other universities have moved away from this form of employment. The University of Leeds must now make this commitment.

Our claim is for the University to agree steps to move hourly paid staff onto fractional employment contracts, assimilated to the National pay Spine and matched to the national role profiles at the appropriate academic level. These should be open-ended contracts wherever possible in line with our claim under section 7. Fractionalisation should not introduce detrimental pay rates in comparison to any previous hourly rate.

4.             Fractionalisation of hourly paid staff

The use of hourly paid teaching contracts produces systematic underpayment for teaching staff. Preparation time is not adequately recompensed, office hours are unevenly paid for at rates that do not reflect the contact and feedback time spent with students, while marking tariffs vary between schools. Some PhD bursaries still expect unpaid teaching as a condition of their grant, while postdoctoral research staff report being put under pressure to teach without separate payment. In addition, the practice of paying hourly paid teaching assistants using timesheets frequently results in a failure to pay staff at all, sometimes for months. For people who depend on teaching pay to maintain their postgraduate studies, this is catastrophic. There is no need for hourly paid staff, including postgraduate teaching assistants, to be employed in this way. Other universities have placed such staff on fractional contracts. UCU’s claim is for:

The University to agree to the fractionalisation of hourly paid staff;

Fractional contracts to be calculated by an agreed formula that takes account of all hours of work done, including work which is currently unpaid;

An end to unpaid labour via bursaries or fellowships and payment for teaching at the appropriate hourly rate for the grade.

5.             Removing unequal treatment

The university should agree steps, including:

  • Ensuring that all staff who teach are paid at the same rate for the same activities across all Schools;
  • Ensuring equal access to incremental progression for staff on different forms of contract
  • Reviewing the grades paid across schools to ensure compliance with other agreements;
  • All teaching roles to be graded at a minimum of grade 6.
  • Ensuring equal access to adequate paid time for professional development opportunities.

6.      Reduction of the use of fixed-term contracts

The University of Leeds employs almost 36% of its teaching-only staff and no less than 65% of its research only staff on fixed term contracts. Members report to us the use of successive fixed-term contracts, presumably being ‘objectively justified’ by the non-agreed criteria in the University’s Fixed-Term contract policy. While funding streams are often fixed or at least interrupted across the sector, there is no necessary reason why fixed-term contracts should be the majority mode of employment at Leeds. Other research-intensive universities like UCL, Bristol and Aberdeen have made decisive moves to move their staff onto open-ended contracts. This can significantly benefit staff for whom open ended contracts enable access to services such as mortgage lending, and do not suffer breaks in their continuity of service. Continuity of service can also impact upon the ability of staff to access benefits such as maternity leave, and their eligibility for redundancy pay.

Our claim is for:

  • Review of the University’s fixed-term contract policy to ensure that it is being properly implemented
  • A commitment that the normal form of employment for all academic staff groups will be employed on genuinely open-ended contracts
  • The establishment of central bridging funds to support the continued financial security of research projects and enable the continued employment and retention of research expertise in the university
  • Agreement that where Teaching Fellowships are objectively justified as being fixed-term, they are for a minimum of one year’s duration, but the normal expectation will be that these will be replaced by open ended contracts at the end of this period.
  • Concerted action will be taken by management to ensure new contracts are provided in good time, rather than at the very last minute as often the case at present.

7.      Teaching Fellowships 

There is a worrying trend for research intensive universities to attempt to offload more and more teaching onto staff placed on ‘teaching-focussed contracts’ that are in fact ‘teaching-only contracts’ to ‘free-up’ their identified research ‘stars’. The use of contracts that simply engage people to teach without allocated time for the scholarly activity that supports subject specialism demonstrates a failure to understand the distinctive character of higher education teaching, while the Concordat’s principle that being contracted to deliver one activity should not become a barrier to career development equally applies to teaching staff. Far too often, these teaching focused contracts are used on a short fixed-term basis of one year or less, damaging academic careers and affecting the ‘student experience’. Our claim is for agreement that these roles will contain at least 20% of time ring-fenced for scholarly activity.

8.             Agreement on provision of specific facilities time

Conducting effective negotiations on improving employment will require a significant commitment of time from reps and in particular those on insecure contracts. Therefore, our claim includes a call for agreement on a specific allocation of paid time off or, in the case of hourly paid staff, paid time on, to allow our representatives to meaningfully participate in the processes around and within these negotiations.

9.             Negotiating forum

UCU submits this claim as a matter for negotiation. This is a matter pertaining to the pay, terms and conditions of academic and related staff. As such, we want negotiations to be held between representatives of the UCU and university management alone.

It is important that the negotiations are conducted in a timely fashion and that the objective should be to reach agreement by the end of July 2019.

10.         Terms of agreement to be incorporated into university policies

The terms of agreement reached following negotiation should be incorporated into the university’s policies.

11.         Implementation, monitoring and review

The provisions of the agreement reached should be disseminated in a manner that provides for uniform application across the university. Managers should be fully trained on the provisions of this agreement. The terms of the agreement should be monitored on an ongoing basis.

Christmas with Leeds UCU

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Our carol singing at lunchtime last week was great fun – the enthusiasm and gusto of the ‘UCU choir’ made up for any lack of musicality! Some students were so delighted they took away the song sheets to share! Thanks to everyone who sent in lyrics – even managing to get ‘casualisation’ into one of the carols. Lyrics can be downloaded [here] in case you’d like to sing our alternative words with family and friends over Christmas…

Here’s just one of our videos: UCU Jingle Bells!  You can watch more on our YouTube account – scroll down for links to Rudolph the Union Reindeer and White Christmas / Dreaming of a Fair Pay Rise!

We also held a ‘Get The Vote Out’ planning meeting on 17th December with mulled punch, mince pies and parkin, which made an excellent start to our work around the re-ballot starting in the New Year on the Casualisation, Equality, Pay and Workload dispute.  Please contact ucu@leeds.ac.uk if you’d like to get involved.

Leeds UCU committee wishes everyone a great break over the festive season.  Hope you get a chance to rest and recuperate, and we look forward to seeing you in the New Year.

Pensions Update: plain language explanation of where we are on USS

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This post follows on from the email we received from UCU HQ yesterday, and seeks to explain that as part of a plain language summary of where we are.

As we approach the end of an incredible year for the union, it is time to reflect on what we have achieved and how we take this strength forwards into a new year. 2018 saw us come together for the unprecedented “Great USS Strike” 14 day action to defend our pension scheme, through which we highlighted significant issues with the assumptions at work in the way USS has been valued and how our employers were responding to this. Our incredible, solid strike action won us a number of things, including the creation of the Joint Expert Panel which was convened to examine what is really going on with our pension scheme, and to interrogate whether the changes proposed by Universities UK (UUK) were justified. This, and associated negotiations and meetings, has been a complex process with multiple players.

The Joint Expert Panel came up with some recommendations that indicated we needn’t pay too much more for our pensions, and can keep the same pension structure we had, instead of the changes that we rejected and took strike action against. In other words, our action was vindicated (and really ought not to have been necessary, had the relevant parties listened to us, quite some time ago when we sounded the alarm about how USS was being valued and assessed).

Before that JEP report came out, a USS mechanism had to be triggered that means we will see our contributions increased slightly in April 2019. UCU and UUK (on behalf of the employers) have yet to agree a way forward that would rule out any of the further increases required by that mechanism.

We, UCU, say that there should be ‘no detriment’ to members – the same pension at the same contribution levels. The JEP report was adopted by UCU to support negotiations to achieve this. UUK has asked its member institutions, and they broadly agree with UCU, that the JEP recommendations should be followed.

USS has begun a new valuation for 2018, in addition to completing the 2017 valuation that led to the dispute. It will report later on that new valuation. A new report from the JEP is expected in 2018, looking at matters of governance of the USS. 

If USS trustees are reluctant to implement the JEP recommendations, UCU will work with employers to persuade the USS to adopt those recommendations. 

USS is currently talking to UUK about ‘contingency payments’, which is to say additional payments employers might need to make in extreme circumstances. Both UCU and UUK have asked for flexibility on this matter, to avoid further impact on contributions. 

We believe USS’s position is indefensible, not least because the JEP found that these increases are unnecessary.UCU will continue to negotiate to defend the current pension position. When a position is established, it will come back to members for agreement/rejection.

Further info:

At last week’s USS meeting with employers and the Joint Negotiating Committee, it was revealed that the JEP proposals, if adopted, would entail a ‘no detriment’ position, as they lead to a surplus instead of a deficit at the ‘year 20’ point which is tested.

The UCU National Dispute Committee, formed at Congress 2018 to examine and provide a steer to the USS dispute, has met several times. You can read more about its work and the minutes of its meetings [here], and at their meeting on 17 December, the NDC agreed [this motion] represents its current position.

What about the Pension Regulator?

The Pension Regulator (tPR) has not always bee the most helpful to our cause, and has come in for some criticism from the JEP, and in the report prepared for UCU by First Actuarial. There have been delays in commentary, and unhelpfully framed and misinformed interventions such as its recent letter to USS. The breadth and depth of this criticism levelled at the PR is cause for concern and it would be for the best if USS is willing to hear these criticisms and to join UCU and UUK in its adoption of those as expressed by the JEP in its report.

What of USS?

In a recent exchange over universities ‘deficit recovery payments’ , Bill Galvin of USS – who came in for criticism in the JEP report, has in effect been rebuked by UUK who have reminded him that their consensus on lowering these payments (in accord with JEP recommendations) is appropriate and properly supported. Given that recent calculations indicate a year 20 surplus, and no longer a deficit, on JEP recommendations, Galvin’s intransigence might be read as seeking to defend a position that has been demonstrated as unnecessary. There is a petition calling for Bill Galvin to resign [here].

Under Galvin, USS have tended to repeat overstated concerns about risk in the USS scheme, which we have shown to have been exacerbated by USS’s very methods. Since at least 2014, Leeds UCU has been arguing that USS’s very own methods of unnecessary “de-risking” cause and elevate risks to our pensions. We also hope to see a more reflective, open approach to listening to these concerns about the Pensions Regulator when USS it opens its next consultation on the new, 2018 valuation. If USS do not act in the interests of USS members, our employers need to join UCU in speaking out about the mismanagement of USS.

So, we continue to defend our pensions. However we now do so from a much stronger position that many in senior management positions in universities across the UK initially told us was untenable. We have withstood attempts to undermine and discredit us, and we have met it with detailed, critical, sound analysis, backed by a willingness to take industrial action if this was ignored. We must be ready to do so again, though given the adoption of the JEP report by both UCU and UUK, we hope that another strike over pensions will be unnecessary.