VLS in FBS and Medicine

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Members who attended our General Meeting on 22nd October will recall that we passed by an overwhelming majority a motion instructing officers and committees to mobilise to stop proposed redundancies in the Faculty of Biological Sciences and the School of Medicine.

We understand that both areas either have announced, or will shortly announce, to their staff that a voluntary redundancy scheme, known as a Voluntary Leavers Scheme (VLS), has been opened, with a final date of application of 7th December and an earliest leave date of 28th February for those who may choose to leave the University under this scheme.

The campus trade unions – UCU, Unison and Unite – are opposed to the launching of this scheme at this time, and have not agreed it.

We do not believe that the unions have been meaningfully consulted on this, in accordance with the University’s Organisational Restructure Policy, Meaningful consultation, in our view, requires consultation to happen before a decision has been reached, that sufficient evidence and explanation of the decision be given and that sufficient time be taken so that that explanation can be interrogated and alternatives explored. In this instance, we were presented, with a few days notice of a meeting, with outline strategic plans and a proposal for a Voluntary Leavers Scheme (VLS). It was clear from the outset that there was to be no consultation on the need for a VLS, but only on its terms, and that the University was in particular not prepared to consider alternatives to a VLS. Discussions have been curtailed by tight time limits and tight time frames.

As things stand we object to the proposals on a number of grounds:

  • Voluntary redundancies at this point have substantial implications on workload for staff who remain. In such a difficult year, where workloads are already unacceptably high and where we face uncertainty week by week, this is not in the best interests of staff and the University.
  • To announce the scheme at the start of a national four week lockdown demonstrates extreme insensitivity. This is an extraordinarily difficult time for many staff, on top of the stress and pressure of functioning within a pandemic, and we do not think the University should be asking staff to make important life-changing decisions at such a time.
  • The redundancies are being justified on the basis that they are financially necessary, and for no other reason. We see no evidence that other options have been explored. Both FBS and SoM have developed substantial academic development plans which are intended to redress the financial deficits within those faculties – why not explore options which do not reduce the number of staff available to give effect to those plans?
  • Medicine ran a VLS as recently as last year. The Faculty of Biological Science did the same 10 years ago. We have not been shown adequate evidence to explain why these failed to improve the situation and why the current schemes will be any better. We are concerned that a fundamental issue here is the university’s Resource Allocation Model (RAM), but have been told that financial matters of that nature are not part of the consultation. We dispute this, as the rationale for this VLS is financial and thus the RAM must be part of that discussion.


Together with Unison and Unite we have written to the Vice-Chancellor to express our concerns. However, the schemes have been launched regardless. We cannot overstate our disappointment that at such a difficult time for staff the University would proceed in this way. We will be discussing further steps.

And as always, Leeds UCU members, if you feel you need individual support from your union please get in touch via ucu@leeds.ac.uk

Motions passed at General Meeting on 22 October 2020

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Members of the branch agreed the following motions at the General Meeting on 22 October 2020.

Redundancies

This branch instructs its officers and committee to organise the necessary steps to mobilise the branch to stop any proposed redundancies in the Faculties of Medicine and Health and Biological Sciences.

Motion to UCU LGBT+ members’ conference – Campaign for GRA reforms and against asylum seeker persecution

Conference notes that the rise of the alt right and political scapegoating has led to a very significant rise in LGBT+ hate crime and a consequent rise in LGBT+ asylum seekers.
Conference further notes the failure of the Government to implement the Gender Recognition Act (GRA) reforms.

Conference resolves:

  1. To raise the profile of the UCU campaign for reform of the GRA.
  2. To campaign for an end to the persecution of asylum seekers.

Motion to UCU Women members’ conference – Caring responsibilities during the pandemic

Conference notes that:

  • Many members, often women, have caring responsibilities for children or for family members who are older, ill or disabled.
  • COVID-19 has particularly impacted carers’ ability to work their full contracted hours, due for example to children being home because of nursery/school outbreaks, difficulty in arranging tests, and needing to support household members who have symptoms or are otherwise required to isolate.
  • This is not a temporary problem which can be accommodated through normal carers’ or parental leave policies.
  • Expecting carers to fit their full contracted hours around caring responsibilities, i.e. by working evenings and weekends, is unacceptable and will result in health problems.


Conference resolves that:

  • UCU should develop guidance for branches on negotiating policies for:
    • safe flexible working and additional special leave for carers during the pandemic
    • no career detriment through carers being unable to achieve expected research outputs or other objectives.

Re-affiliation and online subscription to Labour Research Department publications

This branch notes that the Labour Research Department is an independent research organisation which has provided information and resources for trades unions reps and negotiators for over 100 years.

This branch believes that Labour Research Department (LRD) booklets including Law At Work are a valuable resource on employment law and best practices for trade union reps.

This branch agrees to re-affiliate to Labour Research Department and to re-subscribe to LRD booklets online on an annual basis, the cost to be set by the Labour Research Department, except that if the cost goes above £500 this will be reconsidered at a General Meeting.

Re-affiliation to Leeds Trades Unions Council

This branch notes:

  • That Leeds Trades Unions Council (Leeds TUC) is, and has been for a century and a half, a valued way for members of local trade union branches from different workplaces across the city to work together on common issues at a grass roots level, to support each other, and to celebrate and promote the work of trades unions in the city.
  • That Trades Council delegate meetings take place on the last Wednesday of the month (except December), starting at 7pm at the Swarthmore Education Centre, Woodhouse Square, Leeds, and that this branch is entitled to send up to ten delegates to the meetings.


This branch agrees:

  • To re-affiliate to Leeds TUC on an annual basis, cost to be set by Leeds TUC, except that if the cost goes above £500 this will be reconsidered at a General Meeting.
  • That the committee should appoint up to ten delegates to represent the branch at Leeds TUC each year.

Coronovirus cases still too high and teaching continues despite SAGE advice

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Today the University released figures suggesting the cases of Coronovirus reported in the last week numbered 269 new cases. They have also added 82 additional cases to last week’s total, due to late reporting, bringing that figure to 640. It seems the additional control measures are not doing enough. Face to Face teaching and student support are still going on in some parts of the University despite the large number of cases reported a week ago, and since last week’s initial publication of numbers, there have been no further policy changes or communications about teaching. Furthermore, we are concerned about the possibility of under-reporting meaning that the real figures could be much higher.

The University of Leeds are still working on the basis that schools/services can decide whether teaching/support is safe and pedagogically necessary. Given the looseness of this guidance, inconsistent practices continue, although we welcome that some schools have reduced or removed on campus teaching and events. Nonetheless, teaching and support staff are still being asked to come in, and we are particularly concerned for colleagues on fractional contracts and PGR teaching staff who may be compelled to teach on campus or lose their income. In the emergency meeting on the 1st of October, a motion was passed stating we will register a dispute with Leeds University management if they insist on proceeding with coercion of staff into face to face activity, deeming it to be in breach of the university policy on Dignity and Mutual Respect.

On Monday night it was revealed that the government’s scientific advisers recommended three weeks ago that all university and college teaching should be online unless face to face sessions were absolutely necessary. We are frustrated that University leaders are not listening to either to this scientific advice or UCU, who have been calling for a move online since even earlier in September.

UCU continue to support colleagues who are being asked to teach or do other face to face work on campus but feel unsafe to do so. Please speak with your local rep or contact ucu@leeds.ac.uk for support if you are in this situation. Branch officers will continue to use our meetings with University management to call for an end to in-person activities. An ordinary general meeting is scheduled for next Thursday 22nd of October for further discussion amongst members.

Covid-19: motions passed at emergency general meeting 1 October

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Members of the branch agreed the following motions at the emergency general meeting 1 October 2020.

Motion 1

Leeds University UCU instructs the Leeds University UCU branch committee to register a dispute with Leeds University management if they insist on proceeding with coercion of staff into face to face activity, which is widely acknowledged to be unsafe. This branch considers this to be in breach of the university policy on Dignity and Mutual Respect.

Motion 2

This union recognises:
  1. Good practice on Health and Safety in numerous areas by University management.
  2. Continuing difficulties and deficiencies in other areas, which must be resolved urgently in view of the Covid-19 pandemic. 
This union notes: 
  1. The refusal of managers in LUBS to disclose the findings of test surveys carried out on ventilation systems in School premises – including teaching rooms – to UCU Safety Reps. 
  2. The lack of a clear undertaking from senior University managers, in response to requests at the “Working Together” (“Town Hall”) meeting on 29 September, 2020, to ensure that such reports would be shared with UCU Safety Reps across the University. 
  3. The duty placed upon employers by HSE Safety Representatives and Safety Committees Regulations (1977) and relevant Code of Practice, to: 
    1. allow Safety Reps “to inspect and take copies of any document relevant to the workplace or to the employees the safety representatives represent” (Reg 7), and to: 
    2. “make available to safety representatives the information, within the employer’s knowledge, necessary to enable them to fulfil their functions” (Reg 7), including: 
    3. “technical information about health and safety hazards and precautions needed to eliminate or minimise them, regarding machinery, plant, equipment, processes” (COP 7b), and:
    4. “any other information specifically related to matters affecting the health and safety at work of their employees, including the results of any measurements taken by the employer or people acting on their behalf in the course of checking the effectiveness of their health and safety arrangements” (COP 7d). 
This union believes:
  1. That the University of Leeds is currently in breach of statutory requirements of the Health and Safety at Work Act (1974). 
This union resolves: 
  1. To formally request the prompt disclosure of all relevant ventilation reports to UCU Safety Reps. 
  2. To set a reasonable timetable for said disclosure. 
  3. To formally report to the HSE any failure by the University to disclose these reports in a reasonable and timely way.
  4. To register a dispute with Leeds University management in the event of any failure by the University to disclose these reports in a reasonable and timely way. 

Motion 3

Title: Care responsibilities in the context of COVID -19: flexible working and contingency plans

This branch notes:
  1. That COVID-19 is having a different impact on staff according to whether they have caring responsibilities for children and elderly relatives, and will potentially be more pronounced where the person cared for has additional care needs. For example, if a child of a University employee is required to quarantine because household members show COVID -19 symptoms then staff with caring responsibilities will be affected even if they themselves are not unwell. If it is not possible to undertake the test due to the limited testing capacity in the UK, the parent/carer employee(s) are also required to quarantine.
  2. That when schools close due to local outbreaks of COVID-19, there is no public childcare available and parents will be responsible for home-schooling and care of pre-schoolers. Not all employees with care responsibilities have family networks to support childcare if children are home from school due to confirmed or suspected COVID-19.
  3. That due to the increased surveillance and necessary caution regarding spreading of COVID-19 in the UK and areas with additional lockdown measures children are more likely to need to be kept home from school than during non-pandemic times and this may occur multiple times. This may be due to their own symptoms or due to outbreaks in their class or school.
  4. That the University management has included in all staff official communication messages of empathy about the specific challenges related to child and elderly care for staff, recognising that this may impact on the ability of the employee to work according to the contracted hours. However, no leave or equality policy has been changed as a result.
  5. That a “Return to campus survey” has been carried out to identify specific circumstances and challenges that different members of staff may experience on the basis of their protected characteristics, but that the survey’s section on childcare made a problematic assumption about partners (or other family members) being available to cover the extra care work required in case of illness.
  6. That current workload models do not account for this specific and exceptional context in terms of staffing, e.g. to replace members on sick leave and contingency plans. The current risk is that other colleagues with no care responsibilities may see their workload increase.
  7. That a clear staffing and contingency plan would reduce the stress and anxiety currently present among staff, especially female staff with caring responsibilities, that is due to the uncertainty and variability in how individual managers will treat this situation.
  8. That the university cannot deal with this situation on a case-by-case basis, but there must be a policy, with case-by-case considerations where that policy specifically does not work.
  9. that multi-generational households in BAME communities face specific challenges during the COVID pandemic where individuals have care responsibilities for both elderly parents and children
This branch resolves:
  1. To negotiate with management a new policy for staff with care responsibilities that considers the new challenges brought by COVID-19, especially due to increased likelihood of school and nursery closures and increased need for sick leave. This policy must address practical difficulties of juggling work around childcare in a concrete way.
  2. That reassurance should be given to workers with care responsibilities to reflect this new exceptional, time-limited situation, especially in the coming winter months.
  3. The policy should go beyond recognising the generic need for ‘flexibility’ which is already built into academic roles, and that flexible working arrangements cannot simply mean that staff will ‘catch up’ with work at unsociable hours (e.g. the evening or weekend) as a new standard but that objective reduction in working hours must be considered.
  4. That our UCU representatives should negotiate with management to include the following elements in the future policy on care issues:
    1.  Specific acknowledgement that no detriment will result for staff who are unable to fulfil their contracted hours when the household and children are isolating but have been directed not to get a test (this is aligned to Athena Swan), all staff should be able to re-arrange their working hours or access leave in this circumstance.
    2.   In the best-case that the university supports private avenues of testing for all staff and their family members if they wish to minimise staff stress and facilitate return to normal working. As a minimum the policy should include specific acknowledgement for all staff (regardless of their caring responsibilities) that finding and attending a COVID-19 test is time consuming. This is because local availability is often limited and the availability of tests is unpredictable meaning that a person who needs a test will need to keep checking the website intermittently over a day or two. The rules on taking a test prevent other household members from being tested until they show symptoms. So a parent may need to organise a test for a child and then later for themselves as symptoms develop. Multiple testing within one household is very time consuming.
    3.  Consideration will be made of this disruptive time to productivity similar to how career breaks and part-time work result in pro-rata adjustment to expected productivity/outputs through, for example, specific allowance for special pandemic-related carers leave over and above the statutory allowance.
    4.  The policy should stipulate that ‘flexible working’ to accommodate caring responsibilities should not be accessed to the extent that it prevents the person from being able to have a reasonable amount of rest time within a typical week.
    5.  ‘Flexible working’ to accommodate caring responsibilities should explicitly exclude the assumption that the person can still be reasonably expected to work contracted hours if the only way this could be achieved is by including weekend work. This should be discouraged because it is not sustainable and will result in decreased long-term productivity due to burn-out.

Email to the vice-chancellor about covid-19 response

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The UCU branch committee emailed the University of Leeds vice chancellor on Tuesday 29 September 2020 in response to the message from the university “Arrangements in the new academic year – a message from the Vice-Chancellor” (opens in new tab) received Friday 25 September 2020.

Dear Vice-Chancellor,

On behalf of Leeds UCU, I’d like to welcome your statement to staff.  We are absolutely in agreement with you that the most important priority is to protect the health and safety of the entire University community. And we are very glad that you are encouraging more use of online teaching during the COVID period. The university approach until now has been that schools must provide some face to face teaching, including those schools who had planned for fully online, and it’s good to see concerns about safety now overriding the hybrid model.  However, we would encourage you to go a step further, and insist that the only activities that should take place on campus are those which are impossible to do any other way (eg some practical sessions).  Tutorials, seminars and other small group teaching, supervisions, careers appointments and so on can be done very effectively online (and indeed have been done online since the campus lockdown in March).  This is in line with the recommendations from yesterday’s emergency report by the independent SAGE group, and we would urge the university to follow those recommendations (copied below) in full.

The campus trade unions have worked closely with university Health and Safety staff to make the campus environment as safe as possible, and our input to this has been welcomed.  UCU’s view now is that, with increased rates of COVID-19 nationally and locally, the university must limit as far as is possible the amount of activity on campus, in order to reduce the risk to everyone, including essential workers and the staff teaching and supporting those activities which can only be done on campus.

We are also glad to see your emphasis on student and staff mental health and wellbeing.  We can see from what’s already happened in Scotland, and now in nearby northern universities like Liverpool and Manchester, that outbreaks amongst students are highly likely, as was predicted by scientific modelling. Being ill or having to isolate in an unfamiliar place, and not being able to socialise, must be awful for students, especially new students who won’t have an established support network.  We are concerned that students should not be blamed for local outbreaks – this is a consequence of so many people travelling around the country and mixing, however stringent the safety precautions. We would of course encourage more university provision of student counselling and support.  But we also think that students should be allowed or even encouraged to return home at least until Christmas if they would feel happier doing so (see also recommendations 3 and 4 below).  And we are clear that staff would feel more supported by the university if no-one (including hourly paid graduate teaching assistants) felt obliged to work on campus if they don’t feel safe doing so for any reason.

I look forward to meeting you soon when we can discuss these issues further in person.

Cheers,

Ben

Ben Plumpton
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
University of Leeds UCU President

Please ask me about joining your trade union
Latest Leeds UCU news at http://www.leedsucu.org.uk   or on Twitter https://twitter.com/leedsucu   

From Independent SAGE report 28 September 2020:

“Modelling shows that transmission occurs in residential halls and through in-person teaching. Thus, Independent SAGE recommends that universities immediately implement these five key recommendations:

1. Transfer all teaching and learning online by default.

2. Make essential in-person teaching and learning (e.g., components of laboratory or practicebased courses) contingent on the regular testing of students and staff, with a ‘dashboard’ approach as adopted by US Colleges, and with stringent adherence to face coverings, handwashing, physical distancing, and ventilation mitigations.

3. Offer students the choice whether to live on campus / in their university accommodation or at home elsewhere (e.g., with parents and caregivers) and review at the end of the calendar year (i.e., December), and avoid numerous journeys between home and university.

4. Ensure that students who choose to remain at university while learning online maintain the right to return home for the rest of the term at any point, with accommodation fees refunded, and with testing before doing so.

5. Ensure full and generous support to students both to self-isolate and to access online learning resources, including practical needs (e.g., food, laundry), learning (e.g., IT, connectivity), and social and emotional needs (e.g., buddy systems, regular wellbeing checks, online events).”