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General Meeting 12pm TOMORROW Wednesday 13 March, Roger Stevens lecture theatre 11

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Please come to the members’ meeting tomorrow: every voice matters! If you have never been to one of our branch meetings before, it’s a great one to start with: we have a very full agenda (attached!) dealing with many challenges we face as a sector and as a society. We have updates on local negotiations over the gender pay gap and imminent negotiations over casualisation at the University of Leeds, and a significant number of decisions to make as a branch regarding local policy and what we would like to take forward to the annual UCU Congress and Higher Education sector conference. We will also agree our delegates to represent the branch at Congress this year. … continue reading

General Secretary election

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On Friday UCU announced the nominations process and timeline for [electing a new General Secretary] after Sally Hunt’s resignation. Nominations are open until 5pm on Monday 8 April 2019. Members and staff of UCU are eligible if they meet requirements and nomination guidance outlined [here]. Once nominations are confirmed, there will be an election by postal ballot which will run between 29 April – 23 May 2019. As with the recent UCU officer and NEC elections, the mechanism will be by Single Transferable Vote, meaning members can vote for more than one candidate in order of preference. The successful candidate will hold the position for 5 years.  This is an incredibly important election for the future of UCU. However, in previous years the turnout in elections for the role has been very low across the membership. We hope to address this democratic deficit at Leeds! It is our hope that every single member eligible to vote will return their ballot! As such, please let us know (ucu@leeds.ac.uk) what you would find useful in making your decision about who to vote for and in which order. We hope to organise a large hustings event at Leeds, and will seek permission from candidates to film this to widen access … continue reading

Update on gender pay gap talks

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UCU submitted our gender pay claim in August 2018. For background information see leedsucu.org.uk/genderpaygap In the gender pay claim we asked the university senior management to share with us the detailed information behind the headline figures, to provide us with more detailed information – some of which already exists – including intersectional data on ethnicity, age group and disability, so we can work with them to show where the problems are and make effective plans to end the gender pay gap. We asked the university to produce this information within 4 months. The university met with UCU negotiating team on 20 February 2019. They have not provided us with the detailed information we asked for in advance or at the meeting, and instead talked us through the actions they have taken to reduce the gender pay gap from 22.5% to 20.1%. (Which includes recruiting more men into relatively lower paid roles, which improves the mean average, which would not have been our priority!) The university has proposed to meet us again for further talks in two months. We welcome any progress so far but have impressed upon university management that we want to end the gender pay gap and they … continue reading

International Women’s Day events in Leeds

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Women’s Strike The Women’s Strike Assembly has organised two women’s strike events in Leeds for 8 March: 12pm rally in Briggate4.30pm assembly at Bridge Street Church. More details on their facebook page. For the avoidance of doubt: UCU is not explicitly or implicitly calling for members to take strike action, but please go along to the events if you can. Some staff and students are meeting at the Parkinson building steps at 11.30am to walk down together. International Women’s Day event on Saturday Saturday 9 March 10.30am – 12.30pm Momentum have issued wide invitations to their Women and Socialism event on Saturday from 10.30am – 12.30pm, in Leeds Civic Hall (the one with the golden owls). Speakers include Leeds TUC president Jane Aitchison (who spoke at our strike rally last year). Celebrating 100 years of women in engineering and science 7th – 8th March, Treasures of the Brotherton Gallery. Feminist Archive North mark the centenary of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) with a display of material from their collections related to women in science and engineering. Please support this event if you can: when we were on strike this time last year Feminist Archive North phoned us to say they … continue reading

Job ad highlights need to eradicate culture of casualised work

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In the past few days, a storm of academic Twitter anger was aimed at University of Leeds over a job advertisement for a research assistant. The job description, apparently aimed at postgraduate students ‘interested in developing [their] professional academic skills’, read primarily like a personal administrative assistant with ‘occasional bits of supplementary research.’ What shocked many was the implication that the employee would need to be on campus, in effect ‘on call’, more often than not even when not working. As soon as we were made aware of the ad we contacted University of Leeds Human Resources, who immediately withdrew the vacancy. The university says this was a mistake in the vacancy advertising process, which they will now urgently review and improve. That this job ad saw the light of day is also a symptom of a culture of rampant casualisation in the university sector. Staff working in all roles and at all levels of the university deserve a culture that emphasises dignity and secure work for all. Insecure jobs go hand-in-hand with ludicrously high workloads, fear of being able to take annual leave or be off sick, and, in extremes, bullying. We are standing up for secure jobs and … continue reading