Category Archives: Campaigns

Support Bradford College UCU Strikers!

Posted on by

Bradford College UCU are due to strike for 3 days: 20th, 21st, 22nd March 2019. Members in Bradford have experienced a 25% reduction in pay in real terms, with no significant pay rise at all in 10 years. In comparison, school staff have received a 3% pay rise applied to pay scales that already tend to exceed the rates paid to staff in colleges. The strikes this month follow an unprecedented 4 days of solidly supported industrial action at the college in November and January. It is hugely disappointing that a recent letter from (then) Acting CEO Chris Malish (now the finance director) to the Bradford College branch only offers talks with UCU on pay after the proposed strike days, on 1 April. Given members have already walked out twice, Bradford College UCU are quite justified in asking whether their management are playing April Fools… Bradford College staff are suffering under hugely increased workloads and high levels of accompanying stress. Spending on the Bradford College senior management team has risen while the wage bill for lecturers has fallen. Consider this context of a refusal to move into meaningful talks for over six months, playing for time under the restrictive (anti-)Trade … continue reading

USS Pensions update

Posted on by

Members will have seen in last week’s all-staff communication the reminder that our USS pension contributions will be going up from 8% of Salary to 8.8% of salary, as from your pay slip at the end of April. We will be receiving letters from the USS this week with further details. We have communicated this known forthcoming contribution a few times in updates on pensions in the last few months. This is the first of a series of increases in contributions that were triggered last summer as a result of a failure to agree the 2017 valuation – the source of the big pension strike this time last year. Further increases will take place if no agreement is reached – and you will see these mentioned in the USS letter and by following links from the all-staff email – but please note that there are no employers who desire these further increases and the pressure is on to come to a conclusion and agree a way forward to avoid them. Members will recall that the Joint Expert Panel was established on the back of our strike, and its first report came out last September. Partially in response to that, USS … continue reading

Update on gender pay gap talks

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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