For the latest news on the national pensions negotiations see UCU’s national website: ucu.org.uk/strikeforuss
You can find more personal comments and assessments on Twitter @leedsucu
Who should be the UCU department rep / UCU anti-casualisation rep / UCU postgrad rep where you work?
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.
Members please check your address!
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!
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!
Heads of School recruitment and the spurious use of ‘equality and inclusion’
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.
USS update
USS caught misrepresenting the views of the pensions regulator + the pensions regulator itself is being investigated by a Parliamentary committee for its handling of whistleblowing from a USS trustee
Our pension scheme is under unnecessary threat.
The 2018 pension strikes successfully challenged concerted efforts to fundamentally undermine our healthy defined benefit pension scheme and transfer it into a substandard defined contribution scheme. Our actions changed the debate, and the report of the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) vindicated UCU’s position.
UCU and the employers’ body UUK signed up to the JEP’s recommendations. This was a positive route forwards and out of dispute. Since then, the USS executive has put forward three ‘options’ to proceed, all of which fall short of the JEP recommendations and all of which would cost members more to get less in their retirement (see our recent [newsletter]).
USS has also been caught out misrepresenting the Pension Regulator’s position and neglecting to correct it while a consultation on these substandard options was being presented to employers. The employers’ body UUK will soon decide which option (if at all) it formally supports. All indications so far are such that UCU sadly expects our employers to side with USS, and to shrink from its commitment to the first JEP report, while asking us to wait for the outcome of the second.
A Parliamentary Committee is currently investigating the Pensions Regulator for its handling of recent whistleblowing from a USS trustee, who revealed that USS misled employers and members about the 2018 valuation. See [here] and [here]. The USS executive (in which UCU has formally lost all confidence) wrongly claimed that The Pensions Regulator had said the JEP recommendations would be too risky and failed to correct this position when requested to do so. See this [Financial Times] article for more (Leeds staff can log in to read FT articles using leeds.ac.uk email addresses).
We have seen public commentary shift from the employers’ side, as attempts have begun to portray UCU as ‘unreasonable’. A recent comment piece by Adam Tickell (chair of the Employers Pension Forum, EPF) does just this. More of these types of media piece are sadly expected. When you see them, please remind yourselves that the report of the Joint Expert Panel vindicated UCU’s position and both UCU and UUK signed up to it. To now shore up the position taken by a USS executive that has been caught out for misrepresentation and in which UCU has lost all confidence, is very disappointing to see from our employers.
For a bit more background, I heartily recommend watching my USS negotiator Sam Marsh’s latest video here, [The State of USS].
In a situation when USS and the Pensions Regulator are both under investigation, it is a tough task to portray us – union members – as being ‘unreasonable’. But this seems to be the tack the employers are trying. This is unfair, it is unnecessary and it risks damaging all of our futures.