UCU Fighting Fund applications

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This post reproduces the details from an email sent to all members on 16 October about how to apply to the UCU fighting fund. Please read carefully and if after applying you have any additional questions or need further help email ucu@leeds.ac.uk with FIGHTING FUND in the title. See note at the end about evidence of deductions from the June strike.

All UCU members who took strike action* as part of this dispute can apply to the UCU Fighting Fund for support connected to the third day of strike action (Friday 13th October) regardless of financial status (the fourth day of action we have taken as a branch). A cap will be applied at £75 for this day, or at a lower level if the member would have usually earned less than £75 that on that day (this is to ensure HMRC compliance).

Additional consideration will be given for payments connected to the first two days of the strike action (Wednesday 11th and Thursday 12th October) for members on hourly paid contracts or who can otherwise evidence that the strike deductions will have a disproportionate impact upon them leaving them financially vulnerable. A cap will be applied at £50 per day, or at a lower level if the member would have usually earned less than £50 per day (this is to ensure HMRC compliance). This is really important and is a mark of the importance this dispute holds as it is beyond usual Fighting Fund provision.

Other support may be available locally (see email and here).

Please note that you will need to evidence that you have taken strike action and deductions made* in order to apply for the national Fighting Fund and/or for local provision:

Many hourly paid staff will have seen their “deduction” in October as they submit weekly time sheets to HR. This includes postgraduate staff. We will prioritise processing your claims as you will be “hit” first and are among those most likely to be disproportionately affected. More details on how to evidence the hours you would normally have worked below.
Update: We are aware many hourly paid postgraduates have been waiting longer to have their October pay processed, and that there may be complications with decoding the pay slips – please see below, and email us for help with this if you’re struggling: ucu@leeds.ac.uk.

Members who work on a salaried basis (rather than submitting time-sheets for hours worked) should expect deductions to be made in November’s pay. You will need to show us copies of your payslip showing the deductions made (details below) when that payslip comes through on the system.

How to use MyUCU to make a claim

Claims from the national Fighting Fund need to be made on-line through the new portal, MyUCU and we will support you through the process. Hourly paid staff can begin making their claim right away, and salaried staff will be able to do this once they have a copy of their payslip for November’s pay.

All members will be able to make claims once you can evidence deductions of 3/5 of your normal working week; i.e. if full-time from day 4 of action (our 3rd of this strike), or pro rata for part-time or hourly paid appointments – i.e. after the equivalent of 3/5 of what would have been your normal working week. This means that all our members who participated in the 3 day strike are eligible for a payment of up to £75 for the final day of strike action last week (the cap kicks in sooner if you would normally have been paid less than £75).

Additional payments can be made from the national Fighting Fund to any member for whom the deduction of pay for qualifying 3/5 period of a working week causes excessive difficulty for that individual. You must contact us on ucu@leeds.ac.uk so we can endorse your application. The Fighting Fund will pay up to £50 per day for those claims when UCU HQ match the list provided by us (the branch) with the on-line claims submitted.

  1. Even if you have previously registered to use UCU web services, you will have to update your password to use the new system (worth doing to manage all your membership stuff anyway): https://ucu.custhelp.com/app/utils/login_form/redirect/membership%252Fmy_details/
  2. Once you are in the portal you will see a tab for the Fighting Fund. Within that area, there is information about the general principles and how to apply.
  3. The existing Fighting Fund claim arrangements allow members to signal if they are in a category where the deduction/s made is/are causing excessive hardship and this signal will prioritise those claims over their peers. HQ will match this with the list we hold at the branch, so you must also email ucu@leeds.ac.uk with details as above. Please make sure you make the claim under your name as it appears on the membership system.

 

*Additional note 4 December: a few members have emailed about being asked to provide evidence of a deduction for the June strike. This is because the Fighting Fund is paying for the fourth day of action in the dispute (which is the third day of the October strike). There are some exceptions, particularly members who started work at the university after the June strike.

  • 2 Updates from UCU HQ 7 December: 
    1.  Eligibility triggers for Fighting Fund:
    The Fighting Fund is usually activated on the fourth day of industrial action in branches engaged in a nationally significant dispute, however in this case, those members who took the three days of action (or if part time/hourly paid, took industrial action as applicable across these three days) this term (October 11/12/13) will be treated as if they had also taken the day of industrial action in June but will not have to evidence that earlier day. The requirement for that evidence is being waived by HQ because it is proving a problem to some claimants, so HQ is making the assumption that those who were eligible to strike in June 2017 did so, and that means claimants will be paid for the third day of industrial action taken this term.2.  Further update for hourly paid / part time staff: UCU do require evidence from the part-time and hourly paid for their industrial action but it may be too difficult to demonstrate this via pay-slips as they are  often difficult to decipher and many hourly paid staff are facing delays to their pay which makes it harder to track. For members afflicted with indecipherable pay slips / difficulty in tracking late pay, the evidence can be in the form of a time-sheet or timetable, alongside confirmation of the recorded strike action (perhaps a screen shot of the self-service strike record, or a copy of an email confirmation from this from the University’s Industrial Action email address). The principle is that UCU need enough evidence to show that these staff would ordinarily have been expecting to work on the dates that strike action was called, and therefore their strike “deductions” were incurred by loss of pay from not recording work on time-sheets on those days. Hourly paid staff will also need to attach some evidence of their hourly rate of pay, such as a previous payslip or copy of the contract.  The “deductions” (pay that would usually have been expected but was not accrued due to strike action) will be worked out from the hourly rate of pay. 

UCU Leeds newsletter December 2017

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The latest newsletter for members of UCU University of Leeds branch is available now.

 

Contents include:

  • Statutes dispute
  • USS pensions
  • Welcome to all our new members
  • University of the Aire
  • EU staff rights and Brexit
  • UCU Equality Conference
  • Christmas with UCU
  • Free UCU membership for postgrads
  • Raising problems with management
  • Ask a colleague to join
  • Next UCU General Meetings

 

Pensions – please let us know when you’ve voted

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It would be great if you would let us know when you’ve voted in the pensions industrial action ballot by emailing ucu@leeds.ac.uk with the word ‘voted’ in the subject box. (We’re not asking what you voted.)

This will help us to remind colleagues who may have forgotten to vote, so we can deal with the obstacle of the Tory anti-strike law which says unions have to get a 50% turnout but forbids us from using electronic voting or having ballot boxes in the workplace because these would increase the turnout.

(We will try not to ask you again once you’ve either told us you’ve voted or that you don’t want a reminder.)

If you haven’t received your ballot paper by Monday 4 December, you can request a replacement by going to ucu.org.uk/ussballotrequest

For the latest updates on the pensions dispute see the national UCU website www.ucu.org.uk/uss

 

National action on pensions: inaccuracies in management statement on USS

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Yesterday, our university management posted an update on the USS Pension scheme, under “latest news” which has led to queries from members. The university management’s statement contains a wholly inaccurate claim that the USS pensions dispute is “not a national ballot” and goes on to claim the “University is the subject of a dispute which we have no power to resolve.”

In fact, save for one detail, UCU is following the same process as we always do in a national ballot – which is to serve individual ballot notices to each institution on whose behalf negotiations are being conducted.

The only difference in this ballot is that, as our first national ballot since the unfair, anti-trade union Trade Union Act passed in 2016, every ballot now has to pass a 50 per cent threshold before action can take place. UCU has therefore decided to count each ballot separately in order to maximise the opportunity for branches to take action and minimise the possibility that low turnout in one or two institutions would stop action elsewhere. Every USS branch is being balloted, and this is a national campaign.

Two Leeds UCU officers (Lesley and Vicky) are members of the UCU’s Higher Education Committee. They were both present at the meeting which voted decisively, and with unity, to move to the ballot in this national dispute. We absolutely assure you that the claims made by management to the contrary are erroneous.

Yesterday we wrote to you to suggest you write to the Vice Chancellor (vice-chancellor@leeds.ac.uk) to ask several questions – here they are again:

  • Under the UUK proposals can you tell me what my retirement income will be?
  • Under the UUK proposals will my pension benefits now be significantly worse than those in post-92 universities?
  • Will the University of Leeds please formally request evidence of the modelling that has been provided by Universities UK?
  • Will the VC take action to stand up for staff and for the difficulty we will face in attracting staff to work in a UK university without an adequate pension scheme?

Please note that these questions are important because, contrary to senior management’s assertions in the 29 November update, every University does indeed have power to affect the course of negotiations – we ask that our VC follows the example set by Warwick and Glasgow universities by standing up for our pensions.

Censure and Academic Boycott of University of Leeds

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Leeds UCU is still in dispute with university management over our statutes. Management have refused:

  • to remove ‘some other substantial reason’ for dismissal
  • to reinstate a medically qualified chair for appeal panels for dismissal on health grounds
  • to reinstate an independent chair for other appeal panels

 

Management also intend to move all the pertinent procedures into Ordinances (which can be changed more easily) rather that Statutes, which are subject to government approval.

Consequently we have begun the process of Censure and Academic Boycott of the University of Leeds, as agreed at several Leeds UCU General Meetings and at UCU National Congress 2017. This is a serious step which we hope will encourage management to withdraw their proposed new statutes from Privy Council and reconsider their approach. Censure and Academic Boycott is a UCU procedure which happens in stages. The first stage of this was a letter of censure to the university, which will be sent today, Wednesday 29th November. The University of Leeds will be on a list of employers who are subject to censure as a result of a particularly damaging approach to an industrial relations issue. UCU publicises this list through appropriate media and to other academics.

The university management can respond by meeting UCU again for meaningful negotiations. But if they don’t, we need to move to the boycott stage, where academic and academic-related staff at other universities and institutions are asked not to cooperate with Leeds in various ways. Please read the full UCU policy on Censure and Academic Boycott (PDF, 148k), as agreed at the UCU National Congress 2010.

The boycott will be a gradual process and we will all decide together as a union what should be boycotted and when. The committee will consult members each time we believe it is time to increase the boycott. Below are the sorts of activities we might ask that UCU colleagues from other institutions boycott. The committee will propose starting with those which are straightforward but will have a significant effect on the university. Then, if things don’t improve, it’s envisaged the committee will come back to members and propose increasing the level of the boycott. We want to keep members fully involved throughout, and we’d welcome your views now on what activities to boycott at the initial stage.

  • Applying to become external examiners for taught courses
  • Speaking at seminars or guest lectures
  • Applying for jobs at Leeds
  • Recommending to students considering postgraduate study that they should choose a university that gives proper recognition to academic freedom
  • Peer reviewing Leeds research
  • Speaking at or organising academic or other conferences here
  • Accepting positions as visiting professors or researchers here
  • Writing for any academic journal which is edited at or produced at Leeds
  • Collaborating on new research projects

We would also very much welcome further suggestions from members for activities we could add to this list.

Staff working at Leeds will continue doing their normal academic and academic related activities within our own university – the boycott is for our colleagues elsewhere.

Based on feedback from members we will draw up a plan for stages of the boycott. Remember that university management can at any stage agree to meet UCU again for meaningful negotiations, and thus avoid further escalation of the boycott.

A detailed consultation will follow soon, but in the meantime please email your thoughts to ucu@leeds.ac.uk.

Note that we are also working towards renewing our ballot for further industrial action, and we will be consulting members further about appropriate forms of that industrial action.  General Meetings have suggested a marking boycott and a REF boycott, and we also welcome members’ suggestions on this.