New UCU branch committee

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

The new UCU University of Leeds branch committee starts its one-year term of office today.

Committee officers

President: Ben Plumpton
Vice-president: Chloe Wallace
Immediate past president: Vicky Blake
Treasurer: Aisha Walker
Honorary secretary: Tim Goodall
Membership officer: Alaric Hall
Equality officer: Dima Barakat Chami
Campaigns officer: Lesley McGorrigan
Health and safety officer: Neil Maughan
Anti-casualisation officer: vacancy

Committee members

Alan Roe
Alexa Athelstan-Price
Andy West
Brendon Nicholls
Gabriella Alberti
Hugh Hubbard
Jane Holgate
Jonathan Hume
Lata Narayanaswamy
Laura Loyola Hernandez
Mark Taylor-Batty
Mark Walkley
Megan Povey
Paul Steenson
Rachel Walls
Ruth Holliday
Sue Taplin

Your department reps are listed at leedsucu.org.uk/about-us/departmental-representatives

University lecture capture policy update

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by 
Text of email sent to branch members by branch vice president Chloe Wallace on 23 July 2020

Dear members

I’m writing in relation to the new Audio-Visual policy which was pushed through Senate on 1st July. The policy was presented to Senate and pushed through without a vote, despite a number of senators expressing reservations about it. This is an undemocratic process used by the University’s most important deliberative body about which we have grave concerns.

As you know, UCU were consulted on this policy but we remain unable to agree it fully. Nevertheless, as a result of that consultation the University made some important changes to the policy which are welcome insofar as they improve the position and rights of staff in relation to recordings. As such, we wanted to draw your attention to elements of the policy which you can use to protect your work, as well as ones which we are keen to monitor.

As far as control of your recordings are concerned, the policy is clear that the person being recorded is to be the content owner of the recording. This means that if your lecture is recorded, you should have control of it on the system and others should not. You can tell if you are the content owner because you should receive an email when a recording has been processed, directing you to the area of Mediasite where you can edit your recording. In most cases this should be straightforward but we know that in some Schools recording remains within the ownership of module leaders or other staff – if that is the case, please speak to your School telling them to remedy this, and let us know if there are problems. 

The policy is also clear that your recorded materials should not be used in any context without your consent – please complain instantly in any circumstance where this happens, and let us know. We are disappointed that the University has failed to give us an explicit assurance that recordings will not be used to replace staff, but note that they have said that the University position is that lecture recording is valuable only as an enhancement  to face-to-face learning and teaching activities. If you hear of any threat to use recordings once a member of staff has left the institution, please let us know. 

The policy states that recorded materials should not be used as part of performance management. Please let us know of any instances where recordings are used to investigate complaints against you.

In principle, recordings held on Mediasite cannot be shared online beyond where it is deployed by you. We recommend that you use Mediasite in order to keep your recordings locked down to students on your module. Allowing students the option to download your recordings is a choice on your part, and we recommend not doing it. However we know that there are illicit methods of downloading material and sharing it. We have asked the university to be clear about what they will do to protect staff if this happens.  

We know that the reduced time for editing recordings is a worry for many of you. You can, however, prevent auto-publication within 48 hours if you are the content owner of the material, and we suggest that you do so if you want or need to edit and have concerns about the time pressure. This will only apply once we are back in a situation where we are recording face to face lectures.

We also know that people were worried about the time involved in captioning. The policy now states that staff are not required to edit captions and that if they are not accurate enough they will not be released. We do not expect staff to be held to account for the quality of captions – let us know if you have any concerns in this regard. 

The key change in the policy is that you will have to justify any decision on your part not to record and that the decision will rest with the Head of School. We disagree with this position. However, whilst the policy is in place we expect that reasonable justifications on pedagogical, legal and personal grounds, particularly those relating to equality rights,  will be accepted and we also expect that staff should not be required to disclose confidential or private information in order to make the case to not record. Please get in touch if you request not to record and it is unreasonably refused.

We finally note that this policy does not cover many issues of concern to staff in terms of moving our teaching online or into hybrid form – we know that some of you, for example, have concerns about the privacy implications of being asked to do video-recordings (as opposed to screen captures) in your homes. We await a response from the University on these points but suggest in the meantime that you discuss your concerns with your line manager/Head of School and contact us if you have any queries.

in solidarity

Chloe Wallace

Vice-President, Leeds University UCU

Branch agrees donation to UCU national fighting fund

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

At today’s emergency general meeting (23 July 2020) the branch passed the following motions:

Donation to the UCU Fighting Fund

This branch agrees to:

  • donate £15,000 from the branch to the national UCU Fighting Fund
  • call on the UCU National Executive Committee to meet urgently to reconsider the interpretation of rules regarding the use of UCU reserves, in order to transfer an appropriate amount to the Fighting Fund
  • call on the UCU NEC to agree a donation of 20% of national reserves to the Fighting Fund.

Supporting lower paid members in the UCU levy

If UCU does not raise enough money through branch and other donations and transfers to replenish the national Fighting Fund, a levy on members will go ahead, with the lowest paid members probably exempt.
This branch agrees:

  1. that if a levy is imposed on any members earning under £30,000 per annum, or who are in particular difficulty, we will draw on our local Hardship Fund to pay the levy on behalf of those members who request it, through an appropriate mechanism determined by the local branch committee following discussion with HQ.
  2. to amend the rules of our local Hardship Fund (https://www.leedsucu.org.uk/local-hardship-fund/) to enable the Hardship Fund to be used for this purpose, by inserting a new bullet point between bullet points 9 and 10 to read:
    “Will also be used to support lower paid members of this branch if the union imposes a levy on members.”
    and renumber remaining bullet points.
strike rally on Parkinson building steps

Emergency meeting: branch donation to fighting fund

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

When members of the branch met on 9 July we agreed to hold a further emergency general meeting to decide on making a donation to the national UCU fighting fund. The meeting will be:

Thursday 23 July, 1pm – 2pm (video meeting – link in email from Ben Plumpton sent 14 July)

Two motions from the branch committee have been circulated to members, along with the meeting link, in an email from branch president Ben Plumpton sent 14 July (4pm). One motion proposes a donation to the national fighting fund and the calling of a national executive committee to enable consideration of further donations from the union’s national reserves. The second proposes additional support for members of the branch.

Context: You’ll be aware that the general secretary announced a levy of £15 per member to replenish the UCU fighting fund. There was a motion from committee to the branch general meeting on 9 July to propose that the branch should pay the levy for members earning under £30,000 per annum, and make representations to national UCU that the levy should be graduated according to income. Since that motion was written, the general secretary has sent out an appeal to members and branches for donations, with the aim of exempting the lowest paid members from the levy. Accordingly, the general meeting agreed for that motion to be withdrawn and a new proposal put to an emergency meeting for the branch to make a donation.

We know many members have also made individual donations to the Fighting Fund – many thanks! If anyone else can afford to do so, see ucu.org.uk/fightingfund.

Carrying annual leave

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

We’ve had several members contact us with concerns about messages they have received from managers related to annual leave.  UCU raised these matters most strongly with HR and a clarification has now been issued to managers, but we’re still receiving examples of erroneous emails being sent by managers. 

While the UCU officers agree people should generally take their leave during the year (and in many cases the university should reduce our workloads to allow us to take our leave), it is quite normal to be allowed to carry 5 days. It does need to be agreed by the head of school or service but members should expect a good reason if there is an objection; there should not be an unreasonable objection.

The policy for academic and academic-related (professional and managerial) staff is:

Unused leave entitlement may not normally be carried over from one year to another except that up to one week’s leave (pro-rata) may be carried forward for up to 3 months after the end of the leave year by agreement with the Dean of Faculty/Head of School.

(Policy downloadable from the page on academic and academic related (professional and managerial) staff annual leave entitlement)

HR managers have recently been referring to staff only being allowed to carry five days’ leave “in exceptional circumstances”. That restriction does not exist in the university policy and is a misunderstanding. It is a normal right of our contracts to be able to carry five days leave which the head of school or service should not unreasonably object to.

For some members, depending on their job roles and how their leave impacts on others, it is foreseeable that if a much greater number of people than usual wish to carry over leave into next year that heads of schools or services may have good reason to object to some leave notifications. However for many of our members our carrying over those days will have little impact on others and objecting to that notification of intent would be unreasonable.

Many staff have also been told to give notice of intention to take leave by 17 July. Senior HR managers tell us this was a misinterpretation of an email asking that managers discuss annual leave with staff by 17 July. There is no specific notice period for leave specified in the university policy, only that leave will not be unreasonably withheld if adequate notice is given and operational requirements permit.

In summary, take leave this year if you can, but if you wish to carry some and this is unreasonably refused contact ucu@leeds.ac.uk and we will arrange a UCU caseworker to support you with this.

UCU levy, and job losses

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by 
Text of email from branch president Ben Plumpton to members on 26 June 2020

Dear members,

UCU levy

You will have seen the email today from Jo Grady, our General Secretary, about UCU taking a levy from members of £15 (in two instalments) for the Fighting Fund, so that the union can continue to support members taking industrial action. Obviously it’s important that the union can help members in this way: many members in our branch have been supported by the Fighting Fund over the recent strikes, and the union has prioritised low-paid and casualised staff in disbursing strike pay.  However, your branch committee is concerned about the lack of consultation on this, and that it wasn’t possible, according to the UCU rule book, to make this a progressive levy dependent on salary. We know many hourly paid, part time and low paid members will find this levy difficult to afford. (Note: members on the full free membership are excluded from the levy).  Some members have already offered to contribute to cover the levy for low paid members of this branch (thank you!), and we would be glad to hear from any other members who feel able to do the same. Also, the branch committee are going to propose to the next General Meeting that the rules of our local Hardship Fund (https://www.leedsucu.org.uk/local-hardship-fund/) should be changed so that it can be used for this purpose. Come to the General Meeting to have your say on this (Thursday 9th July 12 noon), and let us know (ucu@leeds.ac.uk) if you have questions or ideas about this.

Job losses in the sector

You will have heard of some pretty awful things going on across the higher and further education sectors, with some institutions announcing large scale redundancies, voluntary severance schemes, cuts to working hours or even ‘voluntary’ pay cuts. UCU is gearing up to fight this at a UK level, and to pressure government to secure the future of the post-16 education sector through government financial support (the “Fund the Future” campaign). Many from Leeds have attended online solidarity meetings called by a group of UCU branches where particularly drastic cuts and job losses have been announced. These branches, with their Twitter handles so you can show your support if you use Twitter, are:

A short video giving info from these branches is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfUsHJ5dot0

We expect to see more national action on this soon.  

Follow @ucusolidarity on Twitter for up to date news.

Local update

For members on fixed term contracts coming to an end, let us know if you want UCU support in attending meetings with management/HR. We suspect end of contract letters are being sent out too freely when some of these posts will be renewed, because of course the work hasn’t gone away.

Leeds UCU officers are negotiating on job losses at university level. We’ve been sent lists of all the fixed term contracts due to end in the next few months, and we are arguing that ending these posts is

a) cruel, because in the current pandemic and hiring freezes, people are very unlikely to find new jobs (this is a particular problem for our migrant members whose visas will be affected) and

b) short-sighted, because the university needs these roles for the future.

Also Leeds has reserves and has saved itself a lot of money through the furlough scheme and through the university being largely closed for many months.

Initial discussions with management at last week’s Joint Committee of the University and UCU (JCUU) meeting indicated that they were quite receptive to these arguments. 
We have been sent formal letters about 240 job losses proposed in the period to September, including many on fixed term contracts and 28 on permanent contracts.  The three campus trade unions are pressing for a formal consultation on this, so that we can argue to protect those individuals, and we hope to prevent some or all of these job losses. 

HR have finally agreed to start talking to the unions about casualisation more generally (18 months after we submitted our anti-casualisation claim, see https://www.leedsucu.org.uk/ucu-anti-casualisation-claim-submitted-to-university-of-leeds/) and the first meeting about this is on 8th July.

The branch is also in discussions with HR/management on many other issues of concern to our members, including return to campus planning, health and safety, progressing anti-racism, working from home allowance, plans for one-off staff visits to campus, issues with pay for casualised staff in specific areas, organisational change, workloads, promotions, furlough, Metro cards and more. Our interventions in many of these areas (especially health and safety) have brought some improvement. There has also been a slight improvement on university communications, in that they are informing staff before they inform students, although not much before!

Thank you to all our reps and caseworkers who have been working hard to support members. And thank you to those who have recently volunteered to help their union in various ways (see my email last Friday “Your union needs you!”). And of course thanks to everyone for supporting each other – we need solidarity across roles, contract types and diverse backgrounds – together we are strong!

In solidarity,

Ben

Ben Plumpton
Pronouns: She/Her/Hers
University of Leeds UCU President
Latest Leeds UCU news at https://www.leedsucu.org.uk   or on Twitter https://twitter.com/leedsucu   

General meeting change of date: Thursday 9th July

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by 
Text from email from branch honorary secretary Tim Goodall to all branch members Thursday 25 June 2020

Our next General Meeting is on Thurs 9th July 12pm – 1pm and will be held online.  Please note the change of date from that given at the start of the year. We’ll send details of how to join the meeting in a later email.  

Agenda items and motions should be submitted by 12 midday, Tuesday 30 June, by email to ucu@leeds.ac.uk 

If you need any help or advice to submit a motion, please email ucu@leeds.ac.uk  I’ve included a few guidance notes below:

The meetings are for all members of this branch. They are the primary means for collective decision making. If you think the local UCU branch should take a particular position on an issue or should carry out a particular action you can submit a motion* to the meeting by the deadline**, your motion will be circulated to all members with the agenda, then all members who attend the meeting can vote on whether they agree. Please do come to as many general meetings as you can attend – the more people participate in our collective decision making the more effective the union is locally.

* If you would like help turning your idea into the format of a motion, email ucu@leeds.ac.uk.
A common format is:

“This branch notes …”              (optional preamble about the facts/background)
“This branch believes …”          (this is where the branch takes a position on an issue)
“This branch resolves to …”     (these are the actions the branch will take in furtherance of what it believes)

There is no word limit to local motions but please be as brief as possible.

**Motions submitted after the deadline might be accepted by the chair if they are deemed emergency motions, which usually means the issue is urgent and it arose after the motions deadline.

Lecture capture policy: update

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by 
Email to members from branch vice president Chloe Wallace, 9 June 2020

Dear members

I hope that you and yours are well – it is for many of us a particularly challenging time of a particularly challenging year, and I hope that you are getting through it.

I am writing to update you on the situation in relation to the University’s proposed new Audio-Visual (lecture capture) policy.

Thank you to all those who took the time to give us feedback on the proposals: if you have not already seen it, the summary of feedback is here:

Thank you also to those who attended our General Meeting on the topic. You can find the text of the motion passed at that meeting here: 

In response to our concerns, the university has made some changes to the draft policy. There is a welcome change on wording around performance management, and some movement on the issue of ownership. However, many areas of concern remain unchanged. 

You may have seen in a general staff email that the revised policy is now out for consultation amongst the wider staff – the link is here. We’d encourage all members to contribute to that staff wide consultation. Attached is a document outlining some of UCU’s remaining concerns about the policy as it stands – it is not comprehensive and we have many other ongoing issues and questions from the document we originally submitted here, but we thought it would be helpful for members to have a summary briefing of the main heads of concern. We will be communicating these to management directly but would ask all members to use whatever voice and influence you have to express your views as well and would ask you to read our briefing before doing so.

A number of members during the feedback process expressed concerns about the automatic captioning process. The pilot on that is still ongoing and, if you haven’t already done so, I encourage you to submit any recordings you might have to it to see how it works – I’ve submitted a few, and it’s enlightening, in the sense that some work much better than others. The link is here. We have not seen any evaluation of that pilot and would need to do so in order to be comfortable that captioning will not substantially increase staff workload without extra time being provided to do it.

All the very best

Chloe

Briefing:

Lecture capture policy: update

After a first round of consultation with us, management have made some changes, which has been good to see. However, management have not responded to the bulk of our questions about the policy, and significant issues with the policy remain, such that we cannot agree to it as it stands. The issues fall under 4 main headings:

Equality

Whilst we have been told an equality impact assessment is being carried out we have not seen its results. A major policy such as this should not be being proposed, let alone agreed, without a comprehensive equality impact assessment.

UCU is committed to inclusivity across the university, including in pedagogy and student support – a commitment which is not merely limited to the fulfilment of legal obligations. . We have recently set up a branch working group on disability, and they are keen to work with the University and LUU to promote what will need to be a radical transformation in the way in which the university operates better to include disabled students and staff. Our objections to the policy as it is written are not objections to inclusive education, and could be addressed without harming opportunities of disabled students. But the policy contains no acknowledgement of the needs of staff, whether disabled or with other concerns which are impacted by this policy, and no recognition that Equality Act duties extend to treatment of staff as well as students. The Head of School guidance contains no mention of these duties and no examples that would serve to educate Heads of School about the circumstances in which a staff member may be disadvantaged by being required to use the lecture capture system, or ways in which they could be supported such that that disadvantage is removed.[1]  As a result, we believe that this policy risks placing the University in violation of its legal duties towards its employees.

Content ownership and control

One of the changes which the university has made is the addition of point 13, making it clear that only the content owner can edit, publish or share recordings. This is welcome. However, the question of who the content owner is is left to the Heads of School guidance, where it states that the content owner is the member of staff who is recorded. That point is crucial and needs to be in the policy, not the guidance. Taken together these provisions mean that if your lecture is recorded, only you can decide where and when it is used outside of the module you recorded it for, which is an important reassurance. However, this is incompatible with point 42, which says that staff leaving the University are not permitted to delete recordings on leaving, because “teaching material… is likely to be needed by other colleagues and students involved in the programme.” If the staff member leaves after a module is complete, which is by far the most usual scenario, we do not see any circumstance in which their recording might be needed again. This leaves the University with the option of deploying a recording of a member of a staff who has left, as an alternative to continuing to employ that staff member or employment a replacement. This is unacceptable.

Data protection/GDPR

Management tell us that they  have taken legal advice on the application of GDPR to lecture capture, and in particular as to the special status of special category data (data concerning issues to which rights attach, including ethnic origin, religious or philosophical beliefs, and political opinions), for which explicit consent is required in order for it to be recorded and stored. We do not believe management appreciate how frequently this type of data is contained within teaching: both video (where ethnic origin and religious belief will/may be visible) and audio, depending on the extent to which the lecturer and students call upon their own experience and situatedness to explain, explore and discuss. We are seeking legal advice on this matter.

Workload

The reduction of the release time from 72 to 48 hours, and the introduction of captioning have good justifications but significant workload implications about which we need reassurance. Management state that most staff do not edit their recordings and most of those who do so do within 48 hours, but the needs of the minority are still important. The impact of this provision hits disproportionately staff who work part time, and may also require evening and weekend working for staff whose teaching falls at the end of the week. We understand the motivation, but more nuance and support is required to achieve the desired outcome.

Captioning is an important resource, but we are concerned about the potential workload involved. A pilot is ongoing, and anecdotally that gives very mixed results in terms of accuracy We have not seen any outcome or analysis of that pilot, and we have not been told what the quality threshold for captioning will be. If that quality threshold is set too low, the job of correcting captions is substantial and cannot be contained within a normal workload. We need more reassurances on this matter.

More generally, we observe that a significant cause of workload creep is additional requirements relating to technology. These requirements are often good in themselves, but the university fails to provide enough staff time for them to be carried out. We need the university to take our workload concerns seriously and propose a mechanism through which workload allocation will be reviewed to take into consideration the demands of new technology, particularly in relation to accessibility and inclusion. We support these values unequivocally, and the University must commit to them by properly resourcing staff to do the work.

[1] Examples might include being a survivor of domestic violence, many mental health issues, including anxiety and body dysmorphia, and the concerns of some trans staff.

BLM support, next steps for UCU committee, and letter to the VC

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by

Leeds UCU committee want to express our complete solidarity at the events that are taking place around the world. We are sorry to our Black students, colleagues and members who are having to collectively relive trauma to mobilise people to stand up to racism, in particular to anti blackness violence. It should not take these types of situations to show our support and uplift our Black students, colleagues and members. We know our solidarity means nothing if it does not translate into real action. As a committee we are committed to the following:

1.   Donate £200 to local anti-racist organisation Racial Justice Network and £200 to University of Leeds alumni Melz’s project Free Black University. In our next General Meeting, we will be proposing larger amounts be donated.

2.   Tackle racism and in particular anti blackness in our local branch by:
a.   Taking an unlearning racism course for committee members, case workers and departmental reps.
b.   Improving our internal mechanisms to report incidents of racism in our union branch.
c.   Offering better support to our BIPOC members.

We know these are very small steps we can take but they will not be the last.

We have sent the following letter to the University of Leeds Vice Chancellor on 5th June 2020.

University committment to anti-racism

Dear Vice-Chancellor,

We hope you and your loved ones are keeping well. We are writing in our capacity as Leeds UCU committee to ask the University of Leeds to address the current socio-political climate in our community. As a university we have a duty of care to our students and staff but in particular to Black students and staff. If the university is serious in its aim to fight racism on campus and beyond, we ask that it takes real steps to action that aim beyond social media posts denouncing racism. We write to you in the spirit of cooperation and inclusion, reflecting the key values of the University, in order to make some suggestions for actions that the University of Leeds could take now:

1. Make a substantial donation to local anti-racist organisations Racial Justice Network and University of Leeds alumni Melz’s project Free Black University. (Melz started the Why is My Curriculum White Campaign in the university).

2. Become a member of the HE Race Equality Charter.

3. Release the statistics confirming the race pay gap that exists at the University of Leeds.

4. Offer specific resources to support Black, Indigenous and People of Colour (BIPOC) student and staff mental health. 

5. Improve how students and staff can report racist incidents both online and offline.

6. Implement direct action to demonstrate how the University of Leeds is addressing the 13% BME attainment gap attainment gap.

7. Improve recruitment and appointment of more BIPOC, especially Black academic and academic-related staff. According to your own data, 30% of job applicants were BME but only 18%18% of those appointed.  

We look forward to your public response on each of the suggested points in this letter.

All best wishes,

Ben Plumpton, on behalf of Leeds UCU committee

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

Defending casualised staff in HE

UCU University of Leeds Branch Posted on by 
Text of email from branch president Ben Plumpton sent 3 June 2020

Dear members,

At our branch General Meeting on 28th April we passed an important motion about supporting casualised staff (copied in full below) which included calling on you to support the CoronaContracts campaign. Please sign the national open letter at https://tinyurl.com/coronacontract – thank you.  Locally, your branch officers and committee are pressing our management on many of these issues, particularly the renewal of contracts and the impact on migrant workers, and our caseworkers are supporting individual members too.

The CoronaContracts campaign have written an open letter to the union’s General Secretary and newly elected National Executive Committee, asking them to hold a mass online meeting of UCU members, both casual and permanent, to discuss urgent action around casualisation. The letter is headed “If you don’t do it, we will” and you can view and sign it at https://forms.gle/5FfShwDFB4HfC6vk9  CoronaContracts are holding a mass meeting tomorrow (Thursday 4th June) on Zoom, at 6:30 pm, and I’d encourage you to join it if you possibly can.  The Zoom link is https://us02web.zoom.us/j/81863074335?pwd=RWNsaWNiY1FOQ0s5WjlmSXZ0M1pLQT09 

It is crucial at this time, when many universities are wanting to make savings on staff costs, that we as union members stand together in solidarity, whatever type of contract we are on.  Those of us who are lucky enough to have open ended contracts need to do everything we can to support our casualised colleagues, many of whom are already in difficult circumstances and with serious concerns for the future.  Tomorrow’s CoronaContracts meeting should be a good discussion about these issues and we hope it will help us take things further at Leeds.

In solidarity,

Ben

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

Latest Leeds UCU news at https://www.leedsucu.org.uk   or on Twitter https://twitter.com/leedsucu