In today’s episode, recorded Wednesday 12 February 2025:, extraordinary general meeting on university finances and student numbers, short-notice IT system changes, annual leave policy changes, time for caseworkers, Salma al-Shehab released from prison, elections for vacant committee roles, annual meeting of academic -related professional staff.

With Jenny Rivas Perez, Rachel Walls and Alan Smith.

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Transcript

Intro

Rachel

Welcome to the LeedsUCU podcast for members of the University of Leeds branch of the University and College Union. I’m Rachel Walls, one of your podcast hosts. I’m also a UCU department rep for Lifelong Learning Centre, branch committee member and saxophone or clarinet player in our occasional picket line band Orchestrike!

Alan

And I’m Alan Smith, co-host for this podcast, and the branch’s administrator and organiser. We thought it would be useful for members of the branch to have an alternative channel for getting your local news because reading long emails or website posts is not everyone’s first choice.

Rachel

So we’re here to be a friendly voice from the UCU University of Leeds branch to keep you in better touch with what is going on, such as what the elected officers are working on and what opportunities there are for you to get involved in UCU discussions, socialising, activism and decision making.

[Brief music]

Rachel

Hi everyone! For today’s branch news, which we’re recording on the 12th of February 2025, we have Jenny Rivas Perez to give us an update on the branch news.

Jenny

Hi there.

Alan

Hi Jenny! So, members have been concerned about the Vice Chancellor’s blog post where they mentioned the size and shape of the university, and also will have their own concerns about international student recruitment and the impact that could have. Where are we with that issue?

Jenny

Yes. Well, we recently had a members meeting, a general meeting, just at the end of January, where many people wanted to discuss the university finances in the context of student recruitment, but also in the context of the wider things that are happening across HE and redundancies that are happening in very many different institutions up and down the country that have been announced. And there were calls at that meeting to have an extraordinary general meeting so that we could look at that issue in detail. So we’ve actually arranged to have one and that will be on the 25th of February. And Members should have had an e-mail that I sent out a few days ago, telling them all about it and inviting them to come to the meeting and also to put forward any motions that they would like to put on the university financial position, student recruitment. And yes, so please have a look for that that e-mail and put the date in your diary. And please do come along and participate because I’m sure it’s something that many, many people are concerned about. And I think it would be good to spend some time just thinking about that issue in this meeting.

Rachel

Yeah. So if you’re interested in submitting a motion, they can go to ucu@leeds.ac.uk. And if you need help writing one, if you’ve got an idea of something that you want to be voted on as branch policy, then just ask for help.

Jenny

Absolutely. I mean, if you if it’s something that you’ve not done before and you’re not quite sure about how to get it done, please just ask for some help. We’re more than happy to give you that.

Rachel

Great. So branch officers like yourself, Jenny regularly meet with other unions and management. What issues have been discussed since last time we met?

Jenny

Well. Today’s Wednesday. On Monday we had JCUU, which is our meeting only between UCU and management. The other unions aren’t involved in that. They have their own joint committee meetings. And at that meeting, we raised a number of different issues. One of the things that we raised there was the IT changes that have been cropping up over the – certainly over the last while – that have been coming up at short notice and causing great inconvenience to staff across the university, the latest one being Zoom. Previously there was a cap on emails that could be sent out in a day, to 250 I think it was, which most people, isn’t necessarily going to they’re going to notice anything about that, but for some people it has meant that they’ve had to change the way that they work in practise. And the thing that we were really trying to get across, is that people really do need much more consultation and notice about these changes, when these business processes are being changed. So, that was taken on board and management’s going to go away and discuss that with IT to see if we can get that that kind of thing improved in future. Other things that we’ve talked about have been the annual leave policy. Now, you might not necessarily have noticed, but the annual leave policy has changed. And those changes were brought in last October and we have been discussing it with HR for some time now and we did not agree with some of the changes that were in there. We’ve now been invited to suggest further changes following our discussion at JCUU. Previously, we’ve been discussing these at a non-negotiating meeting, at HR-TU, and we’ve felt that the new wording within the new policy has been ambiguous and could lead to misunderstandings between staff and their managers. And so we’re quite pleased that we’ve now got a chance to try and get this right. So we will be submitting suggestions, this week, in fact, and hopefully they’ll be taken on board now. We also raised the important issues to do with caseworkers. We’ve been doing a lot of work in the branch around casework and how we support caseworkers and also how we support members with our casework. One of the things that we did at the last general meeting was had a rule change implemented where we could appoint a casework officer going forward, who would be able to take a strategic overview of the casework we have. But the thing that we approach the university about in the JCUU is asking them if we can look at workloading time for caseworkers. Because obviously, everybody is busy, but the work that the caseworkers do is important and they need the time in order to do that in order to support members who are having problems. And we want time that they take to do that to be to have protected time to do that. And also we want we want to see them getting recognition for the citizenship work that they’re doing as well. So that’s been put to our JCUU. What we came back from that meeting is, is that we’ve heard the management are willing to listen to what we’ve got to say about that and they want to take it into another meeting with all three unions, to talk about those kinds of issues. And so we’re just in the process now of scoping out how those meetings are going to work.

Alan

So for a while now, the branch has been supporting the campaign for the release of Salma Al-Shehab, who’s a postgraduate student in dentistry at the University of Leeds, and has been some excellent news on that campaign.

Jenny

There has. We’ve just heard that Salma has been released, that she’s finally home with her family. Which is brilliant news. However, she’s still got the travel ban hanging over her so she can’t leave Saudi at the moment. And actually it was another thing that was raised at JCUU and I’ve asked the university if they would make a statement. They’re considering it. Obviously they are concerned that they don’t want to make things worse for Salma, however, it would be great if there was, if that travel ban was lifted because she could then continue with her studies, because her studies are only suspended at the moment. She is still a PhD student at the University of Leeds. So, hopefully things are going to continue to move in a positive direction with that.

Rachel

And what’s coming up in the Leeds UCU calendar? Have we any events?

Jenny

Well, have we events? Yes, we have the EGM which will be around the university finances and student numbers. And that will be on the 25th of February and that’s from 1:00 PM till 2:00 PM, slightly different. We’ve got it for we’ve got an hour there. Normally we have one hour and 15 minutes, but because it’s one topic, we’ve got an hour. And other things that are coming up next Monday, the three trade unions are sending representatives to meet with the VC, and I imagine we’ll be talking about the VCs strategy and what she intends doing, I understand that she’s been starting some consultation papers circulating and we expect to be updated on that, around the strategy, so, those that have heard things about green papers and white papers, apparently that’s what it’s been about, about consultation on the strategy going forward. A refresh of that.

Alan

We’ve also got an election ongoing, probably by the time this is released, for an equality officer and for a committee vacancy. And then we’ve got nominations open for the casework officer that closes on the 21st of February.

Jenny

Yes, I’m really pleased about that. I’m pleased about the response that we’ve had for all of those positions. It shows that we’re a vibrant and healthy branch and long may it last!

Rachel

And is there anything in the national UCU calendar, Jenny?

Jenny

There’s the academic related and professional staff sector meeting which is on the 6th of March and it’s online or it’s actually in London. And we are able to send two delegates to that and so this is a call out to anybody that actually would like to go. And just to say that you know, as a union member, you are entitled to have time off to go to union meetings and this is one and there is in this there will be, a portion of that will also be some training as well, so I think it will be really interesting. If you’re academic related staff and you would like to go, please just get in touch through the inbox and we can see about you going. If you do decide to go in person down to London, the costs will be refunded for that as well. You’ll have those paid for.

Rachel

Yeah. And I believe people who’ve been in the past in person have found it really worthwhile.

Jenny

Yeah, it’s been great. It really has. I’ve gone twice now and actually it’s good to talk to other people in similar roles in different universities to find out what’s going on and also to sort of get our heads together and actually think about, you know, what it means to be academic related staff in the HE sector.

Rachel

Brilliant. Well, thank you very much for coming on today and sharing the branch news with us.

Alan

Thanks Jenny!

[Brief music]

Outro

Rachel

That’s all for today’s Leeds UCU podcast. Thank you for listening. Please subscribe on whatever platform you’re listening to us on, so you’ll know as soon as we publish our next episode.

Alan

If you’re not yet a member of UCU, head to ucu.org.uk/join to find out more if you work at the University of Leeds in an academic or academic related, professional or managerial role, or as a postgraduate student doing paid teaching. Wherever you work, make sure you join the union for your workplace.

Rachel

This podcast is made on behalf of the committee of the University and College Union, University of Leeds Branch. If you have any questions or concerns, please e-mail our branch offices at ucu@leeds.ac.uk. See our website leedsucu.org.uk for alternative contact details and for a transcript of this episode.

This page was last updated on 14 February 2025