In today’s episode (recorded 10-11 April): posters celebrating our win on pensions, all about the committee elections at the AGM, the latest Home Office pressure on migrant workers. With Aisha Walker, Emily Haikney, Laura Loyola Hernandez, Rachel Walls and Alan Smith.

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Episode links

LeedsUCU post, including link to legal guidance, UK government changes affecting migrant members

Branch committee roles and standing for election

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Transcript

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.

Alan

Today we’re joined by Aisha Walker, president of the University of Leeds branch of UCU, to give us the latest news, and we will also be talking to Emily Haikney, our membership officer, and Laura Loyola Hernandez, member of the branch committee and UCU’s National Executive Committee member and chair of the UCU Migrant Members Standing Committee.

Rachel

It’s great to have Aisha here, but we are aware that there might not have been much happening due to the Easter break. So our chat may be brief. During the days you have been working, what’s been happening, Aisha?

Aisha

Well, I have to say that as far as things at the university have been concerned, it has been very slow. I know that we do have some really interesting papers coming up in our discussions with the university, one that I’m particularly excited to learn more about is to do with career pathways, particularly for, from our constituency, academic and professional staff, and one of the things I’ve been really concerned about is to do with the promotion pathways for academic and professional staff, so I’m really looking forward to hearing what the university proposes there. I’ve received a delivery of some really good posters about USS pension justice because you know that we have succeeded in getting our pensions back. And I’ve said this before, but I’m going to say it again. A big thanks to Mark Taylor-Batty and all of the other pensions negotiators, and to every single person who took strike action over the pensions. I checked my pension statement the other day and I have to say I was really pleased by what I saw. And we’ve got two sets of, well, we’ve got green posters and we’ve got pink posters with the raised USS pension fists that we had on our placards, and some of the posters say “pension justice, we demanded it, we fought for it, we got it!” and the others say “69 days of strike action, benefits restored in full, history delivered by you!” And I would really like to see us getting these all over the campus. Emily Haikney will have a supply of them so you can pick them up from Emily. And I’ll leave it to Emily herself to tell you where and when you can get them, but please come and pick some up. Put them in your window, put them on your door, put them on your local notice board. Let’s show everybody what we have achieved with our 69 days of strike action, which means that, we will now be able to afford to retire, which is pretty good news.

Rachel

Absolutely, yep. Look forward to seeing those posters around the university and to hear more about the career development paper as well. That’s great.

Rachel

So we usually ask you what’s coming up, and I think there’s some social events that could be mentioned, although again we must mention Emily Haikney, who’s organised those.

Aisha

Yeah. Emily is our social event supremo, but there’s a lunch at the I’m going to say Ziff Cafe, even though it’s not properly a cafe anymore. So it’s a bring your own lunch on the 17th of April at 1:00, and then there’s an evening social at the Library pub on the 3rd of May at 5:00. And as I’ve said before, Library pub has food as well as drinks. So do come along.

Rachel

And it’s also not long until our annual general meeting on the 16th of May 1245 till 2:00 PM. Can you tell us a bit more about what happens at that meeting and why people should come?

Aisha

The annual general meeting, it has two main functions. One is that it’s when the officers report back to the branch about what’s been happening. So you get our financial statement, you get an official report from the President about what’s happened in the year and various other reports. So it’s the point in the year when the officers are answerable to the branch and you can ask us questions. It’s also the time when the new committee and officers will be elected, and I think I’m going to let Emily tell you about the branch committee and the positions that will be available, but anybody is welcome to stand for a committee or an officer, a position if there’s something that you fancy. And officers and committee will be, as I said, elected at the AGM. The deadline for motions for the AGM is 12:00 on the 30th of April. The deadline for nominations is Wednesday the 15th of May, so it’s the day before the AGM which is on the 16th of May at 12:45 to 2 and it will be on Zoom. So important deadlines. You can also submit rule change motions to the AGM. So I think that’s all that I have to tell you. But you know we’ve just had some big celebrations and we’ve got more coming up. So we’re actually recording this on the day of Eid. So Muslim Members, I wish you Eid Mubarak. I hope you’re having a fantastic day or by the time you listen to this, I hope you had a fantastic day. It will soon be Vaisakhi, so happy Vaisakhi to all our Sikh members. And then after that it’ll be Pesach. So, Pesach Shalom.

Rachel

Fantastic. Thank you. OK, with that as well, we’ll say goodbye to you now and welcome Emily Haikney, our branch membership officer, to talk about how to get more involved as a member of Barbara. Hi, Emily.

Speaker

Hello.

Alan

Hi, Emily. So let’s start with the basics. What is the branch committee?

Emily

So the branch committee is the group of people nominated and elected by the branch members to do the work that branch members ask them to do. So, the main decision-making part of the branch is general meetings where people can put motions forward and decisions and choices are made there. This might be motions about asking the university management to do something, it might be participating in a national campaign or anything else that they want their branch to do. The committee would then actually do the actions that they have been mandated to do. So that might involve going to meetings with management, it might be writing letters, making a donation to a campaigning fund, it might be taking things to Congress or other decision making structures in the national union as well. It would be the committee members who would carry out the actions that the members want them to do.

Rachel

Say what ordinary members of the committee do.

Emily

So we’ve got up to 14 ordinary committee members. So that means that’s the members who don’t have a specific branch officer role. So those committee members take part in their regular committee meetings. They might do some of that work that I’ve just spoken about and some ordinary members would also take on a lead role within the committee, so they might have a specific experience that makes them really well placed to be the committee’s lead for a certain aspect of equality, for example. So we can have a disabled members equality lead, we could have a women members, migrant members, black members, or LGBTQ plus members equality leads as well. We currently have a climate change and ecological emergency – [stumbles over word]. easy for me to say! – We’ve got a lead who’s thinking about and working on issues around that climate change. We’ve got a pensions lead and a communications lead as well. So that’s the people who have specific knowledge or experience that they can really bring to the committee to do work in that area.

Rachel

Thank you. And then we also have branch officers. So it would be great to know a little bit about each of those officer roles. I guess the most familiar one to most people will be president.

Emily

Yeah. So the President is essentially the chair of the of the branch and of the committee. So you’re going to see the President quite a lot chairing the general meetings throughout the year. They’re also chairing the committee meetings as well. They would make sure that any motions that come to the general meetings are debated and voted on, they’re sort of facilitating that discussion. But they also do a lot of work behind the scenes, so they are part of the branch’s negotiating team, they are going to be one of the people who’s in regular meetings with the university management, negotiating with them on the issues that we need to negotiate about. They’re going to be involved in HR consultations and things like that. So they’re really a key representative of the branch and therefore of the members and they sort of just make sure that the committee is working as it should.

Rachel

Brilliant. And we also have a vice president and an immediate past president.

Emily

Yeah. So the immediate past president is essentially what it sounds like. So the person who was most recently the president stays on the committee to be the immediate past president, and then the Vice President is just supporting the President. They also usually form part of that negotiating team as well, so they will be going to a lot of those regular meetings that we have with HR or with university management, they would be chairing meetings if the President is not available and generally sort of supporting the running of the branch.

Alan

So one of the roles which is essential for a branch to have is a treasurer. So what does that involve?

Emily

So yeah, the Treasurer is super important, making sure that the branch can function in terms of using money to pay for stuff. So we have union accounts which we get money into from people’s monthly subscriptions to UCU. And then we need to use that money to keep the branch running. There’s admin costs, there’s sort of promotional materials that we might have and other costs such as buying gazebos for those times that we might need to go and stand on a picket line. So all of those things are things that someone needs to look after the money for. And that’s obviously the Treasurer. And every year they’re going to, as Aisha said earlier, they’re going to present a report on the branch finances to the AGM.

Alan

And what about the role of the honorary secretary?

Emily

So the secretary is the person who sort of does some of the admin work. Not all of the admin work, of course, Alan, but some of the admin work of the branch, so they have specific duties like calling the general meetings, keeping track of the minutes of those meetings, notifying members of important information, but also liaising with the region and the national UCU officers as well. So they are a really, really important link between our branch and our regional and national officials as well.

Rachel

And it will be familiar to you, this next role, I think, the membership officer.

Emily

Yeah, absolutely. So that’s what I have been doing this year. It is quite a varied role, actually, I am discovering. So I’ve been doing a lot of different things to try and build the membership of the union and also to engage the members that we already have, so organising the social events that we’ve already talked about, making sure that promotional materials are put around campus, organising meetings in different faculties and departments, either just to keep up with what people are doing or to sort of organise around certain issues. I’m also trying to do a lot of work with department reps to really support them in their roles, doing things like getting mentoring for some of the newer reps, encouraging reps to share their experience and their knowledge with each other as well. So really just trying to build community and build connections between branch members.

Rachel

Thank you. We also have an equality officer.

Emily

Yeah. So the equality officer is someone who’s looking at the things that come to the branch. So when the university wants to change a policy or introduce a new policy, they would want to have a look at that and think about what are the impacts on different staff members in terms of equality issues. They’re also looking at, just in general, are there issues of employment? So equal pay, casualised work, things like that, that impact on certain people more than others and just making sure that we are always thinking about that talking about that and raising that with management and with HR when we need to.

Alan

And can you tell us a bit about the role of the campaigns officer?

Emily

The campaigns officer would be specifically thinking about any campaigns that we’ve got on at the moment. So in recent years we’ve had the pension justice campaign, we’ve had their four fights campaign, they’ve been the national campaigns that we have participated in. If we were to have any local campaigns and things that we really wanted to mobilise and rally members around, then that would be the campaigns officer’s sort of role to do that as well. And really, just to try to organise anyone who wants to sort of act on those issues, maybe that could be through going to rallies, it could be through distributing leaflets, it could be through organising an e-mail campaign or a petition. Or raising money for some important issue, anything like that, and probably a lot more. The campaigns officer would work on that sort of thing. And one of the quite important things that they would do as well is to stay in contact with other branches locally and nationally to sort of build solidarity among everyone as well.

Alan

What about the branch health and safety officer role?

Emily

Yeah. So health and safety is obviously quite an important part of people’s well-being at work. And it’s something that the union is always thinking about and working on, and the health and safety officer is the person who’s got that key responsibility for that. So there is a university health and safety committee, there are also sort of ‘local’ ones, I want to say, so there’s a professional services health and safety committee, for example, and the health and safety officer would attend that. They would look at any policies, any things that the university is doing or wants to do or wants to stop doing. And again, they would look at what is the impact in terms of health and safety, people’s well-being, anything like that and just make sure again that the branch is aware. Of potential problems and that they are raising that with the branch and pushing back where we need to push back on things that the university might be doing.

Rachel

Thank you. And I think the last but by no means least branch officer position that we have is anti-casualisation officer. Could tell us a bit about that?

Emily

Yeah, so this has been a really important and really active officer role, especially over the last few years, and casualisation and fixed term contracts and insecure work has been a really big issue at all universities, including here at Leeds. It was part of the four fights campaign that we’ve been participating in over the last few years. So at Leeds the anti-casualisation officer is one of the people who’s been involved in the negotiations around fixed term contracts, the ‘fairer futures for all’ ‘initiative?’, ‘strategy?’, that the university has been rolling out and getting people onto. Open-ended, but sometimes fixed funded contracts. That’s something that the anti-casualisation officer would be involved in looking at and negotiating on and talking to members about and sort of finding out what’s going on and what the effect of some of those policies is on members of staff and then again just taking that back to the university and trying to secure, well, secure working conditions for those members.

Rachel

Great. Well, the committee is going to work best representing the branch if the members elected reflect the diversity of the academic and academic related staff at the university, including postgraduate students who teach. So this is a call out to all of you really to consider applying or getting yourself nominated to be on the committee. And if you’ve got any questions, please do get in touch with us and we’ll be happy to answer them. So yeah, the deadline for standing for election?.

Emily

Yeah, so the deadline for nominations to committee is Wednesday the 15th of May. You need 2 nominations to be a nominee to committee. And ideally you would say what you want to stand for as well! So your nominations would say I want to nominate this person as president or anti-cas officer or whatever. And I would really encourage everyone to think about being a member of the committee, whether it’s as a specific officer or as an ordinary member. It is a way to really get involved in activities and things that do make a difference at the university, for all of us. So it can feel really, really rewarding. And there’s lots of different ways to make change at Leeds, which you can get involved in. So please do think about it. So as Aisha said earlier, I do have the pension justice posters, so please do let me know. If you’d like to pick some up, I am on campus at least twice a week every week, so if you drop me an e-mail at e.wheeler@leeds.ac.uk, I can let you know when is a good time for you to come and collect a poster or two or five and display them in your area.

Alan

Thanks, Emily. I hope you’ll come back on the podcast soon. OK. Next we’re joined by Laura Loyola Hernandez, member of the branch committee and the UC’s National Executive Committee and chair of the UCU Migrant Members Standing Committee. Hello, Laura.

Laura

Hi, Alan. Thank you for having me.

Alan

So first of all, could you tell us a little bit about the migrant members standing committee?

Laura

Yes, so the migrant member standing committee was formed in 2019. And it’s part of one of the equality standing committees at a national level. And what we do is we are elected by members – we are members as well, this is all voluntary, we don’t get paid for this, we don’t get time off. And basically one of the only conditions is that you identify as a migrant to be on the committee. And in my individual position, I was elected by members to be on the National Executive Committee, so or in short ‘nec’. And what ‘nec’ does is that it carries out policy that has been voted on in congress, which is usually held towards the end of May so. I sit on different national boards, but what is relevant for this podcast is what we do in the migrant member standing committee, which is we meet 3-4 times throughout the year and we discuss and take action on pressing issues that impact above all migrant members such as immigration changes to employment law or immigration changes in general.

Alan

So, and that’s particularly why we wanted you to come and talk to us today because you recently organised a briefing for UCU members about changes that the government is making around migration law.

Laura

Yes. So new changes have come in to effect from the 4th of April. Some of them have been gradually, been continued after the 4th of April, but most of the changes that impact our members are from the 4th of April, so we held a briefing with Bindmans – I think that’s how you pronounce it – who do immigration employment advice for the union, and we held a briefing. It was towards the end of March. It was a one hour meeting where members could submit some questions in advance, but also after they kind of gave us the briefing of the changes, depending on the different visas. Members in the call were able to also ask questions as well.

Alan

So what we’re not going to try and do is summarise everything that went on in that briefing because we are not lawyers and we are not going to give legal advice. There is some advice for members which Bindmans have produced for UCU and we will put a link on our website, and there’ll also be a link in the show notes for this podcast. But we will give you a bit of a sort of overview of some of the changes that are happening. So there are two main types of visas that are affected. There’s the sponsored visas and there’s the family visas. Do you want to just to give us a bit of a summary?

Laura

Yeah. So the sponsored skilled worker or what used to be called the Tier 2 worker visa which no longer exists, it’s now sponsored skilled worker visa has some significant changes. One of the biggest ones is that the general salary threshold. Has increased from 26,200 per annum to 38,700 a year. There’s also been some changes to the SOC code. So what the SOC code is it’s a code that you need to apply your visa with. And there’s been some changes with that as well. As Alan said, it’s all very technical and we’re not immigration lawyers, but the more kind of detailed emphasis is on the briefing, which is available at ucu.org.uk and we will put a link in the LeedsUCU web page for that. I think one thing to note that was mentioned in the briefing is that there will be a so-called transition period. So this means that anyone that is currently on a visa does not have to meet the increased salary threshold, even if you are changing or renewing your current visa. As I said, more details on that is there. There’s stuff on for example indefinite leave to remain because there are different routes to gaining permanent residency here in the UK, so you could do it via the five year route, which is if you’ve been continuously working in the UK for five years, or the 10 year indefinite leave to remain, but there’s been some slight changes to the latter, so I would definitely please look at the detailed briefing. There’s changes also to the spousal visa scheme, so this applies also to British citizens that are sponsoring family visas or their partner visa as well. There’s been some changes to that, particularly on the salary threshold as well. Yeah. I think just to kind of really emphasise one of the other biggest changes that we’ve become aware of is that the Home Office is now going to migrate to an E visa status. So this means that if you are on a visa or you have indefinite leave to remain, you usually have a hard copy of your biometrics and your visa status, but you have until the 31st of December of 2024 to transition from a hard copy to register online, and you will need to do that before that date because if you don’t and let’s say you leave the country, it will be very difficult for you to come back in. They have started, the Home Office, to roll out the registration from April. You cannot register your E-visa status until you get that notification from the Home Office, so it’s really important that members check their junk mail, their trash mail but also contact HR from their department because if the HR department help them through the visa process, it might be that the Home Office contacts your employer instead of you. So it would be really important that you kind of keep on top of that. The union will be sending out periodic messages via the Friday e-mail to remember members to change. And we’ve got from April basically until December to do that. So that’s I think the other huge change that people need to be aware of.

Alan

So the minimum income threshold is going up to 38,700 for the sponsored worker visa and also for the family routes it’ll be at that level by early 2025. There are transitional arrangements for people have already got those visas, but this is clearly going to have an impact on not only people who are here in those jobs now, but also on the universities who are trying to deliver stuff and people who wanting to come in and do work, you know who some people would be able to come but not bring their family here. So that threshold is above the Grade 6 threshold and above the start of the grade 7 threshold. So that’s going to impact a lot, isn’t it?

Laura

Yeah, for sure. I mean, one of the things that the union is doing and has been doing for a while now behind the scenes is really trying to push for other unions, but also MP’s, employers, we really need to push back against these increases because it will have a massive impact in not only higher education, but further education, you know, the education sector as a whole, it will have a huge impact in terms of who is able to come into this country and work, but also be able to bring their family. And I say this in terms of the increase in immigration fees means that you are out of pocket before even entering the country. If you are currently already in the country you are still out of pocket because most employers either don’t pay for immigration fees, so this includes the visa fee, but especially the immigration health surcharge, commonly known as the NHS surcharge, which has also significantly increased again this year, which means that you will have to have, I don’t know, for a family of four at least 20K to pay out of pocket, full, in advance. So if we’re talking as a union around pay gaps, this is a massive, massive pay cut in the sense that, you know, we’re basically paying employers for the right to work here. And this obviously leads to wider conversations around casualisation, about fair pay, but also I think it’s really important that we also within that discourse and political pushback that we have to do, we have to push back on the criminalisation of international students. They have become a target, well, forever, but particularly over the last few months in terms of the way in which not only the government, but a lot of employers and including some colleagues in the way in which they refer to international students, as you know, well, I’m, I’m not going to say it because it’s really offensive, I find it. But, you know, international students are more than international fees. They are more than people that sustain our education sector. I mean, I was an international student. My partner was. I know a lot of friends. You know, we’re human beings and we have families here and back home and having to continuously hear kind of this, this xenophobic discourse around migrants in general, not only international students or staff, but people seeking asylum. You know, people migrate for a whole sets of reasons. So we really do have a duty of care towards our communities and really pushing back, you know, in our workplaces. And in society at large.

Alan

Yeah. So I suppose for members affected by this, go the website and get that advice – get that legal advice. You can also through the ucu.org.uk you can find how to contact our specialist immigration lawyers if you need individual advice on that. But I suppose that’s just how we respond to the – or how individuals can respond to the terrible situation created by xenophobic government – and, I suppose the way to deal with that collectively is a political solution which we can’t get into here because UCU does not get involved in party politics. But, you know, the solution has to be that society takes a different, a better view, on internationalisation, particularly universities, universities have always been international spaces and need to continue to be to function.

Laura

Absolutely. And, you know, migration is life. It’s not a crime. Everyone should have the right to move between borders and not be impacted by financial and border violence. So we all have a job to play in making our workplaces and where we live safe for everyone. And not just for some.

Alan

Thanks to Aisha Walker, Emily Haikney and Laura Loyola Hernandez for bringing us the branch news.

Rachel

That’s all for today’s LeedsUCU 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 22 May 2024