You will have received emails from UCU general secretary Jo Grady in relation to working to contract – please do follow the advice and instruction in them, bearing in mind that our strategy is to build pressure and escalate action. Circumstances are changing compared with previous periods of working to contract: the increased use of online asynchronous materials for teaching, the increased demands of the Office for Students in terms of recovery of learning, and the developing public health situation, and other things. This changes the ways in which we have leverage and therefore the threats we can make to drive this dispute to a successful end. For now, the priority is to refuse to overwork without specific instruction from your line manager- and that applies also, and perhaps particularly, to those of us who lead areas of work and line manage others.

In that regard, I draw attention again to the university’s closure days, to which you are contractually entitled – you should not agree to work on a closure day unless doing so is part of your contract. In relation to the public health situation, please note in particular that it is not reasonable to expect anyone to overwork as a result of that, given the amount of overwork we have routinely been required to do over the past couple of years. If you are asked to engage on short deadlines with the scenario planning process, please speak to your line manager about what work you should deprioritise in order to do that.

This post is from an email to members from branch secretary Chloe Wallace on 10 December 2021