30 November – A fantastic day of solidarity in Southampton

Southampton UCU started it’s day of action early, braving the cold and drizzle to set up our pickets at the Highfield Campus of the University of Southampton.

 

Soon we were joined by a group of supportive students (the banner reads ‘Workers and Students United’) outside the UCU office, where we refueled, warmed our frozen feet and prepared to march into town….

 

On the way we saw a striking message left on the Physics building…

 

And then we marched 100-strong into the city centre, where we prepared to join our colleagues in our sister unions in a march to the rally at Guildhall Square.

 

UCU had a strong presence in the march, featuring our own large contingent along with colleagues from Southampton City College, Eastleigh College and Southampton Solent.

 

The march through the city centre was abuzz with energy, as passers-by stopped to wave, shout their support and take pictures.

 

Finally we arrived at Guildhall Square, where the massive crowd was treated to speeches from representatives of unions from across Southampton and south-west Hampshire, including our very own Professor Catherine Pope.  The gathering was boisterous and enthusiastic, but always peaceful, and filled with optimism.  Hopefully a sign of things to come!

All told the day of action was a smashing success.  We were thrilled at the turnout for the march into town, and our pickets were strong and well-received: we were visited by Vice-Chancellor Don Nutbeam (who later sent us free coffee and tea!), Director of Human Resources Janice Donaldson, Registrar Tessa Harrison, and Provost and Deputy Vice-Chancellor Adam Wheeler.  Everyone engaged us in civil and spirited debate, and expressed their appreciation for our conduct during this industrial action, and we are grateful to them for stopping by and talking with us.

Southampton UCU would like to thank all members who came out to picket and march today, and we would especially like to thank the students who joined us on the march, showed their support all day, and distributed our flyers all around the campus beyond where our pickets could reach — you were all fantastic, and your support means a great deal to us.

A great day without a doubt, both for Southampton and for the country as a whole.  Let’s keep the momentum going!

—–

Eric Silverman

 

30 November – A statement from the branch President

Tomorrow is going to be quite a day.  A day of action featuring several million people.  A show of solidarity and strength by more than 20 trade unions, including our own.  A demonstration of our collective unwillingness to sit back and watch our benefits get taken away without negotiation.

But more than that, it’s a chance for us to show that we’re prepared to fight back.  To step up when our employers, and this government, decide that they can take away what we have worked so hard for.  To stand in the way of changes done for reasons of ideology rather than need.  To show to our colleagues, our students, and our community that we stand prepared to defend higher education in this country.

The USS pension scheme is the second-largest pension scheme in the country, and is cited as one of the most financially stable.  Even during the current crisis, the scheme is not in terrible danger of falling apart.  And yet, our employers have chosen to attack the scheme, to replace it with a markedly inferior two-tier structure that is unfair to new members, and to increase our contributions while making sure we get less out of it.

Some members have expressed to me the view that, while these changes are a disaster, we should be thankful for keeping a decent pension in the current climate — so why are we getting all fired up? But of course, these changes aren’t happening in isolation; they’re happening in concert with other sweeping changes to higher education that, when combined with the pensions issue, threaten our profession and our universities.  On top of our lesser benefits, our universities are getting their funding cut enormously, meaning we have to deliver more with less money.  Support has been cut for poor students who need financial support to attend college.  University students are now expected to pay triple the amount of fees as before and live the rest of their lives with a mountain of debt.  Along with all of this, lurking ominously in the background has been the promise of changes to university certification, which will allow private education providers — and the predatory lenders who come with them, as we’ve seen in the United States — to enter the sector and change the landscape of higher education forever.

For me, I feel like I know where this path ends.  I come from the United States.  I have $118,000 in student loan debt, which will follow me for the rest of my life and is not dischargable for any reason, including bankruptcy.  I’ve seen the undercover investigations of private education providers, and how they prey on the poor, the mentally ill, the infirm, offering them a chance at ‘education’ but in the end providing only empty promises and a lifetime of debt servitude.  Finally, I’ve seen what happens when unions are broken and when benefits are eroded: workers certainly don’t end up with a ‘good enough’ pension that is protected.  Eventually, as soon as the employers can engineer it, those benefits disappear entirely.  And they don’t come back.

Tomorrow will be a fantastic day, filled with inspiring rallies, glorious marches, and comraderie and solidarity.  But it will also be an opportunity for us to say that enough is enough.  That we don’t want a higher-education sector funded on the backs of students, a sector that preys on its workers and denies them the right to a dignified retirement after many years of hard work.  We deserve better than that.  Our students and co-workers deserve better than that.  Our society deserves better than that.

Please stand with us on 30 November.  Let your employers know you’ve had enough.  The challenges ahead require unity and strength; and the more of us there are, the stronger we are!

————-

Eric Silverman, PhD

Southampton UCU President

30 November – Professor Catherine Pope’s speech

Tomorrow at 12.30PM, following our picketing in the morning, we will be marching down to Guildhall Square for a rally with our sister unions in Southampton.  Professor Catherine Pope, our Equalities Representative, will be speaking on behalf of Southampton UCU.   What follows is an excerpt from her remarks.

———————————————————-

I’d like to say a few words about why UCU – the University and
College Union – is on strike today. UCU is the largest trade union
for staff in the post 16 education sector in the UK. We have 120,000
members in FE colleges, Universities, Agricultural Colleges, Prisons
and Adult education. We are educators, researchers, librarians,
technicians, IT staff and administrators.

Members of University of Southampton UCU branch are on strike
today to defend our pension – the Universities Superannuation
Scheme. Our UCU colleagues in FE colleges are also on strike to
defend their pension – Teachers Pension Scheme. And many of you I
know are here to defend public sector pensions.

By striking we know that we have an impact. Lectures, seminars,
research meetings, and parts of the day to day business of running
the University have been cancelled. This is bad for our students’
education and bad for our research. It is probably also a bit of an
inconvenience for colleagues who are not in the union.

I know that strikes are not a ‘good thing’. That is probably the only
thing Frances Maude and I will ever agree on.

That is why I and my fellow UCU members do not take strike action
lightly. When we withdraw our labour and take strike action we
do so as a last resort. We strike because our employers (and the
government) have refused to engage in meaningful negotiation with
us about our pension.

USS is a final salary pension scheme. We pay 6.35% of our salary into
the scheme. It is the second biggest occupational pension scheme in
the UK and according to its website is ‘one of the largest and most
stable pension schemes in the UK’.

USS is also, in fact, a private pension scheme. It is not a public
sector pension scheme. It is stable and not in serious financial
difficulty. But despite that it is being attacked in exactly the same
systematic ways by the government and our employers as public
sector pensions and that is why we are on strike today: to defend our
pension, and to stand in solidarity with our friends and colleagues in
local government, NHS and Social care, Border Agency, schools and
so on.

Don’t turn back time: women and the cuts – 19 November 2011

This is an edited version of a talk given by Catherine Pope, Southampton UCU Equalities Rep to the Southampton Feminist Society and Socialist Society event for the Fawcett Campaign to ask the government ‘Don’t turn back time on women’s equality’ on 19th November.

I am a Feminist. I am also a Mother (to three boys aged between 9 and 20). I am a Professor at the University of Southampton – so I am variously a scientist /academic / educator / researcher. If you want specifics, I am a sociologist who studies health care organisations and teaches health professionals and a Web Scientist studying the world wide web and co-directing a major doctoral training programme here at the University.
I am also a Trade Unionist. I have been member of UCU (University and College Union) since its creation and before that of the Association of University Teachers – its predecessor – since the late 1980s. I am currently the Equalities Officer for the local branch and region. I am an activist. I haven’t always been one but I find, contrary to the usual political trajectory, which has people tending to get more conservative with increasing age, I am becoming more radical as I get older. (I am 45 now so goodness only knows what I’ll be like when I’m 80 if I go on like this). I have become more radical and I have been radicalised. In my 20s my activism was focussed on the peace movement – marching with CND, and of course, as a student in London the 1980s, defending free education and fighting for the Greater London Council. Over recent months I have become closely involved with the anti-cuts movement – notably UK Uncut. In fact this week I have been supporting some inspirational people involved in the UK uncut non-violent action in Fortnum and Mason’s earlier this year. I am, and continue to be, passionate about defending education – particularly post-16 education: that is higher education in Universities like this one and further education for 16-19 year olds in our colleges, and other forgotten areas such as adult education, prison education.
Of all the labels I might use for myself, Feminist is the most important. Without it I would not be here. I do not think I could have achieved any of the other things without Feminism and importantly I could not have done it without Feminists. (and I must be clear that I do not only mean women, though many women have been important to me on this journey. I include here the numerous men who have supported and inspired me.)
The Fawcett Society has a vision “of a society where women and our rights and freedoms are equally valued and respected and where we have equal power and influence in shaping our own lives and our wider world.”

So I’d like to talk briefly about three ‘equal’ rights. Firstly, as we are in here in the University, I thought I would talk about the right to education. I have had a life changing educational experiences, notably at Lewisham College and North East London Polytechnic (now University of East London) where I first studied sociology and learned to think differently about the world. I learned to question why things are the way they are. I learned to see gender and roles as socially constructed rather than given, to see that inequality is often manmade. Had I been born 100 years earlier I would not have had the chance to access education. I was the first in my family to study for a degree. In 1878 the first London university admitted women to its degrees, and even for a long time after that women were still expected to be wives and mothers, not doctors or geographers or lawyers. Women’s access to education was not given to them. It was won in a long political struggle. A political struggle which some of our sisters across the world have not won. According to a United Nations report women in two out of three countries in the world have unequal access to primary and secondary education. For every 100 boys not attending school, there are still 117 girls in the same situation.
I had a free education. I did not have to pay the kinds of fees currently expected from students and I did not leave higher education with the kind of debt facing many of the young women who will study here in coming years. UK students starting university in 2012 are likely to graduate with debts of well over £50,000. Alan Bennett a few years ago said
I believe that all students should have the same access to education as I did. But it just doesn’t happen now because students have to pay for the university tuition their academic achievements have brought them. I don’t claim to know how higher education should be paid for; all I know is that it’s morally wrong to expect students to get into debt”
That sense – that it is morally wrong to charge for higher education – is why I along with many members of my trade union UCU joined the NUS last year for the national demonstration – Fund Our Future: Stop Education Cuts and why we in UCU continue to oppose fees.

Secondly I have grown up with the right to vote. This right was won for me by other women and men who protested and fought and sometimes lay down their lives to win suffrage. Again this right is not shared by all women across the world. And whatever I might feel about the political parties on offer I cherish my vote and use it. Each time I do it is a small repayment of the debt to those that fought for my right to participate in the political process.
The third and final right I want to talk about takes me back my sons. I mentioned earlier that I am a Mum to three boys. They are a delight and amazement to me. I think they might also be feminists like their Dad. As well as being a Mum I also have a career. My choice to have children and work is a choice which the women who came before me could not make. My dear mother in law – the first in her family to go to University, who studied at Oxford and trained as a teacher, left her teaching job when she had her first child. Her own mother had to leave work on marriage. The activists and feminists of the 1960s and 1970s fought for the right of married women and mothers to work, for affordable childcare, family friendly employment policies, and for equal pay and opportunities. It is not easy combining paid employment and parenting. But I have had that choice. That right. And I also have the choice – a personal choice – about controlling my fertility via contraception or abortion. Having children or not. Having a career. Combining the two or not as I choose. These are rights and choices which all women should have – no matter where they live.
I feel privileged that I have had the opportunities I have had. And there is certainly more equality for women in my lifetime than for those in the preceding generations. I have equal rights – to vote and to be educated. I know this gives me a lot more opportunities than many women in the developing world. If I had been asked here just to celebrate feminism and its achievements I would stop there. But I am afraid you will have to listen to me a bit longer. Because I think that the policies of the current government will turn back time on women’s equality. The cuts to public services being made now disproportionately affect women. The Fawcett Society has called the way the cuts affect women a ‘triple jeopardy’ because

1. Women will be hit hardest by job cuts in the public sector
2. Women will be hit hardest as the services and benefits they use more are cut
3. Women will be left ‘filling the gaps’ as state services are withdrawn

Let’s look at some of the ways that the cuts are hitting women.

  • Women’s unemployment is now at its highest in more than 20 years – there are 1m women unemployed.
  • 65% of public sector workers are women; almost a quarter of working women are in public sector jobs so they will be more heavily hit by the public sector pay freeze and the projected 600,000 job losses.
  • Of the nearly £8bn that the government wants to raise by 2014-15, nearly £6bn will be taken from women.
  • Cuts to legal aid of £600m per year for people facing issues relating to divorce, housing, employment, immigration, debt and welfare benefits will hit women hardest, according to the government’s own equality impact assessment.
  • Child benefit has been frozen for the next three years. As 94% of child benefit recipients are women, of the £975m saving from child benefit £913m will be taken from women.
  • The health in pregnancy grant was abolished this April. The Sure Start maternity grant will now only be paid for the first child.
  • Child tax credit changes will cut the income of many families.
  • Changes to state and public sector pensions will disproportionately affect women – who already make up 2/3 of the UK’s poorest pensioners.

Despite a raft of equality legislation women are often treated worse than their male counterparts. Nearly 40 years since the Equal Pay Act women working full time across the UK still earn on average 15.5% than men working full time. According to the 2011 National Management Salary Survey, men continue to be paid more on average than women doing the same jobs (£42,441 compared to £31,895). Despite laws to protect them 30,000 women lost their jobs in 2009 as a result of being pregnant.
This government is doing nothing to address inequality. Their policies are making it worse. The Fawcett Society suggested that we dress up for this tea party in 1950s clothes because today’s event says ‘Don’t turn back time’. Our grandmothers and mothers alive in the 1950s lived with austerity – after WWII. But they could look to the newly created NHS when they were sick and to widening access to free education. They were on a journey that would take them through the women’s liberation and equal opportunities movements that would improve their lot. We’ve come such a long way. Let’s not turn back now.

30 November – Picket lines

We would like to remind all members that picket lines are more than just a way to gather in solidarity with like-minded colleagues — they are a statement, a form of direct action, and a means to disseminate information to other interested parties.  Southampton UCU will provide all pickets with leaflets to distribute to passers-by which summarise the current dispute; if you are picketing, please make every effort to distribute these widely.

Prior to the day of action, you may wish to explain to colleagues our reasons for taking action, and why you feel it is important to take part.  Ask them politely for their support, and if they are eligible to be a member, to pick up an application form and join us!

Remember that you may lawfully attempt to convince passers-by or workers in related industries (such as lorry drivers entering University premises, delivery services, or similar) to support us, and to not cross the picket line!  However, you must do so without making an attempt to deliberately obstruct any individual or vehicle which is attempting to cross the picket line.  You also cannot lawfully obstruct any public highway (for example, roads or paths adjacent to the employer’s property).

 

There are regulations which specify activities that are and are not permissible when joining a picket line during an official dispute.  DirectGov has a webpage which summarises these:

 

http://www.direct.gov.uk/en/Employment/TradeUnions/DG_10027549

 

All members should bear these regulations in mind when picketing.

Day of Action — 30 November

Wednesday 30 November: UCU members at the University of Southampton will be taking strike action in defence of USS pensions!

We urge you to support this action by JOINING OUR OFFICIAL PICKET LINES and NOT COMING TO WORK.   UCU members will be picketing near the entrances to a number of workplaces covering a range of campuses.  We are seeking volunteers on a rota basis to cover short periods of time.  Please email ucu@soton.ac.uk if you are able to help with this.

At 11.15am we will regroup outside Union House (47 University Road) to march into town, via Avenue campus, to Hoglands Park.  There we will join colleagues from our sister unions (Unison, Unite, ATL, PCS, NAPO, NUT, Prospect, NASUWT) on a march through Southampton centre to Guildhall Square for a rally starting at 12.30pm.  There will be speakers from all of these unions addressing the rally, including Southampton UCU.

The University has been informed that UCU will be taking industrial action. You DO NOT have to inform, in advance, your manager or the university that you will be taking industrial action, but if asked afterwards you must answer truthfully.  For those of you who have students, as a courtesy you may wish to inform them about your participation in this action and explain your reasons for participating.

It is likely that you will lose a day’s salary for taking part.  If you are for some reason unable to strike but wish to support the action, please contact the UCU office for advice — and please DO NOT cover for striking colleagues.

As a UCU member we would ask you to support the action by:

1)   Not coming to work on 30 November

2)   Letting us know if you are able to join a picket line

3)   Joining us at 11.15am on the march into town

See you on the picket lines!

Workshop for Researchers — 7 December 2011

If you are a researcher at the University of Southampton you will shortly be receiving an invitation to attend a half-day workshop which is being held at 1pm on Wednesday 7 December room 45/2039 (Lecture room B) at the Highfield Campus.

The programme will cover issues such as employment rights, university policies and ways to get increased job security.  We will also be launching our newly-updated Researchers Survival Guide which contains practical advice about your career including REF, info for supervisors and networking.   If you are a researcher and are interested in attending this event look out for your invitation letter – if you do not receive this then please contact Amanda Bitouche at ucu@soton.ac.uk and she will register you for the event.

Further details and promotional flyers will be available here soon!

University of Southampton and Southampton UCU team up for ‘Bully or bullied?’ workshop

We’re please to announce that the University of Southampton and Southampton UCU have come together to promote a fantastic workshop to raise awareness of bullying and harrassment.  The workshop is called “Bully or bullied?” and will be hosted by the Nuffield Theatre.

This workshop was developed in coordination with the University’s Diversity Team and Director of HR Janice Donaldson, and has been delivered to Harassment Contacts and members of the University Executive Group (UEG), with high praise from all who have participated. University Provost Adam Wheeler said it was the best equality and diversity training he had ever attended.

The workshop will run 09:00-12:00 on Wednesday 9th November 2011. Tea and coffee will be provided on arrival (from 08:45) and at breaks through the morning. The venue will be confirmed shortly.

Places are limited, so please register your interest by sending an email to Alexander Melhuish, University Diversity Officer, as soon as possible: a.w.melhuish@soton.ac.uk.

We have heard wonderful things about this workshop and recommend that members interested in these issues make their best efforts to attend!

 

 

 

UCU Anti-Stress and Bullying week 7 – 13 November 2011

Monday 7 November sees the start of UCU’s Anti-Stress and Bullying week in higher and further education.

In order to raise awareness of this issue in your workplace we will be hosting information stands during the lunch hour throughout the week.

Information stands will be at:

Highfield campus (outside staff club): Monday 7 November 12 – 2pm

Avenue campus : Tuesday 8 November 12 – 2pm

Winchester School of Art: Wednesday 9 November 1 – 3pm

If you feel you are affected by these issues please come along and pick up some information and have a chat with local UCU representatives.

For further details please contact Amanda Bitouche at ucu@soton.ac.uk ext 22364