Monthly Archives: March 2019

Branch action plan update

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Thank you to all of you who came to our well attended General Meeting last month, and to those who also came to the Workload Reps workshop. We are delighted to have established our new group of H&S workload reps who will take forward our actions to address workplace stress and work overload. Please save the date for our AGM which will be held on June 5th, starting at 12:30 (room tbc) where we can update you on this campaign.

The nominations for General Secretary of UCU will close on 8th April and we are hoping to arrange hustings to give members here a chance to meet and hear from all the candidates. Please look out for details of this.

Below is the update on local branch activities and our plans for the coming months presented at the GM. This action plan is very much an evolving document, supported by your branch exec, departmental reps and caseworkers, and individual members who bring concerns to us. If you can help the work of your union or want to find out more about local and national campaigns please do get in touch (ucu@soton.ac.uk).

Appraisal guidance – a welcome pause

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On behalf of members we have raised several concerns about new appraisal guidance and performance expectations documents that have been appearing in different Faculties and Services. Members and reps in Arts and Humanities recently had a very constructive meeting with their Deanery team and reached agreement that the guidance document issued recently is to be considered ‘paused’ at present. We are looking forward to further discussions with senior managers across the University about improving how we appraise, support and develop staff.

As a reminder, UCU recently got senior managers to confirm that Weekend open day/visit work by level 4 and above staff is voluntary and should not be set as a performance expectation. We continue to push back on other unreasonable expectations creeping into appraisal processes. We also note your continued concerns about excessive workloads for academic and academic-related professional staff and we are delighted to announce that we have recently trained our first group of Health and Safety Workload reps. These new reps will be focussing on using the support offered by H&S legislation and the collective power of our union to address workplace stress and work overload. This work is part of the national campaign on workloads, and more details of our involvement in this can be found here.

No place for racism at our University

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We are sad to have to use this blog to remind members about the distribution of potentially offensive/intimidating posters on our campuses. Our Estates and Security teams are aware of this and are doing their best to remove these.

Staff and students should not approach anyone seen distributing these posters, but should report this to Security on ext 22811 and email Diverse@soton.ac.uk with details. Please don’t attempt to remove the posters yourself.

These posters appear to be from Generation Identity, a far right and white nationalist movement. This movement and these posters have no place on our campuses.

The TUC developed the Migration Messaging project with Hope not Hate and Migrant Voice as a way to promote progressive messages which shift the blame for workplace and social problems away from migrant communities. Some of the case studies supporting the TUC work were taken from the campaign in Southampton against the screening of the Channel 4 documentary ‘Immigration Street’ in 2014, and some of our members were involved in this work. The appearance of vile posters on our campuses is a reminder that our community cannot and must not stop fighting racism. So please do let Security know if you see any of these posters around campus.

We also remind members that there is a stand up to racism march in London this Saturday 16th March linked to the UN’s International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination. 

Following the news on 15 March we have added the following link to the NEC statement on the New Zealand terror attack.

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International women’s day: when do women start working for free?

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The theme of this year’s International Women’s day was ‘balance for better’. Here at the University of Southampton we still have a lot of balancing to do. The majority of our highest paid staff are men (62% of all staff in the upper quartile of pay).

UCU is holding the University to account to ensure that they take sufficient steps to eliminate the gender pay gap and to create a more diverse leadership team. (We note that research has suggested that quotas for diversity might be a way to ‘weed out incompetent men’ and this could be a strategy for a University where 75% of staff do not have confidence in a largely male senior management team).

For International Women’s Day your UCU reps hosted a stall on Highfield campus to highlight some of the work the branch is currently doing to fight gender inequality at the University. We asked people to take part in a quiz to ‘guess the date from which female staff will work for free?”

After lots of hard thinking, and some sneaky use of calculators, you cast your votes. The answer: this year women at University of Southampton will start working free from 18th October 2019.

The people we spoke with were shocked that our gender pay gap is so high (20.2%, which is above the average for the Higher Education sector), and wanted the University to have a stronger plan to tackle this pay gap, especially as other Universities appear to have made more progress in eliminating their gender pay gaps (e.g. University of Essex).

As we’ve previously noted, there seems to be a ‘glass ceiling’ or promotion bar for women at our University. Senior managers and HR have tried to overcome this by encouraging women to take up training courses to help improve their success rates at promotion. Underpinning such strategies is the idea that women need to change: they need to become bolder, more confident, more self-promotional, more career driven. Yet in order to ensure gender equality in our workplace we don’t need women to change, we need the institution to change. Gender inequality stems from workplace cultures that value over-work, competition and long working hours. Ideas of ‘excellence’, ‘esteem’, and ‘meritocracy’ are never neutral—they uphold values that are often associated with masculine ideals. UCU have been working hard to try and improve the appraisal process at the University, in order to create appraisals that give value to the demanding but de-valued roles that many women play in this institution—such as pastoral roles, mentoring, and other forms of emotional labour. Above all we need to change the culture here for everyone.

For International Women’s Day our University celebrated women who are ‘everyday superheroes’ ‘who hide in plain sight’. But women should not have to be superheroes to receive recognition or equal pay. Furthermore, UCU recognises that many of our everyday superheroes are on the most precarious contracts. Women make up 67.5% of those in the lowest quartile for pay and their over-representation on casualised, fixed-term contracts exacerbates gender inequalities.

 

Gender inequality cannot be addressed in isolation, it is entwined with other forms of discrimination about disability, race, trans, age, and class. Inequality can only be tackled by working together, all the more reason to join UCU in fighting for equality & better rights in the workplace!

Another one bites the dust (but the top team is still the problem)

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Staff and students here at University of Southampton say goodbye to another VC this week. This one didn’t last as long as the last, but managed to oversee a period of great turbulence, poor morale, and cuts to frontline staff.

We are not alone – University of Leicester announced this week that their VC Paul Boyle is departing. Reading their branch blog we feel, again, that sense of déjà vu. As at Leicester, one of the first acts by Sir Christopher was to rename his role ‘President and VC’. This led, naturally, to the creation of Vice-President roles, and not long after, to the expansion of their number and the senior salary pay bill.

While we were promised no more destructive organisational change it took a mere 18 months for a series of projects to unfold – each with more *hilarious* monikers: we had the Wellington Project – the voluntary severance scheme that accompanied – yes, you’ve guessed it – the reorganisation of the University (from 8 Faculties to 5). We wondered if the senior management were having a laugh (Wellington being a type of boot, and so many staff being ‘given the boot’). We also had a Hartley project that entailed, what we considered to be quite heart-less, voluntary redundancies. Like so many other Universities, we endured these losses from a live building site. The slogan “Buildings not Brains” seems to accurately summarise the situation.

The delayed staff survey results, discussed in a previous blog, confirmed what most already knew, that this University has some serious problems. The survey showed that staff lack confidence and trust in the highest levels of leadership here. Staff feel that senior managers are not honest or open, and do not respond to feedback. Southampton UCU and our Senate have responded robustly, calling for serious and meaningful action by senior managers to address this disastrous staff survey.

With Sir Christopher’s departure there is a danger that the organisational narrative will become “It was the last guy’s fault”. We feel a need to push back on this, now, before it takes hold. Yes, Sir Christopher was part of the problem; he oversaw and agreed to many of the negative changes and processes enacted in recent years. But he was not alone. The University strategy, the direction of travel and the tactics employed, are owned by the senior management team. This group, all earning excessive salaries, seem out of touch with frontline staff and the real work of higher education. They have consistently failed to listen to staff and students. Instead of working collectively and supportively with us to defend higher education they have been seduced by metrics, league tables, bonds, and marketization.

With the VC’s departure we have a chance to reclaim the university. We ask the senior managers, especially the Vice-Presidents and Deans, who will be ‘in charge’ in this interim period to remember what higher education really is.  This is their moment to engage properly with frontline staff and students to address the real problems we face.