University fails to move on exams release dates

Posted on May 26, 2022 by amanda

UCU presented the following paper at the UCU Joint Negotiating Committee meeting with senior management on 17 February 2022 complaining about the ridiculously short turnaround time for this year’s marks:

Taking too long?

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At the subsequent UCU JNC on 19 May, we were informed by Philip Wright, Senior Vice-President (Academic), that the dates would not be moved because they would impact on Super Graduation.

We would like to remind members that we are currently taking part in Action Short of a Strike. At Southampton, MyHR calculates a working week at 35 hours and part time staff are pro rata also based on this. While most contracts do not stipulate a maximum number of hours, the Working Time Directive says you should never work more than 48 hours (unless you have chosen to opt out). If you cannot get your marking done in 35 hours, you are overloaded. If you need more time to complete your marking to the high standards our students expect, then you should tell your line manager and ask them to release you from other duties. The refusal of management to listen to requests from staff to address the marking deadlines is indicative of their lack of interest in staff welfare and their assumption that they can exploit our goodwill.

We are saying that our goodwill has run out.

Work your hours, then go home. Make ASOS count.

Senior Vice-President (Academic)

Why academic related professional staff should vote YES in the HE ballots

Posted on April 1, 2022 by amanda

The University of Southampton comprises over 6,000 staff. Over 2,000 are academic-related professional staff (ARPS). We work across 17 distinct professional services: responsible for student and education services, libraries and the arts, widening participation and social mobility, global recruitment and admissions, residences, iSolutions, and the list goes on. ARPS are fundamental to the running of the university. Whilst our collective voice in UCU may be smaller in relation to our academic colleagues, we are affected by many of the same issues, we are of equal importance when it comes to challenging issues of our pensions, pay, workloads, casualisation and equality, and it is imperative that ARPS make it clear that we will not stand for the erosion of our pay and conditions.

Many ARPS will be affected by the ongoing USS pensions dispute, and indeed, many of us have taken strike action on this issue previously at Southampton in 2018, 2019 and 2020. On 31^st March 2022, UCU issued a call for VCs across the UK to demand UUK revoke the cuts to the pensions after the health of USS finances were revealed. The changes due from 1^st April see staff who pay into USS lose up to 35% of their pensions when they get to retirement. If you haven’t already, you can use the UCU modeller to see how you could be affected by these cuts.

Along with our pensions, pay has been eroded consistently since 2009, with a recent report by UCU showing that pay is down by 25.5% in real terms. ARPS are already in a position where there is no consistency with academic colleagues in regards to a framework for pay and promotion. Relatedly, the national picture on pay inequality is bleak. The pay gap between Black and white staff is 17%. The disability pay gap is 9%. The mean gender pay gap is 15.1%. An earlier blog in this series pointed to the pervasive gender pay gap at the University of Southampton. The erosion of pay is closely linked to increased casualisation. There are approximately 15k ARPS employed on temporary contracts. The issue of casualisation HE is not exclusive to our academic colleagues. Across the University of Southampton, professional services have undergone or are undergoing restructures, and there are departments still reeling from loss of staff after the latest rounds of voluntary severance in 2020. This has seen temporary posts and uncertain secondments proliferate, putting strain on teams, and adding to workloads where staff turnover is high and gaps in teams aren’t being properly resourced. For an institution that has just unveiled a new strategy that states a commitment to put its people at the ‘heart’, presiding over sustained cuts to our material conditions at a time when the cost of living is the highest it has been in decades is contemptuous.

Voting to take strike action is hard. It can be particularly difficult when you are one of only a small handful of colleagues in a team – or sometimes the only one – who are members of UCU. However, visibility of ARPS on the picket line is key to growing our numbers at the branch and making that collective voice stronger. Without ARPS, universities would cease to run. Academics would suffer, students would suffer, and the wider community would suffer. We need to stand unified with our academic colleagues, recognising that the issues outlined in the ballot affect us all.

Higher Education ballots – Four Fights – say no to spiralling workloads!

Posted on October 28, 2021 by amanda

Spiralling workloads have been an endemic problem in higher education for several years, made only worse by the pandemic. The average working week in higher education is now above 50 hours, with 29% of academics averaging more than 55 hours. In December 2020, 78% of UCU respondents reported an increased workload due to the pandemic.

At the University of Southampton the situation is particularly alarming. While some other universities were hiring more staff (although often on insecure contracts), the rule last year at UoS was to not replace staff who had left through the voluntary severance scheme. Members reported dealing with exceptionally high workloads, having to pick up the work left by those who left often in the middle of the year, without notice. Staff also bore the brunt of the overnight pivot to online working and the increased pressures and demands of virtual learning. 

The workload survey conducted by your branch in June 2021 shows that only 3.3% found their workload fine, 24% manageable while 72.3% found it very high or unmanageable with many respondents noting that they had to work evenings and weekends, and some reporting up to 70-80 working hours a week. The feeling of being overwhelmed and anxious about workload was widely shared.

This unsustainable workload has consequences on the health and wellbeing of staff: many reported anxiety, depression, or panic attacks from working overtime. Some had to be signed off for several weeks for depression and anxiety. In our survey, 75% of respondents said overwork had impacted on their mental health, while around half developed neck and back pain and sight problems and a third repetitive strain injuries and weight gain.

Loss of sleep, migraines, overall fatigue were frequently cited as symptoms of this overwork. One respondent said they cried every day for at least a week.

Workloads affect our private lives and the quality of the work we deliver. Respondents noted that the work pressure made it difficult to ‘switch off’ and was detrimental to relations with friends, partner or children (68%). 84% of our respondents said they could not have weekends or evening completely off while 61% said they were not able to take all their annual leave. One colleague noted that they refrained from taking sick leave because they knew there was no process to cover their work and that the burden would fall on already overworked colleagues. The situation is even worse for staff on insecure contracts who don’t get paid annual leave or sick time.

Overwork also makes us less efficient and creative in our work. Over four fifths of our respondents said that overwork did not give them ‘thinking time’ to reflect on their practice, be creative, read or get proper training. Many note that they can’t keep up with the changes of procedures within the institution. For colleagues on balanced contracts, research is often the first thing that is sacrificed when workloads are too high, while for others it is professional development and long-term career planning that get dropped. They note that things are often rushed, that they feel disorganised and that it lowers their mood. Basically, staff feel that they are mostly fire-fighting and have no time to ‘reflect, discuss and share their experiences’. ‘Collegiality’, understood as mentoring colleagues or taking on additional activities to be a ‘good citizen’, is also not factored in workload models. It is still important for many colleagues as shown in our survey, but done as a voluntary activity on top of their other tasks.

Your branch will take the survey results to senior management at the next Joint Negotiation Committee in November. We want them to confront the reality of high workloads at Southampton and to commit to an open discussion of the different ideas brought up by survey respondents to tackle the issue: hire more people, in particular professional services staff who play a vital role in our academic community; have a more realistic assessment of our workloads and in particular of our administrative duties; create a staff-led forum to decrease the bureaucracy; a more transparent and fair distribution of teaching load which reflects the realities of staff-student ratio; have proper working contracts for PGRs; create the conditions for staff to take leave by provisioning for parental/sick leave replacements and having enough slack in the system to allow for annual leave.

What are we fighting for?

We are at a breaking point and we can’t go on like this any longer. Abstaining or voting no in the Four Fights Dispute is accepting the situation. So vote yes for strike action and action short of a strike in the Four Fights dispute. By using your vote, you also give your branch the power to fight for better conditions here at Southampton.

We want:

A plan agreed with senior managers for a reduction of workloads across the board
35 hours to be the standard weekly employment contract of all HEIs
Clear and transparent workload models
End to austerity in terms of hiring policy

Higher Education ballots – Four Fights – staff deserve a pay RISE not another pay CUT

Posted on October 26, 2021 by amanda

Last year our employers used the opportunity of the pandemic to impose a 0% pay award, despite a 4% increase in student numbers. This year, the final offer made is for a 1.5% pay increase. A 1.5% pay increase over two years is a steep real term pay cut.

This year, we know that inflation has been rising rapidly. The Office for National Statistics reported CPIH in June at 2.4%, CPI at 2.5% and RPI at 3.9%. Whatever tool is used, this year’s offer is in real terms a pay cut. New members starting careers in 2021 will earn around 20% less than they would have done if our pay had been maintained in line with inflation over the last decade.

Not only will take-home pay be spread much thinner, but it will be minimally increased when considering the increase of National Insurance next year by 1.25 percentage points (to 12% of pay).

As a sector, HE total income has risen by 15% over the last years after adjusting for inflation. At our university, tuition fee income from international students has increased by 36.6% over the last five years. Last year the University of Southampton had a surplus of 6.6% of income.

Over the same period, staff salaries have fallen in real terms. In 2018/19, the University of Southampton even “outperformed” its target of capping staff costs.

In spite of the impression given by our employer, who has been preaching austerity for several years while recruiting more senior managers on high salaries, the money is there to award a real term pay increase.

What we are fighting for on pay:

A pay uplift of £2,500 on all pay points
A minimum of £10 per hour wage for all contract types
For all universities to become Living Wage Foundation accredited employers, ensuring outsourced workers receive, at least, the live wage foundation rate of pay.

A maximum sector wide pay ratio of 10:1
Additional uplift at the lower end of the pay spine to address pay compression.

Look out for your ballot papers, vote early and vote YES on the Four Fights!

Higher Education ballots – Four fights – Experiences of a casualised teacher

Posted on October 21, 2021 by amanda

In this second of our four-part blog series, we hear from our branch President about the challenges faced by them as a casualised staff member working in Higher Education

When I was a PhD student, I supported myself by teaching at various FE and HE institutions. I spent countless late nights cobbling together lectures and seminars to deliver the next day, often outside my immediate area of expertise. With no official workspace I had to cart my laptop, books and notes around everywhere, often meeting students in cafes and other people’s offices. Working in a variety of locations I frequently had to navigate unfamiliar public transport, or search for semi-legal parking spaces, and I would spend fraught moments hopelessly lost in corridors, locked out of classrooms, or denied access to IT systems because of a malfunctioning ID card. It was important to me that my students trusted me, that they thought I was an established member of the teaching team, that they thought I belonged there. So, on the surface I tried to look professional, but I was permanently frantic, under-prepared and anxious. The teaching I delivered on core modules was the culmination of hours of work and I was only paid for a fraction of the time I had put in. But I was good at it. My students liked me, and I got consistently positive feedback. I did it for the love of the subject and in the vain hope that my experience would count for something. But it got me nowhere.

After 5 years, while on maternity leave on a fixed term contract, I was made redundant. The job market in HE had become more and more competitive, and by then you needed extensive teaching experience, a monograph and a successful grant application even to get an interview. The lack of diversity that this ruthless job market encourages cannot be overstated. Once I had children, my ‘dream’ of becoming an academic was over; I was too far behind. I am now a permanent member of staff on an Education Pathway and I like my job, but I have never forgotten the feelings of insecurity, inadequacy and resentment which built up over those years on temporary contracts. My personal experience is common amongst PhD students but casualisation is now endemic. According to a UCU report carried out just before the 2019 strike over the ‘Four Fights’, 70% of the 49,000 researchers in UKHE remain on fixed-term contracts. Many more are employed on precarious contracts with short term funding, so the threat of redundancy is ever-present. 37,000 teaching staff are on fixed-term contracts, most of them hourly paid. 71,000 teachers are employed as ‘atypical academics’ but not counted in the main staff record. These are overwhelmingly hourly paid teachers, employed on the lowest contract levels, and many of them are employed as ‘casual workers’, with fewer employment rights. 50% of these ‘atypical academics’ are employed by the richest ‘Russell Group’ universities. UCU estimates that this ‘reserve army’ of academic labour is doing between 25 and 30% of the teaching in many universities (UCU report, June 2019). More recently, we have seen articles in the news highlighting the extent of casualisation at our ‘top universities’ such as Cambridge.

During the 2019 strike, I ran a teach-out on the epidemic of casualisation in UKHE; a key issue in the ‘Four Fights’ dispute. Before this , I asked colleagues on hourly paid and fixed term contracts to share their experiences of working under these conditions. They highlighted the detrimental impact casual work has on their family lives, their ability to plan financially and their mental and physical wellbeing. They reported high levels of anxiety due to lack of certainty and said that they were unsure about their maternity, holiday and sick pay entitlements. Many colleagues had been working on short term contracts for more than 5 years and felt they had to accept unreasonable or unsuitable workloads because they were scared of being ‘passed over’ for work next time. Since becoming branch president in 2020, I have seen first-hand the levels of exploitation and have been astounded by the lack of awareness of the issues surrounding casualisation exhibited by managers and HR at the university.

Students who attended the teach out were horrified to discover the levels of precarity at the university. Participants were asked to consider the impact of casualised work on key areas including family life, financial planning, mental and physical health and career development. They were given post-it notes for their ideas, and together we created posters highlighting the multiple effects insecure employment has on university staff. At the end of the session, we began an important discussion about concrete action the university could take to address SUCU’s concerns about casualisation. During the strike in 2019, members of SUCU executive met with Mark Smith and received assurances that steps will be taken to improve contracts and terms and working conditions for casualised staff. There seemed to be some hope that the message was getting through that casualisation in universities is bad for staff, students and the universities themselves. However, the experiences of casualised colleagues during the pandemic have shown that nothing has changed and in many ways things have got worse. The pressure, anxiety and insecurity we have all experienced over the last 18 months are exacerbated enormously when you have no guaranteed work, no sick pay and are struggling to work from home with inadequate equipment. Now that we are being pushed back on to campus, casualised colleagues are finding they are missing key information from managers, have limited access to office spaces and are facing increased pressure to accept in-person teaching when they do not feel safe because they have no choice. The final insult for our valued colleagues came when a covid bonus for staff was not extended to staff on hourly paid contracts. Despite repeated attempts from UCU to reverse that decision, management refused and, in their responses, showed once again how little they understand the extent and negative impact of casualisation at the University.

This week, we are being called on once again to stand up for our precariously employed colleagues without whom permanent teaching staff would simply not be able to manage. We need to push back hard against exploitation in our universities. We must ensure that all workers enjoy fair and equal pay, decent working conditions and equal rights. Look out for your ballot papers, vote early, and vote YES on the ‘Four Fights’.

If you would like to get involved in the fight against casualisation contact Amanda at ucu@soton.ac.uk

Higher Education ballots – Four fights – why you should vote YES!

Posted on October 19, 2021 by amanda

In this four-part blog series, we talk about the issues at the heart of the ‘four fights’ ballot and how they affect colleagues at the University of Southampton. In this first part, we will discuss the issue of insecure and precarious work.

Insecure work is a prevalent yet often concealed problem at our university. Insecure and precarious work contributes to immense stress and also damages the quality of academic work. Those of us on insecure contracts suffer from uncertainty in our private lives and cannot make plans for our future. We find it harder, if not impossible, to buy a house, sustain long term relationships and support a family. Neither can we make long term plans with colleagues or students and are often treated as second-rank colleagues, excluded from department decisions and meetings.

Despite these harms, our employer consistently turns to casualised forms of work as a cheaper and “just in time” form of labour instead of providing long term, sustainable and planned staffing. The contemptuous attitude of our management toward insecure workers was confirmed in the decision to consciously exclude hourly-paid workers from the COVID-19 staff bonus, despite the significant contribution that hourly-paid workers made during the pandemic. If you haven’t already, read their dismissive response to our request to reconsider their decision here. Additionally, management continue to deny hourly-paid workers automatic sick pay entitlement, maintaining they will only do so when legally required and they do not automatically inform hourly-paid workers when this is. Consequently, financial insecurity is forcing hourly-paid workers to come on to campus when sick.

Counting casualisation at Southampton

In the 2019-20 academic year, 955 academic staff were employed on fixed-term contracts at Southampton—35.2% of all academic staff.

When considering all those on hourly-paid or insecure contracts, the percentage of academic staff on insecure contracts could be closer to 50%. Unfortunately, the challenges of finding accurate data on the number of workers on insecure contracts is telling of the lack of transparency from our employer on this issue.

Nationally we know that 30,335 academic staff were employed on hourly-paid contracts in the 2019-20 academic year, around 13.6% of all academic staff. So, if a similar figure were applied at Southampton, it would mean around 48.61% of our academic staff are on insecure contracts. But, of course, the figure could be much higher, and we intend to submit a Freedom of Information request to try and find out.

What are we balloting for?

The union is seeking institutional-level action and implementation plans that commit to tackling casualisation. We are asking that the University and Colleges Employers Association (UCEA) agrees to a process for creating, implementing, and reviewing these plans across each of the institutions it represents. We ask that these plans be based on the principles of:

Ending the use of zero-hours contracts.
Introducing a Graduate Teaching Assistant contract.
Agreeing a process of moving hourly-paid staff to fractional contracts.
Moving staff with 4 years’ service on to open ended contracts.

Introducing minimum contract lengths of 24 months, apart from incidences of genuine cover.
Ending the outsourcing of support services.

The final offer made by the employers insultingly ignored nearly all of our pay claim demands under the heading of casualisation. Indeed, the final offer does not even mention the word ‘casual’ throughout.

Our proposals are for a better future for universities, a future which is fairer, more secure and more equal for staff and students.

The ballot will close on 4 November. To make sure your vote is counted, return your ballot by Tuesday 2 November.

Worried about not being able to afford a strike?

Don’t forget that we will have a local strike fund to support members taking industrial action (if we get there!). There will also be a national fighting fund for members to apply to. So, if financial concerns are a worry, you can rely on the solidarity of your branch and colleagues!

Southampton UCU

News and information from the Southampton branch of UCU

Category Archives: Pay claim 2021