In this bulletin;
Branch Survey – please respond!
Redundancy Prevention
Extra Bank Holidays
Academic Calendar
Harmful Gambling – awareness training
Climate action CPD meeting
Please respond to the branch survey on industrial action!
Yesterday the Branch Committee sent out a link to an important survey on industrial action. If you haven’t yet done so, please complete the survey as soon as possible. It’ll take you only a minute.
Check your email for the link.
Redundancy Prevention
UCU have been attending weekly Redundancy Prevention Committee meetings with Management, with the goal of preventing there from being any compulsory redundancy. Of the VR/PVR requests that have now been made, Management are able to immediately grant some of them; of the remainder, Management will aim to make the organizational rearrangements necessary to be able to grant VR, and RPC will have overview of this. As things stand at the Christmas break, the CCI subject teams affected by the Management proposals fall into one of three categories:
- The Management proposal has either been achieved through VR or else been withdrawn; residual discussion will be confined to accommodating VR requests.
- Management will meet with subject teams (in the new year) to discuss deployment and workloads.
- Particular issues remain to be resolved at RPC before further steps can be taken.
This week, Management will write to affected staff to let them know whether the proposal that affected their team falls into Category (1) or not. Additionally Management will send teams some marketing and recruitment information and proposals, in the expectation that subject leaders will coordinate the compilation of a response.
More extra bank holidays
For each extra bank holiday or university holiday beyond the usual, target annual workload hours should be reduced by 7.4 hours (pro rata). This academic year there are two extra bank holidays, so the total reduction should be 14.8 hours (pro rata).
Academic calendar
Management have released an academic calendar for 2023–24 without having consulted UCU on it. For the second year running, they do acknowledge both that they had committed to consult UCU and that they failed to honour that commitment. For most academic staff, the most problematic aspect of the new calendar is that exams have been moved into teaching weeks. The intention is that there should remain 24 teaching weeks, and that there should be no reduction in contact hours, and hence no risk of creating staff redundancy; but the contact hours and exams that formerly spread over 26 weeks must now be squeezed into 24. So this becomes an issue of timetabling for affected modules.
Harmful Gambling – awareness training sessions
The joint unions have been working to expand the University’s Drug and Alcohol Policy to support colleagues who are struggling to cope with harmful behaviour arising from problem gambling; their own or that of a colleague, friend or family member. We are hopeful that UCLan will sign up to the Workplace Charter on Harmful Gambling as part of its stated commitment to Wellbeing. As part of this work, the University is hosting 3 one-hour online sessions on Harmful Gambling Awareness via Microsoft Teams. Please click on the links within the below dates/times to reserve your space on the session through iTrent Self Service:
- Harmful Gambling Awareness on 18 January 2023 between 14:00-15:00
- Harmful Gambling Awareness on 7 February 2023 between 10:00-11:00
- Harmful Gambling Awareness on 23 March 2023 between 10:00-11:00
Climate action CPD meeting
Over the last couple of years, UCU have run a number of Climate-related CPD events with thousands of UCU members, reps and activists attending. The union wants to maintain this momentum and harness members’ experience of climate action in the workplace. This short online conference will be an opportunity to understand what action is taking place around the country and hear about future plans to develop and shape environment work. We hope you will be able to join the first Climate CPD – Take action! online meeting. The full itinerary will follow in early January. Please see below for registration details:
Date: 26th January 2023
Venue: Online
Time: 10:30 a.m. to 12:30p.m.
Please check your email for the link to register.
Just in case you need to re-acquaint yourself with UCU’s approach to climate action in the workplace via our Green New Deal framework, please see here: https://www.ucu.org.uk/green-new-deal
We wish all members a restful Christmas and best wishes for the new year.
UCU Branch Committee
