Management want to re-negotiate our agreement on workloads, which we think helps to protect staff from overzealous managers, but it has not yet been in force for 3 years and has never been evaluated. We want data (just like they do) which proves the present agreement does not work, before we will consider a change.
Over the past months and years, your UCU branch has been incredibly busy in what has been a challenging environment, both locally and within the sector. Nationally, the Trade Union Bill is seeking to undermine the collective power of unions like ours. Locally, we are representing the interests of our members throughout an unprecedented avalanche of problematic issues: programme closures, workloads, grade reviews, electronic marking and feedback, PG teaching grades, casualisation, gender pay gap, health and safety, stress and mental health to name just a few. We are aware that the tangible results of our work on your behalf often go unnoticed! This is because we have limited resources and often we need to choose between doing our job and boasting about it!
On Saturday 4th March, several UCU officers and members contributed to the North East March for Europe, organised by cross-party grassroots organisation North East for Europe. Amongst the purposes of the march, we aimed to celebrate the fraternal ties between our region and our continent, the contribution of the European Union to the development of the North East, and the human contribution of migrants, many of them from other EU countries, to a diverse, tolerant, progressive and optimistic society.
This university is rightly proud of the world class, cutting edge, collaborative research undertaken here. What I am pondering though are the trade-offs necessary to do this. A general trend of ‘Work intensification’ through workload management means increasing division between those who have time allocated to carry out research and publish and those who don’t. I am seeking information from members to try to formulate a branch position.