1) Open Letter – Share Room Risk Assessments
Final call…please sign this open letter, calling on University management to make available ‘a list of rooms and their risk assessments…which staff and students using these workspaces can check’.
Click on the link below to sign:
https://bristolucu.onlinesurveys.ac.uk/ucu-open-letter-share-room-ras
2) Ballot Opens Monday
Our UCU industrial action ballot opens on Monday next week.
If you are currently on maternity leave or sick leave, or are no longer a member of this branch, please email ucu-office@bristol.ac.uk asap.
Why are we balloting?
On our USS pensions, our key contention is that there is no reason to make any cuts, the USS valuation is wrong, and that employers, rather than opting out, need to opt in and join UCU in halting USS in their recklessly prudent tracks.
UCU’s ‘Four Fight’ dispute is based on our four pillars of pay, pay equality, workload and anti-casualisation. Alongside a headline pay uplift of £2,500, we are asking UK universities to make good cuts and cut workloads and casualised temporary contracts, to agree binding measures to end pay injustice and to insist on measures to roll back the ‘robber baron’ approach to remuneration at ‘world-leading centres of HE excellence’: ‘a maximum sector wide pay ratio of 10:1’.
UCU members across UK Higher Education will be asked to take action, including strike action, to force university managements, in such universities as Bristol, UWE, UCL, Cambridge, Queen’s University Belfast, the University of Aberdeen, to take decisive, meaningful national action to close gender, ethnic and disability pay gaps and reduce workloads and casual employment of our lecturers, researchers, librarians and student support staff, and in ‘pre-92’ universities such as Bristol, Exeter, Sheffield and Newcastle, to revoke deep and painful cuts to university’s staff pensions
No one wants disruption adding to that caused by COVID-19 and the blame should be laid at the feet of UK university managers that simply do not want to build back better; refusing to invest in their institutions.
3) Upcoming Branch Meetings
A reminder that the dates of Executive Committee and general Branch meetings are available online at: https://www.ucubristol.org.uk/meetings/
- Executive Committee – 19 October 2021, 1pm to 2pm
- Branch meeting for all members – 27 October 2021, 1pm to 2pm
It is expected that all meetings will be held online via Microsoft Teams for at least the duration of Teaching Block 1.