In this Newsflash:
1. Stop the Cuts and Bristol UCU.
2. Bristol UCU General Meeting 12th March.
3. International Women’s Day.
4. Staff Benefit and Reward Update.
5. Event: David Harvie: ‘Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at Our Universities.’
1. Stop the Cuts and Bristol UCU.
Bristol UCU is organising in response to the stringent financial targets imposed on schools and divisions by the University. We are investigating the financial data and rationale for these targets, and the ways in which schools and divisions are responding to them. For the national UCU campaign in response to the current wave of austerity and redundancy in UK HE, see https://www.ucu.org.uk/stopthecutscampaign. Branch officers will provide an update at the General Meeting next Wednesday 12th March. We are keen to hear from members, reps, and indeed anyone who has concerns or information regarding these developments: contact your reps or ucu-office@bristol.ac.uk.
If your workplace does not currently have a UCU rep and you are interested in becoming one, please get in touch!
2. Bristol UCU General Meeting (GM) Wednesday 12th March 2025 on Teams 13:00 – 13:50.
All members welcome! Please do get in touch with items for any other business.
Please check you UCU member email for this link to join the Teams meeting.
Members have submitted a motion to be debated at our GM .
Amendments to the motion will be accepted. Please note: amendments must be sent, with a proposer and seconder by Friday 7th March to ucu-office@bristol.ac.uk. If members wish to speak at the GM, for or against the motion, please email ucu-office@bristol.ac.uk by 12:00 pm on Monday 10th March.
Agenda
- Apologies & Minutes of the last GM (attached).
- Bristol UCU Year End Accounts for 2024.
- Stop the Cuts.
- Benefit and Reward at Bristol: Joint Trade Unions discussion update.
- BtW (Building to Win) and the Immigration Health Surcharge.
- Motion for UCU Bristol to Support Working Class History.
- Any Other Business.
Date of Next Meeting: AGM (annual general meeting) Wednesday 4th June 2025.
Bristol UCU Meeting Dates 2024-25.
3. IWD – International Women’s Day, Saturday 8th March 2025.
To mark International Women’s Day on 8th March, Bristol UCU has requested joint working initiatives to contribute to eradicating gender-based violence (GBV) and harassment in our university. This request will be discussed at the next JCNC (Joint Consultative Negotiating Committee) meeting on 11th March 2025.
GBV and harassment poses an increasing risk to the University community and now involves a range of complex forms of abuse both in-person and in digital spaces. These issues and crimes disproportionately affect women. A woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK. Domestic abuse makes up 18 per cent of all recorded crime in England and Wales. In the year ending March 2022, there were 194,683 sexual offences, of which 70,330 were rape.
This societal prevalence also affects higher educational institutions and hence the risk posed by GBV and harassment to university students and staff is high. Therefore, there is a need to work closely with the EDI team and SMT, our sister unions, and staff and students to develop strategies and mechanisms to prevent and eradicate GBV and harassment.
Find out more about IWD here https://www.internationalwomensday.com/ [LINK] and here IWD 2025 at Bristol University. [LINK].
4. Benefits and rewards JTU (Joint Trade Unions) meeting 25th February 2025 update.
Thanks to members who responded to our Benefit and Reward Survey. These were helpful not only in preparing for this meeting but also for getting a sense of members priorities more widely and raising issues we will pursue in other ways. The meeting was on 25th February with our sister unions Unison and Unite, James Bigwood, Chief People Officer and Peter Vermeulen, Chief Financial officer. We emphasised at the start of the meeting that the majority of our members want an increased pay offer. We put to management ways in which pay might be improved locally without infringing on national pay bargaining (e.g. a Bristol weighting).
As expected, the management side emphasised the current financial constraints, as they assessed them, and effectively ruled out measures which had a cost. We were still able to push forward our members’ priorities in terms of reward. We proposed improvements which would have zero or negligible costs, such as increasing the flexibility of various forms of parental occupational pay. Issues discussed included: maternity, shared parental, paternal, adoption and surrogacy pay, buying and selling annual leave, flexible working and timetable constraints, the Immigration Health Surcharge and a 4-day working week. More updates to follow.
5. Event: David Harvie, ‘Shaping for Mediocrity: The Cancellation of Critical Thinking at Our Universities.’
Members may be interested in the following event promoting the publication of a book about mass redundancies at University of Leicester in 2021 and exploring its lessons for the current attacks on universities. David Harvie, one of the authors, was made redundant from University of Leicester in 2021. He was Leicester UCU’s communications officer, a branch negotiator and, for 9 days until his dismissal, it’s vice-chair. He was until recently national UCU’s honorary treasurer. Info and tickets here: https://www.bookhausbristol.com/events/#e120718 [LINK].