Chair’s Quick Update: on the redundancies

153 of your colleagues need your solidarity on the picket lines as another consultation meeting takes place tomorrow, Wednesday

Tomorrow is a further consultation meeting with management. Please make every effort to show your solidarity with your colleagues facing redundancy. Even if we are not on the lists now, we could be in the new academic year when the employer is predicting a £50m shortfall. Even those schools with the highest surpluses are often most exposed to the volatility of the international student market.

Solidarity from the Northern TUC on Thursday

On Thursday, in recognition of the significance of our dispute to the region, there will be a visit to our pickets from other trade unions including the chair of the Northern TUC David Pike, as well as the civil servants’ union PCS, the teachers of the NASUWT, the firefighters FBU, the general union UNITE. The visits should be from 10am.

If you under threat, please come to the picket lines and encourage your colleagues to do so. Feel the solidarity and share your anger. Our management want to silence us. Let your voice be heard.

So far, we have not had a single compulsory redundancy our management has undertaken 4 rounds of voluntary severance because of the strength of our resistance. Lets keep it that way. A good turnout would be great.

Their ‘Proposal’ for Compulsory Redundancy

On Wednesday 7 May our employer issued a notice of the possibility 38 FTE academic redundancies.

The redundancies fall in all three faculties but target particular areas on a variety of grounds: 15 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) staff from 74 staff in the Faculty of Science, Agriculture & Engineering; 11.5 FTE from 59 staff in Humanities and Social Sciences; and 11 from 20 in the Faculty of Medical Sciences. 153 colleagues are at threat of redundancy.

Untrained PVCs arrive at inconsistent process: no wonder staff have no confidence

Those in the “pools” redundancy were invited to a meeting on Thursday, with 24 hours’ notice, with their managers and HR. There we established that neither the Faculty PVCs nor the Heads of Units have had the appropriate training as ACAS guidance insists; and it shows. HR was providing expert support. Many staff present were in tears and there was a great feeling of upset and injustice. Careers would end, lives torn apart, with massive losses to retirement income after years of loyal service. There were many heart-breaking circumstances. For recently recruited migrant members, after paying for skilled worker visas, the NHS surcharge, and moving with family from the other side of the world, dismissal would threaten the loss of all that and deportation.

The business cases for the redundancies were circulated to the branch negotiators on Wednesday. We also received equality impact assessments.

Despite repeated requests for any documentation about pool selection, selection criteria or selection method, the head of HR has refused to share this or even acknowledge that how such a process was underway. We would receive a proposal when it was finalised.

We have now received that ‘proposal’, namely three faculty business cases. The consequence is that the pools are now fixed and not in effect subject to consultation.

These business cases are inconsistent with no shared methodology. Damagingly to future goodwill and colleagiality, Heads of unit and faculty PVCs between them arrived at school proposals.

There is wide variation in the concentration of the pools. In SAGE, Physics, Chemistry, Ecosystems and MMB, Geospatial Engineering, Geotechnical and Structural Engineering are targeted. In FMS, only one of three institutes NU Biosciences Institute and none of the five schools is subject to a pool. In NUBI, a group of 6 non-clinical profs should find 5 reductions. Members may remember that we initiated a dispute about punitive capability procedures in FMS with the targeting of individuals over Improving Performance Policy in 2022. In HASS, five of the ten schools have pools: applied linguistics in ECLES, music in SACs, archaeology in HCA, geography and politics in GPS.

There is no consistency in the approach to pool size to redundancy. There are even ‘pools of one’ or two-from-two! This is extremely unusual as it is hard to justify as fair or against charges of targeting. Such pools of one can only be justified where the job is genuinely the only one at risk of redundancy. There are such cases in GPS and SAGE.

The restriction of pool size in order not to worry or demoralise staff is not legitimate as it cuts against a fair selection process. It undermines the principle of bumping or inclusion in pools of interchange jobs. We believe that this should render several of the pools unfair and invalid. This should have all been consulted when the pools were at a formative stage and these anomalies would not have occurred.

We will be challenging all this in the upcoming meetings. Thanks to all for giving us the leverage in consultations.