Dear colleagues,

Thank you for your commitment to a strong branch response to the threat to our jobs and working conditions. Here are a couple of quick updates.

Notice of industrial action has gone in to the employer

After the overwhelming result in our ballot for industrial action announced on Monday, a branch meeting on Tuesday of 170 members voted by a massive majority for escalating action in March to put pressure on university management in negotiations over 300 redundancies. The employer has now been notified of 14 strike days before the end of term on 28 March. The industrial action will consist of discontinuous strike action on the following days 4th, 6th, 10th, 11th, 12th, 17th, 18th, 19th, 20th, 24th, 25th, 26th, 27th, 28th March and continuous action short of strike commencing on 4th March 2025.

We will be organising branch and section meetings over the next couple of weeks.

From Wednesday’s negotiation: truth unto power

On Wednesday we had a consultation meeting with the employer. At the meeting were the three campus unions, and on the management side two UEB members (or the £150k+ club, Nigel Harkness and Jackie Scott), plus two from HR. We were allowed an hour, with the three campus unions. There was no agenda sent in advance. We raised the staff requests for the extension of the VS scheme and information. This was not agreed. We then raised the financial information for the purposes of collective consultation. They informed us the financial information would be forthcoming soon. The union side pointed out the error in the HR1 notification of redundancies, HR thought it was enough that the covering email explained the ambiguity.

Management structured discussion around a PowerPoint slide summary of a curiously selective version of staff feedback at the Town Halls.

Jackie reported on the Voluntary Severance Scheme thus far. About 340 applications from PS and 38 from academics. The 30-odd FTE of people who took VS in the last round will be added to this number. The target for redundancies is 150 PS and 150 academic remember. That would mean if all the PS applications were accepted that this would more than met the PS target and potential make sufficient staff cost savings to limit the number of redundancies overall for academics as well. Apparently not. For ‘parity’s sake’, Jackie would still be looking to target 150 academics. When we pointed out that this would mean that courses would close and student experience would be damaged, management angrily retorted that PS staff also contribute to student experience. We do not disagree.

To be absolutely clear, in the face of an attempt to divide academic and PS staff, UCU is determined to oppose detrimental impacts on all staff, across three faculties and the professions.

Jackie insisted on us discussing a proposal from a staff member in one of the Town Halls that we all take a pay cut. Now this would entail leaving national collective bargaining which would not be acceptable to any of the campus unions, and management know this. It would make Newcastle University one of a small number of institutions like Nottingham Trent and Birmingham City University to locally negotiate pay, rather than nationally. We observed that it was up to the unions to represent staff views. Jackie did not bring other issues from the Town Hall, like the news of an India campus, or calls to downsize UEB.

Financial information we had been asking for was promised imminently, and finally, indeed, a large pack of ‘strictly confidential’ documents arrived at 9am on Thursday. Such information could have been shared at a much earlier stage to allow for careful scrutiny of whether there is actually a ‘genuine redundancy situation’ on financial grounds rather than after the two preliminary consultations and the Town Halls.

The main point on their powerpoint was ‘feedback’ on their redundancy consultation pack. We of course did this, mostly by making the point that that was pretty much impossible without them providing us the financial information we asked for, and pointing out their timeline is unreasonable.

We also highlighted the lack of a decent equalities impact assessments, mitigating for job losses, workload, and the impact of their cuts and making people redundant. They kept insisting the EIA only has to address VS , and further ones for VR and CR come later, they told us, despite them serving us with the Section 188 redundancy notice in the January 21 meeting.

We would have liked the negotiation to have been conducted in a manner more respectful of the fact that all staff are currently under threat of redundancy including your negotiators. Clearly, UEB know that we won a ballot for industrial action and know that they have lost the hearts and minds of their staff.

We really appreciate all the support that you are giving the branch committee in our campaign.

Best wishes, solidarity,

Matt and Loes.