We hope you had a restful and enjoyable weekend. Here is an update on the branch’s response to the financial crisis at Newcastle University. We have been holding well-attended school/unit/section meetings. Several more will follow this week.

In addition, we are involved with negotiations with management over redundancies amongst our PS colleagues in the Medical School. This is a very worrying development and will be holding a meeting in the Med School on Wednesday. This follows the pattern from our dispute over Improving Performance, the Mitochondrial Research Centre and this ‘restructure’ of a heavy gender bias in those in line for capability or redundancy.

In addition, the branch committee have negotiations over the med school ‘restructure’ on Monday as well as workload and the 37 hour week on Wednesday at 2pm and with the Director of Finance at 3pm (see attached request for information about finances). The university has an obligation to share information for the purposes of collective bargaining. We will report on these negotiations on Friday at our general meeting.

We had meetings with both the other campus unions (UNISON and UNITE) and with the students’ union in our campaign about the cuts.