Preliminary response to the March Human Resources Bulletin
By now you will have received the latest missive from HR. This is the most outrageous yet. Much is factually incorrect; the rest has been twisted beyond belief. However, it contains some serious threats to us and so, much as we would like to ignore it as ignorant misinformation, it must be addressed.
The University is misinformed about the legal position over recognition. Under Section 105 of the Trade Union and Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992 recognition is automatically transferred. The University initially accepted this and met UCU officials and officers at ACAS in August, two months after UCU was established. Their own drafts assumed a seamless transition from NATFHE to UCU. Suddenly they decided that they could use this as an excuse to attack the union rights of members of staff and so they changed their position. No other university or college in the country has taken this line after the merger. Once again, London Met wants to take a maverick line.
The issue of the letter requesting recognition is not as simple as the Director of HR suggests. To write such a letter would mean accepting that we are currently not recognised. This is not the case. Since nothing new has been negotiated and since the law says that UCU inherits all existing agreements, we currently have a recognition agreement that dates back to before the merger. We do not want to give this up in favour of a new agreement that allows us to discuss nothing but hours and holidays. Thus the sole purpose of the letter appears to be to make us grovel for something that is ours by right: recognition of our elected representatives.
The HR newsletter also contained a series of accusations that NATFHE had not engaged in consultations over policies and procedures. This is just not true. In fact it is fairly insulting to the union officers who gave up weeks, if not months, to work on the fine detail. Despite the fact that no facility time was offered, union officers attended endless meetings, corrected draft proposals and drafted new sections. As was the case with UNISON, the policies and procedures benefited immensely from this scrutiny although frequently HR's idea of consultation was to say: you've seen the document, you've objected to sections; we're going ahead anyway'! Perhaps what they mean by 'not engaging constructively' is that we refused to rubber stamp their proposals and did not necessarily agree every draft. What is more, it is for members, not the HR department, to decide how effective officers have been.
We should also remember that during this time we were in dispute over our contract of employment. The University tried first to intimidate us, then it unlawfully dismissed 387 lecturers. It is not surprising that routine consultations were interrupted after this behaviour.
The newsletter accuses us, in effect, of bad faith or of refusal to engage. In fact, as usual, the University is the one indulging in this. To give a single example, Greg Barnett wrote to Brian Roper three times between October and December 2006 about recognition: there was no reply to any of these letters.
More seriously, the University has an ulterior motive in trying to de-recognise UCU. This issue of the newsletter shows that it intends to walk away from earlier agreements. In July 2005 the University committed itself to return to ACAS to negotiate, among other issues, PADAS. After nearly two years of attempts to get them to honour their undertaking, they have announced that they are imposing an un-negotiated version. The list of policies also listed in this issue have not been agreed with the Union. They are clearly going to try to impose job evaluation without any consultation: the JNCHES Framework Agreement is explicit that unions should be involved. Indeed most other universities have now completed this process and are signing off agreements with UCU.
This is not just a game between union hacks and a bored HR director with time on her hands. Let’s take one example of why engagement between UCU and management matters to our staff and to our students. This university is attempting to impose the worst possible ‘contract’ on hourly paid staff. In the HR Bulletin this presumably is ‘the action in 2006 to address the issue of fixed term contracts in the university’(p6). We were notified of this, but quite deliberately not consulted. Why? Because the legislation, a combination of The Part-time Workers (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2000 and The Fixed-term Employees (Prevention of Less Favourable Treatment) Regulations 2002 (legally in force July 10th 2006) permits hourly paid workers to transfer to fractional or full time posts. The process is complex but elsewhere in the sector this is happening. Were we able to engage with the university we would seek to initiate this process and, indeed, we have tried hard to do so. Instead HR chose to impose the most pernicious and one-sided contract in the sector on our most vulnerable staff. It commits an HPL to a permanent contract with the university, probably putting in jeopardy any claim to social security payments, whilst not committing the university to any guarantee of work or pay. Notably HR Bulletins are silent on this detail as they are silent on all inconvenient truths. They know that UCU would make these issues visible, would raise questions that they cannot answer and demand fairness of treatment for all staff in compliance with legislative obligations that they prefer to ignore.
It is clear from the juxtaposition of the ill-informed and offensive attack on UCU and the announcement of the Staff Representative Council that the University is de-recognising UCU in order to set up a sham body to rubber stamp whatever they propose. They have cut staff representation on the Board of Governors and are trying to do the same with the Academic Board. Having lost on the contract through the solidarity of union members, Brian Roper and Lyn Link are now attempting to bypass us altogether. No other university has done this.
Please draw attention of all your colleagues to the boycott call (which is UCU and UNISON policy) and please make every effort to attend the all-branches meeting on Friday 30th March so that we can discuss our response.