The strategic objectives of our Fund the Future campaign are to:
- defend jobs
- fight casualisation
- ensure realistic workloads
- defend terms & conditions.
Branches are being asked to engage with the campaign to meet those objectives because it is important to remember that negotiations do not take place in isolation from a broader campaigning approach.
Rarely do employers take action simply because we ask them.
This toolkit therefore will focus on how you set out a bargaining and negotiations strategy to progress discussions with the employer in parallel to the Fund the Future campaign.
The purpose of this page is to signpost branches and activists to the extensive advice, guidance, tips, business cases, etc to support your negotiations.
In Part 1 below, you can use our interactive tool to identify what guidance may be relevant to your branch in a given situation.
In Part 2 we group our advice under the strategic objectives.
Part 1
Part 2
In this part we highlight the existing bargaining and negotiating advice in meeting the objectives of the campaign.
Defend Jobs
Employer responses to the Covid-19 pandemic pose a very real threat to the jobs of our members, especially those on casualised contracts. We need to understand the threat and determine how best we can protect members’ jobs. We have produced extensive advice on fighting redundancies in both FE and HE and that advice remains relevant, even in these changed times:
- Challenging job cuts/redundancies in FE
- FE England organisational change model agreement, Jul 15 [33kb]
In HE, in response to the findings of the London Economics report, we have produced guidance on using the report and updating our advice on challenging redundancies which includes advice on using financial data:
In HE, in response to employer attempts to negotiate detrimental changes to terms and conditions, we have launched a ‘Jobs First’ approach which makes it clear that whilst UCU will discuss a range of options, it will only do so as a means to protect the security of jobs and when certain pre-conditions are met:
We have also produced a document containing some of the arguments that branches can use against proposed job cuts as a result of the Covid-19 crisis:
In more general terms, our advice on negotiating on organisational and corporate change offer branches guidance on what agreements should include:
To help branches to understand what is happening locally we also have advice on using financial information:
Further assistance on reading accounts can be sought via your regional office.
Fighting casualisation
The fight against job cuts is a fight to protect our most vulnerable members on casualised contracts. The endemic use of casualised contracts has not been caused by the Covid-19 crisis but the employers responses have hit staff on casualised contracts the hardest.
As well as fighting job cuts we should not lose sight of our over-arching objective to reduce the levels of casualisation across our sectors We have produced extensive advice on this which remains relevant including:
- Anti-casualisation campaign pack for further, adult and prison education branches
- Negotiating on casualisation in further, adult and prison education
- Anti-casualisation campaign pack for higher education branches
- Negotiating on casualisation in higher education: a UCU bargaining guide for branches
Members in HE may also be interested in our most recent report on the UK and institutional levels of casualisation which can be used to argue for improvements locally:
The fight against casualisation is intrinsic to our fight for jobs but it also forms part of the ‘Build Back Better’ part of our campaign – acknowledging that if we want tertiary education in the UK to be fit for the future then the endemic use of casualised contracts has to be addressed.
Ensuring realistic workloads
Even before the Covid-19 crisis, the workloads of our members were excessive and causing widespread mental health problems.
Our campaign ‘It’s Your Time‘ was launched a couple of years ago to incorporate health and safety, campaigning and organising elements into local fights against excessive workload.
There are 3 elements to defending workloads in light of the Covid-19 crisis:
- reducing the excessive workloads that existed before the crisis
- ensuring any workload agreements and models take into account the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and he move to new ways of working
- to link the fight for reasonable workloads to the fight against job cuts, including those of staff on casual contracts.
In terms of negotiating or re-negotiating a local workload model we have produced some new advice which highlights the impact of the Covid-19 crisis and proposed new ways of working:
- Bargaining for Better Workloads in HE
- Bargaining for Better Workloads in FE (TBC)
Defend terms and conditions
Updated guidance on recorded lectures covers issues branches should be picking up with employers regarding general data protection regulations, performance and moral rights, and new accessibility regulations in recorded lectures:
In HE, in response to employer attempts to negotiate detrimental changes to terms and conditions, we have launched a ‘Jobs First’ approach which makes it clear that whilst UCU will discuss a range of options, it will only do so as a means to protect the security of jobs and when certain pre-conditions are met: