News

Open meeting on USS: Thursday 5th September 2019 at 12.30pm in CMR15, Christodoulou Meeting room 15, email ucu@open.ac.uk for the Skype meeting request.

Support UCU's TUC motion for a 30-minute solidarity climate stoppage!

The Open University branch of UCU took the lead at the UCU Congress in proposing the main composite motion on climate change, and the passing of this motion and others at Congress is reflected in UCU's motion to the TUC this year.

The text of the UCU motion is on this page: www.ucu.org.uk/article/10181/30-minute-solidarity-climate-stoppage

UCU have announced that there will be simultaneous Highter Education strike ballots over pay and pensions.

The ballots will run from 9 September to 30 October 2019. Members in branches where UCU has registered a dispute over USS will receive two ballot papers - one for pay, workload, equality and job security and one for USS.

The branch was pleased to welcome the Branch President of Sheffield UCU, Sam Marsh, to an Open meeting about the USS Pension Scheme on Thursday 13th June. The meeting was recorded and the recording is now available at this address on the OU Stadium website:

http://stadium.open.ac.uk/stadia/preview.php?whichevent=3288&s=31

Since the start of this calendar year, three members of UCU have been suspended or sacked from their jobs in what seems to be a worrying trend towards targeting union activists. Below are the details of the three cases and links to petitions and other forms of support for them. As the old principle of trade unionism states: an injury to one is an injury to all.

UCU announced on 24th May that Jo Grady has been elected as the new UCU General Secretary, read the UCU news article at this address.

www.ucu.org.uk/article/10114/Jo-Grady-elected-UCU-general-secretary

UCU Executive Committee notes that Professor Tim Blackman has been appointed as new VC. We welcome him back to the OU following his four years as VC of Middlesex University, and congratulate him on his appointment.
 

The election for UCU General Secretary opened on Monday 29th April and closes at noon on Thursday 23rd May 2019.

There are three candidates who have websites at the following addresses and we have provided their Twitter account names.

The UCU branch undertook a survey on workload in the autumn, which was publicised to all staff by HR/People Services. The prompt for this was anecdotal evidence of a severe and ongoing workload problem, and fear this might increase after the recent round of voluntary severance.

Initial findings are now available (view report) and support these concerns, while also confirming and contextualising some of the relevant responses on ‘stress’ reported in the Staff Engagement Survey.

We've had a reply to the joint letter we sent to the Open University's Vice Chancellor: view letter.