Negotiating and working groups

All-member Working Groups 

We currently have working groups on these subjects, please email the branch mailbox if you are interested in joining one of these groups: 

• Recruitment, Organising and Campaigns Committee (ROCC) - this group was established to make the branch more visible and improving our membership density, we invite all Walton Hall, Associate Lecturer and regional/national centre reps to ROCC meetings. It functions as a clearing house for issues, so is a good starting point.

More specialist groups

• Divestment and Complicit Investment
• Generative AI (GenAI)
• New Branch Banner
• Policy
• Research-focused staff
• Richer Tuition model
• Sustainability (including Community Wealth Building)
• Workload Intensification

Negotiating Groups 

Joint Negotiating Committee (JNC) and Joint Trade Union Forum (JTUF) 

The negotiating committees with OU management have a broad remit covering a wide range of employment related matters. The JNC concerns UCU-only matters, whilst the JTUF covers UCU and Unison together.

The union side members of the JNC and JTUF team initially consists of the members of the Executive Committee involved with the issue. Other members of the Executive attend as observers on a rolling basis. 

If you are interested in knowing more about negotiations we suggest becoming a rep or joining a working group, particularly the policy working group.

Policies Under Discussion, Negotiation or Consultation

Due to limitations with the website we can't put borders around the table cells, which makes the following quite hard to read. Hopefully if you're this deep into the detail you'll muddle through, but do email us if you need an Excel file as a  reasonable adjustment (borders will show on some web browsers).

The following polices are currently the subject of active engagement between UCU and management. It is not intended as a comprehensive list of all policies that UCU would seek to influence. If you know of anything requiring addressing, please make us aware.