Dear University of Kent UCU members,

URGENT MATTER – REASON FOR EMERGENCY MEETING

UCU, nationally and locally, has been trying to move staff from casual/precarious contracts onto decent, ongoing, secure contracts for many years.

University management, however, seems to plan to address anti-casualisation by making very large numbers of such staff redundant.

We attach this worrying paper (JSNCC 2018-15 Workforce Profile – Programme of Projects) which will be discussed at the Joint Staff Negotiating and Consultation Committee (JSNCC) on Weds 24th October.

It contains the following chilling clause

3.3.2. To determine how many other salaried academic positions should be created in order to reduce reliance on HPLs for ongoing teaching by at least 50%.

When you observe that, according to section 5.1 “The University currently employs over 800 HPLs”, this states a clear intention to put over 400 jobs at risk, and our experience in the HPL pilot in the spring was the majority of those at risk did NOT get one of the new posts. It is also clear from the stated timeline in the document that these redundancies would happen this academic year. If this allowed to go ahead in the way described, we would have hundreds less colleagues in September 2019.

We also attach Academic Workforce Profiling – Key messages narrative 18 October 2018 which has been circulated in some schools, in case you have not seen that either.

Please attend our emergency meeting, Monday 22nd October, 1-2pm, Moot Chamber, Wigoder Building, to discuss how we resist this project.

In solidarity,
Owen, Mark and Sian