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February 2020 – update on local dispute negotiations

UEL Dispute meeting – stage two – 13/2/20

Present:

For the employer: Amanda Broderick, Peter Gregory, Hassan Abdulla, David Douglas, Andrea Diable (note taker HR)

For UCU: Barry Jones, Jill Daniels, Gargi Bhattacharyya

Key points agreed as route to resolving dispute:

They reiterated that the current student-facing calendar can’t be changed this year. A published student calendar is required for students to apply for student loans.

University agreed instead to commit additional resources to addressing ‘pinch points’ in academic workloads in this session. UCU to provide advice on timing and areas where this is urgent;

UCU and the employer will co-operate to create a staff calendar that takes the requirements of the national contract as its basis and includes provisions to address UCU concerns. This will form the basis of academic planning and staffing planning going forwards. The emergency funding for this session is to address issues arising from both calendar and poor/nonexistent workload planning – therefore UCU also needs to identify pinch points that are arising independently of the calendar;

UCU will begin discussion with the employer on the evolution of a new workload model that is a consistent scheme across the University and includes the range of academic tasks and specifies time required to carry out all tasks in our workloads. This workload model will be used to plan both workloads and staffing going forwards;

We spoke about unevenness across the university and the need to enforce agreements in all areas. UCU continues to welcome the thoughts of members on this issue.

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