Email to staff from the Vice-Chancellor 18 February 2020

Dear colleagues

We have confirmation that UCU will be calling on its members to take strike action between Thursday 20 February and Friday 13 March 2020 on the following dates:

• Week one - Thursday 20 and Friday 21 February
• Week two - Monday 24, Tuesday 25 and Wednesday 26 February
• Week three - Monday 2, Tuesday 3, Wednesday 4 and Thursday 5 March
• Week four - Monday 9, Tuesday 10, Wednesday 11, Thursday 12 and Friday 13 March

The industrial action is in response to disputes concerning pay and conditions, and proposed changes to the USS pension.

We recognise the need for York to be a good employer, offering attractive terms and conditions to recruit, retain and reward our staff, ensuring universities are good places to work and study, and develop careers. This for me is not simply a matter of responding to the pressure of industrial action but a point of principle which has been at the heart of the current strategy discussion. I look forward to engaging further with colleagues across the University as we develop our strategy for the next ten years.

But I am also very concerned about the impact on our students, especially those most affected by the action in December and in the next few weeks. I am sure we will all want to see an early and effective resolution to the current dispute so that that impact on our students can be limited and mitigated. I hope that colleagues across the University can share this as a priority.

I am often asked what ‘we’ the University are doing to try to resolve these disputes so I wanted to take this opportunity to update you on the national picture and the approach and progress we have made at a local level to try to facilitate a resolution.

Pay and conditions

We commend the work that UCEA has undertaken nationally to highlight priority areas for the sector including contractual arrangements, workload and mental health, gender and ethnicity pay gaps. Significantly this work has resulted in an unprecedented offer in national industrial relations which I hope will be taken up by the UCU and the other campus unions. I am certainly committed to pushing this work on nationally, and am now convening a Russell Group working group to share and develop good practice on casual staffing. 

By working closely together with our local trade union colleagues, we are also committed to taking this work further locally, and looking to invest significant resources to make tangible improvements at York. 

To facilitate progress with our local trade union representatives we have created a trade union/HR joint working group. This group has already met on several occasions to focus on closing the gender pay gap and hope to release a joint statement shortly. We are also in the process of setting up a joint working group to consider approaches to casual working.

Recognising that this work takes time, trade union colleagues joining our working groups will receive additional ‘trade union facilities’ time (dedicated time off from normal duties) to appreciate the importance of joint working to achieve change.

Priority areas

Taking action on these shared priority areas will have a real impact on the pay and security of our staff:

• “Casualisation” - Our aim is to recognise the variety of different employment arrangements existing in the University to ensure every member of staff has fair and appropriate arrangements, with a consistency of approach across departments. We have committed to a review of the existing agreement on the use of Fixed Term Contracts and in addition we hope to enter into a formal agreement with the trade unions  in relation to fair working practices which would cover the following themes:

1. Only use casual contracts where this is genuinely a casual arrangement, and reiterate the right for casual workers to decline work. Commit to providing written statement of terms and conditions for casual workers, to include rates of pay and the hours to be worked. Investigate whether other contract types would be more appropriate, for example, casual but with a minimum number of hours to be worked each term/year.
2. Analyse ‘non standard’ patterns of employment and move to a more appropriate contract where relevant.
3. Provide wider redeployment support, and work closely with the Trade Unions as early as possible on potential redundancy situations.

• Pay gaps - The University will issue its third gender pay gap report in the next few weeks. The gender pay gap shows the difference in average earnings between women and men and is quite different to equal pay - which is a legal requirement to pay men and women the same for work of equal value. 

We recognise there is still some way to go to address gender equality imbalances. Our gender pay gap highlights we have a predominance of women in lower paid roles and a predominance of men in high paid roles. We have made considerable progress to date using the well established Athena Swan framework, under the  leadership of Professor Deborah Smith and the Athena Swan groups, and this work will continue.

A number of Athena Swan actions are the responsibility of the HR Director and we have reached agreement in principle with trade union colleagues to work alongside HR colleagues to advance these actions.  

• Ethnicity pay gaps - We will expand our pay gap reporting to include ethnicity pay gap reporting, in advance of any legislative requirement to do so. We will be working with trade union colleagues and staff network representatives to improve our data quality on protected characteristics to allow us to do this more accurately and effectively.
  
  
• Workload - Workload has always been a very complex issue. We hear from colleagues their concerns around time consuming activities. We will work with our trade unions and our staff to better understand what the real issues are. 

We recognise the impact stresses at work can have on the mental and physical wellbeing of staff. We have achieved a great deal at an institutional level including a three year health and wellbeing plan which provides for the training of managers around mental health issues, and actions around other specific health issues. Looking ahead we need to go further to understand the issues at a department and an individual level. We have a clear steer from UEB to look at how we can work differently to improve workload and become more agile as we move towards the delivery of a new strategy.

I hope that we can move joint working forward quickly and on that basis produce a formal agreement with campus unions on these issues as soon as is feasible. 

Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS)

Progress is also ongoing regarding the Universities Superannuation Scheme (USS) pensions dispute, the Joint Expert Panel (JEP) set up by Universities UK (UUK) and the UCU published its second report in December. The JEP2 report highlights a number of important recommendations that have underpinned the subsequent tripartite discussions that have taken place between UUK, UCU and USS and which have been facilitated by Joanne Segars, the Chair of the JEP. Signs are that there is a real desire to continue making progress. Reports from these meetings have been very positive and a decision has been taken to continue them during February and March, and we await news of further agreements which could hopefully bring the dispute to a close.

Finding a resolution

I would like us all to seek a resolution to both the pay and the USS pension disputes and to use the routes we have available in UUK, UCEA and UCU to do so. There have been some very fruitful conversations at both national and local levels with all parties to gain medium to long-term stability on the issues of pay, conditions and pensions so that industrial action will no longer be a recurring theme. 

I believe this is a time when we should be continuing to have those conversations. Creative engagement and a will on all sides to compromise is the only way we will make progress and prevent further disruption to the learning of our students. I will certainly be encouraging the talks to continue at a national level and look forward to making further progress in partnership with our local UCU representatives.

Kind regards

Charlie