Sheffield UCU is intending to expand its work in the field of Health and Safety (H&S), both by increasing our team of H&S reps, and also by raising awareness among members of what your H&S rights are, and how you can advocate for them. While the legal rights of workers have been significantly reduced since the end of the 1970s, H&S legislation remains relatively strong and provides significant opportunities for collective representation in ways that make a real difference to all those working at and attending the University. Trade Union H&S representatives are therefore an important role in all workplaces, and have a legal right to time off to perform their duties. 

This activity is not limited to matters such as ensuring fire exits are kept clear, hazardous substances are handled correctly and tripping hazards are removed, but many areas that impinge in the daily operation of the institution, including stress and mental health problems, which have reached epidemic proportions across the HE sector. In the past, employer response to workplace stress has often unfortunately been to treat it as a solely individual issue, rather than recognising the systemic and collective causes which can underpin it.

Stress Risk Assessments at the University

Employers have a legal duty to protect workers from stress at work by undertaking a risk assessment and acting on it. They are required to assess the risk of stress, and its impact on mental and physical ill-health, in the same way as other work-related health and safety risks. 

In recent years, we have worked with the new leadership of Health and Safety Services to develop a Stress Risk Management policy to ensure the university is compliant with its obligations.

Stress management includes addressing matters of excessive workload, inadequate training, bullying and other institutional problems with which we are only too familiar. Given the large-scale restructuring underway at the institution, it is essential we know our rights and hold management to account on these questions, and that means we need more people actively taking a role in H&S matters.

Constructive engagement in the approach to H&S

There has been a significant improvement in the institution’s management of H&S in the last two years, and this has provided opportunities for constructive engagement. 

During the pandemic Campus Unions pushed the University to increase ventilation, install CO2 monitors in naturally ventilated spaces and issue staff guidance on reporting risk and vacating unsafe working spaces. After very strong initial resistance, we managed to achieve these things, which form a crucial part of protecting people not only from COVID-19 but also influenza and the other respiratory infections that are common across the institution. 

We need to build on these achievements and ensure the University is a safe place to work and study, but we cannot rely on management to prioritise staff welfare when institutional pressures are to maximise workloads and marginalise professional concerns in order to compete with ‘rivals’.

Become a Health & Safety Rep

H&S representatives are essential to participate in inspections, sometimes alongside management, but often independently, to hold them to account. We need to ensure all risk assessments are, in the legal language, ‘suitable and sufficient,’ and that the policies we have negotiated are being adhered to. We need people to participate in departmental H&S meetings and to ensure staff priorities are being taken seriously.

If you are interested in getting involved in H&S work, or becoming a H&S rep, please do get in touch, via ucu@sheffield.ac.uk

Employers have an obligation to provide time off normal duties for TU representatives to perform H&S duties – such vital work can be carried out in addition to your day job, but workload remission is essential. Depending on the level at which you are prepared to be involved, UCU provides a range of training, which the employer must also enable you to attend. This might range from shadowing experienced representatives on an inspection to attending a formal course run by the regional union – it is up to you to decide how much you want to be involved, but at all levels of involvement, the work is meaningful and makes a real difference to all colleagues.

What is casework?

It’s rare we want to think about distressing experiences that could happen to us at work – for instance, questions asked about our capability to perform a role; concerns raised by colleagues or students about our behaviour; or a health condition making our established pattern of work temporarily unachievable. However, despite a natural aversion to considering them, such things do happen, and while clearly shaped by individual circumstances and conditions, they are almost invariably stressful, painful, and difficult.

At these points of challenge, there is union support available. This takes the form of casework support – a trained colleague who has experience of institutional processes working with a member to offer information, advice, and a listening ear.  It may be that you will reach the end of your career and never need to draw on caseworker support, in which case your good fortune should be celebrated. But if you do find yourself in a position where things are going less well than you hoped, having an effective casework structure in the local branch can be invaluable.

Casework support within Sheffield UCU

In our branch, we have a team of talented caseworkers, with rich experiences and strong connections to other aspects of the branch’s work.

There are around 18 colleagues involved with casework, and in the twelve months up to October 2022, the branch received 89 requests for casework support.

If we were to divide this equally, that would result in around 5 cases each, and it represents a significant increase from the twelve months before this point.  Even brief consideration of the current working conditions in higher education broadly, and this institution in particular, might offer some indications as to why.

What does a caseworker do?

The kinds of thing that a caseworker can do include accompany members to meetings, support them through institutional processes such as around disciplinary matters or sickness absence, offer information and guidance to help contextualise individual circumstances, give personal and moral support, and, when required, put members in touch with regional union officials as a step towards engaging legal representation.  It is work that is frequently challenging but also rewarding, as the impact it has on colleagues at the sharp end of uncomfortable experiences can be significant. It is also work that makes a material difference to colleagues’ working lives and experiences, as it is partly through understanding the difficulties individual members are facing that the branch determines priority areas for policy development.

Join our Casework Team!

As strong as the current casework team is, we are always open to new colleagues who would like to join. You might want to consider it if you are good at working with people, you are willing to become familiar with volumes of HR policy and semi-legal documentation, and you’re comfortable with questioning those in positions of authority. There is full training and support available locally, regionally, and nationally, and a mentoring and shadowing structure in-place to ensure that no-one takes on work for which they do not feel prepared. Facility time is available at certain points in the year, so this is a responsibility that can be workloaded, and time spent training can also be recognised by line managers.  If you are interested in becoming a caseworker, please email ucu@sheffield.ac.uk, and we can discuss the options from there.

Contact us early if you think you might need casework support

And one final, different, request:

if you feel that you might be entering a situation of difficulty – if you’re not yet in the storm, but you can see the clouds approaching and feel the wind rising – we would encourage you to make contact with the union sooner rather than later.

That might be through your departmental rep, or by emailing the branch; the main thing is the more we know earlier on, the more likely we are to be able to support you if the storm breaks. This is particularly true if something like an Improvement Support Plan (ISP) has been discussed in your working context, or concerns have been raised about the amount of sick leave you are taking. Both of these – and more – are areas where even members confident in their managers might be well-advised to seek support, as the institutional processes around them sometimes have momentum that override the good intentions of individuals involved.

Casework is one way of making tangible the solidarity we profess as a union.  Whichever end of the process you are involved with at different times, we would encourage you to be engaged, both for your own benefit, and the collective benefit of all members.