Over the past 18 months, University of Sheffield management have been conducting an extensive series of restructures, called the Professional Services Transformation Project, which are impacting hundreds of staff members across the university. Research Services and Student Recruitment and Admissions have already undergone this process, as well as numerous smaller teams across the university.
If you know about these restructures, it has probably not escaped your attention that there has been a large amount of disquiet about them, and concern over not only their large scale and rushed pace, but also the way that they are being conducted.
Restructures are a type of change management that involve the risk of redundancies, as well as extensive changes to staff roles, teams, and services offered, at great disruption to not only the members of the team being restructured, but also to students and staff who are supported by these teams. In theory, this disruption is justified because the restructure will lead to a more efficient and logical organisation for a particular team, to ease staff workload and to increase student support. In practice, however, we are not confident that the process being followed at TUoS is reliably leading to any of these outcomes. There has been a lack of transparency about the methodology for collecting data pertaining to team and service department performance, and when affected staff have asked for information on the consultation process, the answers have been similarly opaque:
“I asked how my work had been evaluated, whether any of my user groups had been consulted, and received only a vague response saying it had been a ‘deep dive’ and that staff from one of our faculties had been asked to comment on whether they were ‘happy’ with the service. I asked what questions were asked of those staff (and students?) but received no reply.”
Any researcher who has worked with human subjects will immediately recognise that this unspecified approach to data collection and analysis would fail to pass an ethics review. Nor does it seem to represent a sound statistical sampling of the staff and student population of the university.
Especially for an organisation as complex and interconnected as a university, it is good practice to stop after restructuring one department, in order to reflect on how the restructure process went (and whether it could be improved), and to assess whether the end result has indeed led to greater efficiency and better provision of services. This shows a duty of care to staff affected by the restructure process. Again, though, this has not been the case with the current restructures, which have been scheduled at such a rapid pace as to allow essentially no time for reflection whatsoever. At present, we are nearing the end of the consultation period for the restructure of Academic Programmes and Student Engagement (APSE), a new section under Academic Services. APSE comprises a series of teams which support and enhance the strategic design and delivery of all learning & teaching in this institution. They also support and develop the university workers who deliver that teaching, through 1:1 assistance, mentoring, and networks.
“I regularly call upon the knowledge and advice of this pool of talented and dedicated individuals to strengthen and inform the work I oversee, and it’s always been reassuring to know that network exists.”
The expertise of APSE staff is especially crucial in the current political climate, which sees external pressures on the HE sector in the form of proliferating metrics and acronym-ed drivers which regulate and control rather than support and inspire. This climate cannot be navigated without dedicated, specialist staff who understand how to consolidate and enhance the teaching we do. In this context, a restructure must take special care to preserve staff expertise, and to carefully consider the implications of staffing changes for academic workloads and associated wellbeing.
Instead of prioritising existing staff expertise, the APSE restructure has seen 65 out of 121 affected staff at risk of redundancy. It has resulted in the proposed deletion of the Grade 8 Learning & Teaching Development Manager roles, to which every Faculty currently has a dedicated person. Their job is to provide tailored support to academic teams, translating and implementing institutional strategy in a disciplinary context, and providing sound pedagogical advice. It has also seen the downgrading of capacity and expertise of the team which supports the professional development of academic colleagues in learning and teaching. This team, among other things, delivers the Sheffield Teaching Assistant programme and the Advance-HE accredited Certificate in Learning & Teaching, as well as supporting new teaching staff in passing their probationary period.
At the same time, the APSE consultation period has led to the proposal for the addition of a very healthy senior management structure.
In response to concerns about whether the proposed top heavy structure for APSE is adequately equipped to respond to the aforementioned sector pressures, we are told that academics will now be “in charge of their own development”. We are told that academic teams will not require the same support from professional services as we move to a Programme Level Approach, as they will be working as self-sufficient teams. We are not told that academics will suddenly have a lot of free time in which to do this. Time-allocation aside, the devaluing of significant expertise is devastating and damaging. These staff are the hubs of huge and active professional networks across TUoS, and their institutional perspective and links to external professional networks means significant loss of capacity for Sheffield.
This approach to the APSE restructure echoes what we saw in prior restructures of Research Services and Student Recruitment and Admissions, and we have no reason to believe that the restructures planned for Autumn 2018 will be approached any differently. We are deeply concerned that the wrong decisions are being made, based on poor quality data. Resources are being cut when they should be invested in; Sheffield is not a sector leader in these areas, but the establishment of these teams several years ago, and the work they have since delivered, means we have made huge gains. That expertise is being devalued when we are most in need of it, and services that have helped us to make significant progress are being cut off. Dedicated support is being withdrawn from academic departments at a challenging time for everyone. These concerns have been expressed during each restructure over the past 18 months and are, unfortunately, being overlooked. We believe that the employer is acting negligently in its duty of care to staff, by withdrawing support from crucial staff- and student-facing services and instead substituting a top-heavy management structure that lacks the capacity and expertise to replicate these services.
The employer is required to meaningfully consult with staff through collective consultation involving trade union representation, and trained representatives of TUoS Staffside trade unions have been working very hard to support staff undergoing restructures. However, it rapidly became clear that the pace of these restructures is simply unsustainable both for our trained representatives and for management. Our repeated concerns about this have not yet been addressed, and there is no evidence that management intends to reduce either the pace or scale of the restructures. We believe that the employer is acting negligently in its duty of care to staff, in terms of the scale and speed of implementation of the Professional Services Transformation Project.
You may not be consciously aware of all of the work that your professional services colleagues do, in APSE and elsewhere, and of the impact they have on the day to day operation of this university. But we are concerned that, if the restructure process continues in the same way it was begun, we will find ourselves singing along with Joni Mitchell: “you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone”.
STATEMENT ON OUTCOMES OF SHEFFIELD UCU CLAIM ON CASUAL TEACHING
Following over a year of negotiations, Sheffield UCU is pleased to announce a significant milestone in our ongoing campaign to improve terms and conditions for teaching staff. We have secured the following commitments from HR:
1. All planned, scheduled teaching will be delivered by staff engaged on employment contracts (as opposed to casual worker engagements) from September 20182. The default position would be to engage those who deliver teaching at the University on an employment contract3. An uplift to staffing budgets for affected departments linked to past casual teaching spend and need
Where appropriate, managers will be able to move current casual teaching staff onto fractional contracts as employees, on the same terms and conditions as other staff.
GTAs are already recognised as employees, and there is a specific set of terms and conditions specifically for PGR students who undertake teaching activities. We are next seeking to review this contract to allow greater flexibility on the grade of the role.
Whilst there is still a lot of work ahead of us, this is a major win. We are awaiting clarification on how these commitments will be implemented and monitored by management, and in the coming months we will specifically be seeking further assurances on:
Criteria for what constitutes a ‘visiting lecturer’ and associated thresholdsImprovements to GTA gradingAdvice and support provided to managers to implement this approach
We anticipate a phased implementation of these new procedures over the next academic year, and we ask that all UCU members pay close attention to how this policy is implemented in their departments and working environments. While this is a very positive move which Sheffield UCU welcomes, we need to ensure that no worker at this University is disadvantaged during the transition period. In order to do this we need your help – we want to consult with you and we need you to exercise #MaximumVigilance.
If you are currently teaching or have recently been teaching on a Casual Worker Agreement we strongly advise you to ask your line manager how this will affect you, particularly if you are expecting to be offered teaching next year.
We are therefore advising members to record:
1. their last date of teaching in academic year 17/18 and 2. seek confirmation from their line managers ASAP whether teaching will be available next academic year 3. If you are notified that there will be no work or if you do not receive confirmation within 3 months (less one day) of your last day of teaching.
The three months is a strict time limit which may enable the union to legally challenge the decision not to offer work, or protect your legal position if no confirmation has been forthcoming. We can only make a legal challenge for those members who have undertaken work for the University for a minimum of two years.
We want to consult with members directly affected by this but this may be difficult over the summer. To this end, if you would like to have a discussion with branch reps about how this will affect you please tell us! We will either offer one on one meetings or organise a collective meeting depending on demand and availability. Please approach your line manager to ask how this will affect you, let the branch committee know if you have any questions or would like support to understand how this will work, and tell us about how this new approach is being implemented where you work, by emailing ucu@sheffield.ac.uk
Our position is clear. Zero hours working has no place on campus. We welcome this positive step that takes us closer towards that aim, and we will continue to campaign for fair and secure employment for all University of Sheffield staff.
Jon Benson (Branch Secretary)
Sam Morecroft (Anti-casualisation Officer)
There have been many reports published already, including in the press, about what happened at Congress. Some of the substance of it is quite complicated, but in short: Congress was unable to debate motions that were on the agenda due to walkouts by UCU staff. Business was suspended on the first day and again on the last day (the second day is taken up by what are called the sector conferences, one for HE and one for FE, and those went very smoothly). We did not hear the majority of Congress motions that we were there to discuss on the first and third days.
(Before we go any further, you might find this explainer of UCU’s democratic structures useful. It’s by Rachel Cohen of City University and published by the ever-wonderful USS Briefs.)
So, what happened? The contentious motions included one that we submitted as a late motion calling for a democracy review (which was passed at one of our local EGMs), a motion of no confidence in the General Secretary (motion 10), and a censure of the General Secretary (motion 11). Unite, which represents UCU employees, produced a leaflet that was handed out to delegates on arrival to Congress arguing that debate on these motions represented ‘an attack on [their] trade union rights’ and the agreement that they have with UCU – on the grounds that these motions were critical of UCU employees – i.e. the General Secretary – without due process.
Our democracy review motion did not originally appear on Congress agenda due to Congress Business Committee ruling that it was ‘not Congress business’. We successfully challenged this decision and, after securing a 2/3rd majority vote from Congress (necessary within the rules to order a late motion back onto the agenda), our motion was admitted back on the agenda for discussion. This is when the first walkout happened.
Congress was suspended while the movers of the relevant motions discussed things with Unite reps. As a result of those discussions, we agreed to amend parts of the democracy review motion (which later passed in this form). Delegates from the other branches involved also spoke to Unite reps. You can read full accounts from Exeter (no confidence in the General Secretary) and KCL (censure of the General Secretary) of their experiences, including the pressure that they were put under to withdraw their motions.
Business was briefly resumed (and some excellent motions were passed) before a second walkout after Congress voted to hear motions 10 and 11. No further motions were passed that day. When we reconvened on Friday after the sector conferences on Thursday, we were again asked to vote on whether or not we should hear motions 10 and 11. Again we voted to hear them, and again UCU employees walked out. Congress was suspended again, and it was then announced by a member of UCU staff (the Chair did not return) that Congress was closed.
We share the view of delegates from Exeter and KCL that motions which were submitted in line with formal procedures and deemed legitimate by the Congress Business Committee, the body that orders the agenda, should have been heard. Delegates from those branches had no mandate from their members to withdraw their motions, and plenty of Congress delegates who did not support the motions did support keeping them on the agenda. The fact that the General Secretary is an employee does not override the fact that she is elected to represent the members of the union and is therefore accountable to them; she has a right of reply in Congress debate. We would have actively welcomed any intervention from her at any point in the process of discussing whether or not the motions should be heard. The General Secretary did not intervene at any point, despite being invited to by one of our delegates.
It is our view that neither motion 10 nor motion 11 would have passed straightforwardly had they been heard at the time they should have been. It is also our view that those members who were unhappy with the General Secretary before Congress are likely to be considerably more unhappy now. We believe that forcing the closure of the sovereign policy-making body of a trade union to prevent debate, discussion and public accountability for elected representatives is a very serious matter. We respect the right of any trade union to act in the best interests of its members, but we also believe that the General Secretary is accountable to the membership, including at Congress. As delegates we were broadly in agreement that we would vote for motion 11, which called for censure, but not for motion 10, which expressed no confidence in the GS and called for her resignation. In the light of the disruption this week, which surely could have been avoided had the GS been willing to face the scrutiny these motions represented, we are now minded to consider the matter in a different light.
This is a necessarily simplified account of what happened at Congress – there are many more details to share about how Congress was chaired, how senior UCU members responded to events, how delegates were prevented from proper discussion during suspension and so on. We would like to discuss these issues at our next meeting, and to update you on the motions that were passed at HE sector conference, many of which will be very significant over the next few months. You can read all of the motions that were passed here, and we strongly recommend that you do.
There were excellent discussions around building our campaign on pay. There was much discussion around USS pensions and the JEP. We submitted a motion on strengthening of the Superannuation Working Group, which was well received and overwhelmingly passed. Our amendment to motions relating to potential industrial action over pay, calling for the co-ordination of industrial action with FE and with other trade unions in other sectors, was welcomed by the delegates. Unfortunately we have to report that due to the disruption of full Congress our motion on local government austerity and our amendment on sexual harassment in education institutions were not discussed.
In her address to Congress, the General Secretary told us that membership of UCU has increased by 16,000 in the last year. She spoke, repeatedly, about how this has been a ‘turnaround’ year for UCU. We strongly agree. The membership is bigger, and more active; it has been transformed by the USS dispute and the FE fightback. Branches up and down the country are doing amazing work. As a branch we will continue to fight for a more democratic, member-led and campaigning union. This Congress should have been a celebration of our achievements, as well as a chance to strategise around the huge challenges we are facing together. Instead it was derailed, and ultimately we believe responsibility for this lies with the General Secretary.
An emergency motion for a recall Congress was passed on the Friday, which means that Congress will resume at some point to discuss the remaining business, including Motion 10 and 11. Our AGM takes place on Thursday and we’d urge you all to come along, whatever your views about the General Secretary. This amounts to a crisis moment for UCU: we need your views about where we go from here.
On the 16th April 2018 at a well-attended Emergency General Meeting of Sheffield UCU, we overwhelmingly passed the motion below calling for a democracy review of UCU. We then submitted it as a late motion to Congress, UCU’s annual meeting to determine national policy, which is being held this year between 30th May and 1st June. We also shared it with the participants at UCU Transformed, an activists’ day school hosted by London Region UCU on 28th April, which was attended by 150 UCU members from more than 20 branches.
Democracy Review Motion
Congress notes:
concerns from many branches and members about the processes behind the consultative ballot on the USS offer of 23rd March
the lack of inter-election mechanisms by which to recall or hold elected union representatives to account
most senior full time officials of the union are appointed rather than elected
Congress resolves:
to undertake a review before Congress 2019 of UCU’s democratic structures via a democracy commission, including but not limited to discussion of the appropriate number of full time elected officials and how elected representatives are to be held to account
that the commission should be elected by and from branches, regional committees, devolved nations and advisory committees of the union
to empower the commission to recommend changes to UCU’s democratic structures at a one-day special Congress, for discussion and voting on by branch delegates
We passed this motion, after some discussion, because we wanted to try to address the myriad issues raised by the USS dispute in a constructive way. Bath UCU passed the same motion and Bournemouth UCU one very similar. Many branches and many members of the union have expressed concern about the way in which the decision was made to ballot members about the UUK proposal of 23rd March. This included the fact that branch consultation was rushed through without proper time for discussion and debate, the lack of information around the offer, and the way in which the General Secretary’s office was used to encourage a vote to accept, despite no official recommendation being voted on by the Higher Education Committee.
There have been a range of responses to these concerns. More than 20 branches, including Sheffield, have called for a special Higher Education sector conference; there have been complaints about the General Secretary and some motions of no confidence in the General Secretary passed. As a branch, we believe that there are many questions that need answering about how the USS dispute has been handled, but we also believe that the questions of transparency, lack of information, and accountability raised in recent weeks have characterised previous national industrial disputes as well.
We believe that the best way to address these problems is to involve members and branches of the union in a conversation about how our union should work, and to seriously discuss whether our current national leadership structures are best suited to a campaigning, democratic and member-led union. We want to invite all branches to support this initiative, and be part of the discussion. This is not intended as a criticism of UCU as a union but a constructive assessment of where we are collectively. UCU is just 12 years old – the result of a merger between AUT and NATFHE – and is the biggest higher and further education union in the world. This is a fantastic achievement and is not in our eyes undermined at all by a frank conversation as to how the structures of the union function and how they can be improved.
UCU last underwent a democracy review in 2013, and you can read the report of that review here. However, this was a narrow process involving 10 Congress delegates, and not a wide ranging discussion within the union. We believe that since this review was undertaken, UCU has undergone several important shifts, not least throughout the USS and FE pay disputes currently ongoing. The political context nationally has also changed. We therefore believe that it is both timely and necessary to look again at how we work as a union, and that is why we passed the motion calling for a Democracy Review.
Unfortunately, this motion has been deemed not admissible to Congress by the Congress Business Committee (CBC). We have been told that the motion was ruled out of order because:
“it would involve Congress in decisions about the terms of appointment of the union’s officials, which is outside the scope of Congress under the rules of the union. Rule 29 makes it clear that this is the province of NEC as the employer of the union’s staff. Congress cannot pass motions inconsistent with the union’s rules.”
We are dismayed by this and dispute that it is a valid reason to rule out the motion. Rule 29, titled “Other Employees” does indeed state that:
29.1 Employees other than the General Secretary shall be engaged by the General Secretary under procedures agreed by the National Executive Committee.
29.2 Employees shall be engaged under conditions of employment agreed by the National Executive Committee.
What we are calling for is a review of our democratic structures, which should for us include a discussion on the appropriate term limits of elected full time officials, and also the appropriate number of elected full time officials. We have no interest in discussing or challenging the conditions of employment of “other employees”, which is what Rule 29 relates to, and we do not see this rule as relevant to a discussion about the term limits of elected representatives of the union.
We have also been told that it was the view of CBC that the motion “might be taken to include implied criticisms of staff, which is not allowed under Congress Standing Order 49ii.” Again, we want to make clear that we are not criticising employees of the union, who work hard for UCU and have no democratic authority themselves but can only implement the decisions of Congress, the NEC and the General Secretary. Our issue and the issue for all members as we see it is that we lack a cohesive collective leadership.
We believe that key issues we’re currently facing stem from the fact that UCU’s National Executive Committee is under-resourced, with elected representatives unable to access sufficient facility time to function as a leadership body of the union, and that this, combined with the fact that the only full-time elected official of the union is the General Secretary, means that an inordinate and perhaps unmanageable amount of power is concentrated in the hands of one person. We note that other similarly sized unions in Britain, like the PCS and the RMT, have two and four elected full time officials respectively, and smaller but better resourced and more visible National Executive Committees.
However, we understand that while looking again at the structure and function of our union leadership represents a good starting point to us, that other branches and bodies of the union may disagree. We don’t want to force our solutions on the union, but we do want to begin a discussion throughout the union’s structures on how we can most effectively continue the struggle to build a campaigning, democratic and member-led UCU. We ask that all UCU members discuss this idea, and that Congress delegates seriously consider supporting our challenge to CBC at Congress. We have achieved fantastic things together as a union over the last 12 years. We have a challenge ahead of us, but also an opportunity to develop the most cohesive, responsive, accountable and most importantly collective leadership for our union. Please support our challenge to CBC and our motion for a Democracy Review within UCU.
Jess Meacham (Sheffield UCU Education Officer)
Sam Morecroft (Sheffield UCU Anticasualisation Officer)
A 2017 Sheffield campaign in support international staff was overall successful, moving the university to a position of funding all visa, NHS and ILR fees for staff; providing dedicated HR support; and an interest-free loan facility for staff dependents. We hope that this report contributes to work across HE in improving conditions for international staff.
Background
Over the last decade, the UK’s border regime has become: (1) increasingly expensive; (2) administratively incomprehensible; and (3) arbitrary and punitive in application. Visa fees increase by 20-30% per annum and an NHS surcharge has been introduced. This functions essentially as a form of double taxation, and is due to double shortly. At the same time, our universities have responded to market pressures to recruit students by promoting themselves as international universities, with such slogans as #WeAreInternational, developed here at Sheffield. Since the 2016 Brexit vote, xenophobia has increased, with colleagues from the EU also becoming at increasing risk of falling foul of the Home Office’s xenophobic policies.
The HE sector also has hugely varied policies on international staff, from the ‘gold standard’ at places like St Andrews, where all visa, NHS and ILR (indefinite leave to remain) costs are covered for all staff and dependents, through the much more common situation elsewhere in the sector where international staff are negotiating this expensive and punitive system entirely on their own, without support from their employers. International colleagues at Sheffield and elsewhere had raised these matters individually with HR and management, often to be shut down with claims of costs being too expensive.
At Sheffield, a campaign was developed in early 2017 to push the university to put its money where its mouth was in terms of support for internationalisation. The campaign was overall successful, moving the university from a position of ‘no change to the status quo of essentially no support’ to fully funding all visa, NHS and ILR fees for staff; providing dedicated HR support and access to legal advice if necessary; and an interest-free loan facility for staff dependents. This isn’t everything we demanded – the university should also cover dependents and backpay international colleagues who have been disadvantaged by the university’s unwillingness to listen to their concerns – but the significant progress made here may be able to be replicated elsewhere.
We are not the only ones who have been working on these issues, with similar campaigning happening at other institutions. Notably Gareth Edwards at UEA helped generate some useful early national benchmarking and modeling of the overall costs, which informed our reporting to the university. Edwards’ work showed that an international staff member with a partner and two dependents would have to pay over 30% of their take-home salary just to cover visa fees. There are steps to connect up these local campaigns through the Twitter handle @intnlandbroke and the hashtag #internationalandbroke.
It is our hope that this report can contribute to some more joined up work across the UK in improving conditions for international staff and that the central UCU will support local branches in this cause to make our union truly international.
With movement across several institutions recently, and with stronger union memberships across the UK, now may be the moment when we can push this beyond local campaigns into a national one. We at Sheffield are happy to help other local branches in coordinating such a campaign.
Sheffield’s Strategy & Timeline
After the Brexit vote and Sheffield’s subsequent announcement of a suite of measures to support EU colleagues, the issues of non-EU international staff were raised with the local UCU and a joint organising group was set up to advance this work. Work continued through these two channels over 2017, sharing information and ideas between people working on this issue. Concerns were raised predominantly via two formal channels:
Union-management joint consultative committee meetings – the UCU raised this as a formal agenda item on their regular meetings with HR
Equality & Diversity – the Faculty of Social Sciences E&D committee established a working group on international staff (See Appendix B)
Prior to 2016 the University of Sheffield limited its Tier 2 visa cost reimbursement to in-country applications only. This arbitrary decision excluded many staff from being eligible for reimbursement. ILR and NHS fees and costs associated with dependents have not been covered by the university either. Following the Brexit Referendum, the University’s implemented financial and legal support for EU staff, leading to concerns about parity.
From early 2017 the existing local UCU campaign on issues affecting EU staff issues broadened to include issues affecting international staff. This was first raised formally at a joint union-management meeting in May. Individual meetings with HR were also held by individual staff and the E&D group in spring of 2017. Throughout the summer of 2017 the issue stalled with HR, with multiple joint union-management meetings postponing the issue and little to no information provided to individual staff despite repeated contacts.
In Autumn 2017 the University’s Executive Board cited Brexit uncertainty as a basis for making no changes to existing provision. This decision was made based on spurious benchmarking, not against the Russell Group which Sheffield often sees itself in competition with, but against a selection of post-92 universities with no support for international staff, painting Sheffield’s provision in a more positive light. HR’s report was also not developed with international staff, despite reassurances this would occur.
UCU decided to ramp up its campaign through the development of a survey of international staff about their concerns, which would provide material evidence of dissatisfaction and could form the basis of a future public campaign. The survey generated 72 responses from EU and non-EU colleagues and documented widespread dissatisfaction with the University management. A motion demanding more support for international staff was taken to a local branch general meeting and passed unanimously (see Appendix A). A soft release of the critical report to internal stakeholders, Sheffield UCU members and HR prompted immediate response from HR announcing plans to create a dedicated web resource and offer 1-on-1 consultations with HR.
Further, a meeting with the Vice-Chancellor and representatives of all campus unions and international staff was also scheduled for early 2018. With a change of tone, HR and VC had now become enthusiastic about what the university could provide, while constantly referring to budgetary constraints. That meeting pledged to develop joint HR-union paper on agreed points, primarily full funding for all visa, NHS and ILR fees for staff and provision of dedicated HR support and referrals to external legal advice as required. Costs associated with dependents to be supported through interest free loan. As a matter of urgency, the UEB passes a motion to a substantially enhance its support for international staff.
Lessons learned
There is widespread anger amongst both EU and non-EU staff about how universities have responded to the Brexit vote and the broader shifts in immigration policy over the last decade.
Many international staff are struggling to cover the exorbitant fees. Annual increases in the 20-30% range will only make this more unsustainable.
University administrators and union branches are largely unaware of issues affecting international staff, either through passive ignorance in the case of the union, or perhaps something more wilful in the context of HR departments.
UCU branches are generally overstretched, but when presented with evidence ‘get it’ and are willing to offer support. The same is true for other campus unions, despite having less international staff in their membership bases.
Individual cases will be ignored by HR and management. But when pooled, evidence is harder to ignore.
A multi-pronged approach may provide different pressure points on university management.
There may be scope for further exploration of the E&D implications of discriminatory support provision.
Linking up the issues of EU and non-EU international staff is keyto provide most leverage for gaining concessions.
Ultimately, universities are only concerned about their public image. For Sheffield, pushing on the hypocrisy of the #WeAreInternational campaign, and the luck in timing this around the time our VC was looking at legacy issues, was helpful. There will be other PR pressure points at your local institution.
Appendix A: #WeAreInternational motion passed at branch meeting 29/11/17
In light of heightened and rather polarised discussion of policies on immigration in the UKl, and uncertainty over EU colleagues in particular, Sheffield UCU is concerned whether the University is supporting our international colleagues appropriately.
This Branch notes that the University provides the following support provision to its non-UK EU and non-EU international staff:
Information and guidance: comprehensive guidance on starting a life in the UK for international staff
Dedicated staff pages for non-UK EU since the EU Referendum, with the availability of legal advice on their immigration status following the EU Referendum.
The University reimburses the cost of Tier 2 visa extensions for non-EU staff.
The University reimburses the cost of Permanent Residency cards for non-UK EU staff.
This Branch further notes that the outcomes of its staff survey circulated in October and November 2017 showed serious concerns amongst both non-UK EU and non-EU international staff in regards to several areas. These issues raised cover a wide range of topics, such as:
Lack of communication on post-arrival compliance with visa rules;
Lack of legal support for non-EU international staff;
Lack of financial assistance with the ever-increasing visa costs for non-EU international staff;
The impact of the EU Referendum and the resulting legal uncertainties on the sense of belonging of non-UK EU colleagues.
Therefore this Branch calls for the University of Sheffield to become sector leading in its support to non-UK EU and non-EU International colleagues to honour the principles of its award winning #WeAreInternational campaign. More specifically, this Branch calls on the University to support its non-UK EU and non-EU international staff adequately and equitably via the following procedures:
Comprehensive information and support provision and corresponding legal advice to non-EU international colleagues, or inquiring on behalf of family members and dependents.
Continue to inform and support non-UK EU staff as the Brexit negotiations continue, acknowledging the emotional pressure that the uncertainties cause.
Reimburse initial visa costs and Indefinite Leave to Remain costs to non-EU international.
Reimburse costs for colleagues with international dependents in meeting visa, indefinite leave to remain, or permanent residency costs.
Appendix B: Why Equality and Diversity?
Any expense levied at a particular subset of staff raises questions of equality and diversity in the university, particularly given longstanding issues around gender pay gaps and gendered career pipelines. Colleagues with dependents are also adversely affected by the cumulative nature of visa fees (ie. each fee is levied on each applicant, so costs quickly accumulate). So we felt that there were specific E&D issues around gender and care responsibilities that were not being addressed by the universities’ policies.
Our investigations also revealed a potential under the race discrimination provisions for us to raise the differential treatment being provided to EU and non-EU staff (race discrimination law in the UK specifically highlights national identity as one subset of definitions of ‘race’). While we are not aware of this particular element of the law being tested in this context, the FSS committee felt that there was enough there to be able to pursue these matters through E&D channels. We would encourage further conversations about how we may be able to marshall equality and diversity provisions in universities in support of international staff.