We look forward to welcoming and hearing from our guest speakers Lambeth College strikers and Students Union Officers. Its a great opportunity for us to offer our support to colleagues. A collection towards the Lambeth College strike fund will also be taken.
This should be a lively meeting so please do come along. In addition to our guest speakers business will include the election of next year’s Branch Committee and Branch Officers.
A sandwich lunch will be served at 12.45 and an Annual Report will be available on the day. Venue: Council Chamber, Octagon.
Members of UCU will begin indefinite strike action at Lambeth College on Tuesday 3 June. Members will walk out next week and have vowed not to return to work until their increasingly bitter dispute over proposed changes to terms and conditions is resolved.
Representatives of Lambeth UCU striking workers will be touring Yorkshire Branches next week and will be talking to us at our AGM next Thursday 12th June 1-2pm (Council Chamber, Octagon Centre).
Message from Mandy Brown, Lambeth College UCU Branch Secretary:
Dear colleagues
On behalf of our branch, thank you to everyone who was at Congress, and beyond, for the support and solidarity you have shown to our members, and the very generous donations we’ve received.
Lambeth Strike now has a website up and running here:
We are very pleased the University has won the THE Number 1 for Student Experience award. It’s significant that Sheffield has won it as this is a University with a campaigning activist students union which has strongly supported the industrial action which staff have undertaken this year, while the survey was being done. The support from students during our dispute was great and very welcome. We are proud to have been working in solidarity with the Students Union, rejecting the view of students as ‘customers’ and welcoming them instead as part of our learning community and future colleagues.
SUCU Lunchtime workshop: How do researchers and other casualised academics suffer from insecure contracts, and how do we cope with it?
Wed May 7, 1-2pm
TV Lounge, Octagon Centre, Western Bank S10 2TQ.
May 7 is National UCU Anti-casualisation Day and to mark it we are inviting all Sheffield researchers and other casualised academics to bring their lunch and their friends to discuss how casualisation has affected them and how they handle it.
Most of us got into academia on unrealistic expectations of career progression and teaching jobs, but the reality now is that most (5/6) of us will work on a series of casualised contracts well into our 40s, and often our 50s and beyond. Despite this, research is now big, well-funded business (200M/year at Sheffield) and has become a lifetime career for many of us.
How does casualisation affect your family life and productivity? Are you planning to stay “mobile”, and delay or avoid having children? Does this risk destroying your marriage or relationships with your kids, and are you concerned about the increased risks of health problems that are sometimes associated with delayed parenthood? Will your partner follow you around? Does regular redundancy make it harder to concentrate at work? How do we manage to collaborate with our colleagues when we know that we will be competing with them to get on the next grant? Or do you relish the idea of constant change and new places in your career, and want to share your tips on how to thrive as a casualised academic?
Please come along to discuss all this and more. Non-members welcome.
Circulate the marking boycott slides – contains detailed information about what the marking boycott will involve.
Add a signature line to your emails, eg: “From 28 April I will be supporting the UCU marking boycott. This is part of the campaign for fair pay in HE; for further details see: http://fairpay.web.ucu.org.uk/he-resources/#.UzLBPYVX1IG“
Come to the special Branch Meeting arranged for Thursday 1st May, 1pm (LT6 Hicks Building) and a further Branch Meeting on 14th May 1pm (Council Chamber,Octagon Centre).