Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Hanging tough
29 October 2009
Keith Burnett, the chairman of Ucea, is ready to take a hard line with the unions over pay and job security
The new chairman of the Universities and Colleges Employers Association seems unfazed by the news that four of the five campus unions have rejected its 0.5 per cent pay offer. The University and College Union, Unite, GMB and EIS have refused to play ball, but Keith Burnett doesn't think this will lead to industrial action of the scale seen in 2006. Pay has improved considerably over the past three years, he said, and the economic climate is very different.
"It's unlikely people will want to enter a dispute at this difficult time. It would be destructive and horrible for the sector," he added.
UCU has asked Ucea to reopen negotiations, but Professor Burnett doesn't think it is "worth going back into direct talks on pay because we have such a clear mandate on the current position".
Under the Joint Negotiating Committee for Higher Education Staff (JNCHES) mechanism, each of the four unions must individually invoke dispute procedures, which will then lead to talks facilitated by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service. Unite is already in Acas- facilitated talks with Ucea, having officially declared a dispute with the employers in the summer.
All five unions wrote to Ucea on 19 October, pointing out that following the JNCHES procedure would be "a long drawn-out means of tackling our differences". The letter asks for "constructive dialogue about a jointly agreed and national approach to job security", and says that the employers themselves introduced the link between pay and job security by suggesting that rises would lead to job cuts.
Professor Burnett gives little sign that Ucea will budge on the job protection issue any more than on pay. "We can't negotiate locally," he said. "Our role is to share best practice. It's not about telling people what to do, but we understand there are concerns across the sector."
At the University of Sheffield, where Professor Burnett has been vice-chancellor since 2007, 320 employees are leaving under a voluntary redundancy scheme - 5 per cent of staff - as part of a bid to plug a £25 million funding gap. But universities are doing their best to avoid redundancies, he said, despite suggestions that some are using the recession to cut jobs in a way that would be difficult to justify in times of prosperity.
"When discussing this, I haven't encountered the 'excuse of the downturn'," he said. "I've heard a lot of 'bloody hell, this is hard'. We are well aware of the quality of our staff and how hard people are working. My personal view is that there isn't a lot of slack in the system. We need to convince the Government and the public of that."
melanie.newman@tsleducation.com.
Readers' comments
Interesting that the 'its a hard time' and 'we are all in this together' hasn't resulted in lazy management winding in the slack or taking pay cuts, instead expecting people with no spare cash above subsistance to do it instead. The BS is blinding.
Yup, how hard can it be to "hang tough" on a professor's salary?
Here's some stats - a cleaner earns circa £10K a year - a senior admin/registrar earns circa £50K a year - number of cleaners losing their jobs where I work, around 20 full and part-time - saving circa £150K (part time causing the gap). Number of new senior admin positions created last year 5, costing nearly £250K. Number of people they promoted to work in nne psitions beneath them? 18. Cost £400K. New cleaning management team promoting new structures (now stairs cleaned bi MONTHLY and corridors once a week) - cost £50K. Do those figures add up to anything but gravy-training?
What would be interesting would be whether all the cleaners are the sole breadwinners - in my place many men in manual work have lost their jobs and female cleaners are main breadwinners. This means that sacking cleaners in the example above will send 20 families into poverty. Someone on £50K plus a year (in the top 5% of earnings) will not be dropped into poverty and surprisingly is often the second earner in a household where the household income is over £100K a year - putting them in the top 1% of households in terms of income. When a person on £50K a year drops their salary to £40K a year, they are keeping themselves in the top 10% of earnings, keeping their job and makeing sure that cleaners and junior staff don't get thrown back on a subsistence/poverty heap. When we are 'all in it together' shouldn't this be the attitude rather than raking in more for myself. As I've said before, perfomance management is activlely resisted in HE because managers are often lazy - they work a lot but ineffectively, but still take home salaries at a level that would demand far greater performance and effectiveness in industry.