Extraordinary General Members’ Meeting
Wednesday 20 September
12.00 

BUCU members will have seen the news that the UCU Higher Education Committee (HEC) met on Friday and decided to provide each local UCU branch with the option of calling off the planned 5 days (25-29 Sep) of strike action.

For now, the strike action remains on!  As agreed at our last members’ meeting, we intend to target Monday 25 Sep and Wednesday 27 Sep as days for strike rallies. The other three days, members are encouraged to strike, especially on days you believe your action will have most impact.

We (BUCU) have now written to the University management – Provost Stephen Jarvis – requesting an urgent meeting to negotiate an improvement to the current situation, given that we now have the option of calling off the strike action.

Any improvement – including over the potentially unlawful 50% pay deductions that we suffered as a result of the MAB, or on the range of related issues we are currently negotiating (incl. support for research staff on fixed-term contracts, nursery provisions, support for disabled staff, facilities time to represent part-time/fixed-term staff) – can be taken into account in our deliberations on whether to continue with the strike.

It is now entirely in the hands of the University management to do something to avoid this strike action. It’s time for the managers to manage the situation. We don’t need any more handwringing or management claims to be ‘deeply disappointed’. 

In order to consider our options, we have now called an Extraordinary General Members’ Meeting to take place on Wednesday at 12.00. (Zoom details above).

This meeting will also be an opportunity to report back from our negotiations with Provost Stephen Jarvis, and to decide whether to continue with the strike action.

Please make every effort to attend, as this meeting we will directly decide on the question of the 5 days of strike action planned for Week 1 of term.

If you have any concrete proposal that you wish to put to the meeting, please email it to the branch secretary by 10am on Wednesday at the latest.

BUCU committee