Letter to CoSector

Sally Townsend

CoSector

University of London

Dear Sally

We are writing to you to express our members’ deep reservations on the future direction of CoSector.

Since the change of management took place last year, we have been broadly supportive of your efforts to restructure the business in order for it to grow. We welcomed your apparent abandonment of the proposals to alter terms and conditions for new and existing staff; and in return we accepted the argument that the new senior management team would remain in place for the purposes of growing CoSector’s business.

However, developments in the past week, which seem to be widely known within all parts of CoSector, have cause great concern, not just for those directly affected, but other members who now fear for their futures’ within the organisation.

To be clear, we refer to the proposed changes to TCG Central Services team and Online Services team. If these proposals are implemented, it will lead to the compulsory redundancy of four staff, with the implication that future downsizing will occur once changes take place.

We were lead to believe that no redundancies would take place in the short term and certainly not before the publication of the long awaited business plan, which you have not provided to neither the Board of Trustees nor unions as of this date.  We appreciate that these matters should not be rushed into and consequently we strongly urge you to postpone these proposals for the time being.

You should note that UCU and UNISON have a policy of opposing all compulsory redundancies and we oppose these proposals now. We will be seeking to involve our respective national unions, via the London regional offices.

We find it very unfortunate that many of the concerned members believe that the faults of the business lie with the management that was imposed last year. In particular, the high cost base that is being shared amongst budgets, causing once surplus deriving teams to fall into a loss.  As we have said, we recognise that in order to grow and be successful CoSector needs good and effective management in place. This is not necessarily cheap.  However, your latest round of proposals implies that the business is trying to cut costs and downsize. This is not the strategy of a business trying to grow. Members can see this quite clearly and are dismayed.

We look forward to your response on this urgent matter.

Best

Jon Bitmead

On behalf of the Senate House UCU branch

  

Sam Ferman

On behalf of the Senate House UNISON branch

ICE Vote

The Information and Consultation Elections ballot opens on 7th March 2016. Please take a look at our ICE Vote page for more information.

ICE Vote Page

UNISON Annual Leave Claim

Today (28 January 2016), UNISON – Senate House and EdExcel branch submitted the following claim to the University of London on behalf of University of London members working in grades 1 – 6.

UNISON Annual Leave Claim  Bands 1-6 University of London

  

In line with clause 1.1 and 3.3 of the Recognition and Procedure Agreement between the University of London (“the central University) and UNISON we wish to table the following claim on behalf of all UNISON members employed in grades 1-6.

UNISON wish to open immediate negotiations with the University to secure parity across all grades in respect of annual leave entitlement as set out within the University Annual Leave Policy that currently facilitates for:

1.2    Employees on Academic or Administrative, Management and Professional (AMP) terms of conditions of employment with the Central University receive 6 weeks leave. Employees in other grades receive 5 weeks.

UNISON firmly believe that this policy contradicts one of the founding  principles of the University namely equality “that remains a commitment today in respect of all staff employed by the University”

We further believe the current clause 1.2 brings into question clause 3.2 of the University Single Equality Scheme.

The Claim

All employees, regardless of grade, employed by the University of London will receive 6 weeks annual leave.

We seek to open negotiations around this claim as a matter of urgency and at your earliest opportunity and further  seek to have the claim met in full and at no cost to our members.

CoSector Update

This message is primarily for those in CoSector, but do read on in any case.

We (UCU and Unison) met with Sally Townsend, Chris Cobb, Kim Frost and Matt Thorne recently to discuss the future of CoSector. This is part of our relationship with the University of being recognised unions.

The meeting was good natured and was a significant improvement on the style of previous meetings held under strained circumstances.

Things we learned:

1     - All CoSector staff are meeting with management today to receive the same information as we received yesterday. Of course, you might not have been able to attend.

2     - There is an informal recruitment freeze. This does not mean new staff can’t be appointed, especially if a member of staff chooses to leave, but creating new posts will be considerably harder in the short term and will need a formal business case in order to prevent creating roles which are not needed under the business plan.

3     - The Cosmos project is being shut down. We were told there will be no redundancies.

4     - The business plan is being formulated. The board of trustees will be expecting an update in January 2016 and a full version by March 2016.

5     - Any change of terms and conditions was not proposed by the University at this stage, and we welcomed this. The senior management are on “CoSector Terms and Conditions”. We noted that we had never seen nor been consulted on these terms and conditions. The University has said it may choose to extend these T+Cs to new appointments but not any time soon.

We were given assurance that all staff have and continue to be given the opportunity to feed back into the Business case formulation and on a practical level staff are being encouraged to come up with new areas of business or ways of improving current business.

Please let us know if you have any comments or concerns by writing to unison@london.ac.uk

CoSector Update: Anthony Kemp resigns as CEO

The University announced yesterday, Thursday 8 October, that the CEO of CoSector, Anthony Kemp,  had resigned with immediate effect.

UNISON – along with our sister union UCU - has expressed some serious concerns to the University about the establishment of CoSector which would see the establishment of a two-tier workforce within some of our core services.

We don’t believe that the university should set up a company that will move away from national pay bargaining, giving employees different (possibly less) annual leave and denying future employees in these services access to the SAUL and USS pension schemes.

We believe that different terms and conditions are divisive and there must be better ways to deliver improved services in the future.

There is still considerable uncertainty about the direction of travel CoSector will assume. There is still much to discuss. The University knows our views. However, this announcement demonstrates that both Unison and UCU lobbying of University management can influence.

Your union can make positive changes in the workplace. Therefore, please encourage your colleagues to join. The more of us there are, the more we can achieve.

If your colleagues haven’t yet joined UNISON then they can do so here:

https://www.unison.org.uk/join

In the meantime, please feel free to share your views.

CoSector Update

We write to our members employed in the three shared services, Careers, Housing and the University’s Computer Centre, re their proposed amalgamation into a new company, CoSector.

The two recognised unions (unison and UCU) have been pressing management for more clarity as to the proposed arrangements.

After a meeting with Anthony Kemp on 23 July, we have been promised that, when CoSector is set up:

• All staff will remain employed by the University, on UoL terms and conditions. There will be no TUPE process. (However, please note what might happen in the longer term; see below) 

• There will be no change to pensions – you will stay members of USS or SAUL, if you are already members of these schemes.

• There will be no redundancies – compulsory or otherwise.

• There will be no downgrading in roles.

• There will be no changes to existing job descriptions.

In the longer term ….

Anthony Kemp has stated that new terms and conditions are being drawn up (we have not seen them yet) but staff will have a ‘choice’ as to whether to stick to UoL T&Cs or opt for the new CoSector ones. Our concern is that, choice or no choice, this will create a two-tier workforce with two sets of terms of conditions. We have made our opposition to this development very clear.

We asked Anthony Kemp if new starters, or existing staff promoted to new roles, will have a choice of T&Cs offered to them or whether they will be automatically be assigned to CoSector T&Cs. There was no clear answer but he did  agree that until the end of January 2016, all new starters and all promotions will join or stay on UoL T&Cs and won’t be offered a choice of new CoSector T&Cs. This was a concession on his part – we will strive to make sure it is not just a temporary one.

We realise that this is an unsettling time for staff and the lack of timely and clear updates have not helped. There are still many questions unanswered. If you have concerns then please let us know. There will be a further meetings with management to negotiate these issues in greater detail. We will keep you posted with further updates as and when we have them. Union reps will also be walking around the various services over the coming weeks so you will have an opportunity to ask us questions/raise concerns face-to-face. We’ll let you know.

Finally, please encourage your colleagues who are not members of either unison or UCU to join. The stronger we are, the more influence we will all have to shape the future of our workplaces.  Please feel free to pass this news onto any concerned colleagues and look out for further updates.

Cofely Update

UNISON is working with Cofely to arrange free English language courses. If you would like to improve your English then please speak to your supervisor to let them know that you are interested.

Following the success of the UNISON and UCU London weighting campaign last year, UNISON has lodged a London weighting claim for the workers who were TUPE’d from University of London to BBW (now Cofely). Cofely has confirmed that this will be discussed at the meeting in
July 2015.

Following a recent case in the Employment Appeals Tribunal (EAT) there are changes in the ways in which holiday pay should be calculated which should give an increased holiday pay to those working overtime. UNISON has been discussing this with Cofely who are working on a new national policy. Once we have information we will send this out to members.

UNISON is asking both the University of London and Cofely about who will be running the contract from November 2015 when the contract is due for renewal. We haven’t been given an update yet but watch this space.

If you have any questions, would like to get more involved, would like to go on a training course or talk to a union representative please call Dario Lopez on 07904 342453 or email d.lopez@unison.co.uk.