Union Busting at Westminster University?

 allow management to sideline the unions - union recognition must mean that  any changes to pay or conditions are agreed. If they do it here they will undoubtedly do it on other issues. This is dangerous at a time when there is a real threat to jobs across the HE sector. [...] Union members will lose the protection of the union in matters related to this agreement. Management will claim that as they have agreed to non-negotiated terms they will not have to talk to the union about them. This may also weaken the union¹s ability to help in other ways.

It will also lead to "the creation of a two-tier work-force with members who have not signed doing the same work but with different rates of pay and on different pay bands with different London weighting. This is divisive and may well be subject to legal challenge."

The management offer does not include the backdating of pay, which the union claims is the only instance of a UK University that has not back-dated their framework agreement.Such reactionary tactics may also lead to many students choosing not to go to Westminster, as news of such regressive management gets out through the grapevine. It really seems that management may be shooting itself in the foot!Letters of support, which may be left as comments on this post, are urgently needed. Letters of support can also be sent directly to: ucu@wmin.ac.uk  Some Background:  During periods of recession, many return to education; enrollment has gone up at many institutions, including for postgraduate programs. Absurdly, this is also a time when we are seeing massive cutbacks and redundancies in education.  In some cases, a poor showing on the 'Research Assessment Exercise' (RAE) is used as an excuse to cut departments (as in the defeated attempt to close the Politics and Communication, Statistics and Philosophy departments at the University of Liverpool). In other cases, departments are cut for no apparent reason, such as current attempts to axe French, Spanish and Chinese at the University of West of England.  In other cases, there are attempts to outsource and cut IT and student support. One example of this is the move to privatise email at several institutions through the use of corporate services such as Microsoft Exchange (which has implications for privacy and accessibility).  The worst, of course, is the case of London Metropolitan University, which stands to lose 550 members of staff (1/4 of the workforce), due to a 'claw back' of £38 million in funding based on inaccurate reporting of student completion rates -- in essence asking students and staff pay for the incompetence of management.

It is also a time when management in universities are trying to consolidate executive power and control. These sorts of decisions are often made with very little consultation or communication; they are often simply handed down and people are told they have simply no choice but to accept. Although procedures for avoiding redundancies do exist (they are meant to be a last resort, not a first option) they has been little in the way of serious consideration of alternatives. All this takes place at a time when the average salary for university vice-chancellors has now risen to £194,000, according to the  Times Higher Education's latest survey.

'Pay Packets of Excellence'. 19 March 2009, Times Higher Educationhttp://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/story.asp?sectioncode=26&storycode=405805&c=2