redundancies

On 29^th January 2020, following a Joint Negotiating and Consultative Committee (JNCC) meeting at which a failure to agree was recorded, Kingston UCU branch wrote to senior management in accordance with the Collective Disputes Procedure.

It is the branch’s view that there has been no consultation or negotiation about the need to make £1.5m worth of staff savings in the School of ArCC and Department of CHS nor about the decision to instigate a voluntary severance scheme to effect those savings in part. Instead our members have been asked to blindly accept the amount of cuts and the need for voluntary redundancies. It is therefore clear that Kingston University has already made a strategic decision that has subsequently led to redundancies and that any following proposal for a 45-day consultation period is meaningless.

Given Kingston University’s complete failure to engage with the usual information, consultation and negotiation structures relating to these changes, UCU have no option but to reasonably conclude that those processes would be futile in this instance. Therefore the formal disputes procedure has been invoked.

If you want to contribute to this process and/or have evidence to input please contact us. Please come to the branch meeting on Tuesday 25^th February or Wednesday 26^th February to discuss this and other urgent matters facing our branch.

Back in December, we submitted an open letter to the Dean of KSA, Mandy Ure, expressing our concerns about the portfolio review process currently underway in KSA (you can see the letter here). We received a (fairly) unsatisfactory response from the Dean:

The response is somewhat disingenuous in terms of the Kingston UCU position, which is (and always has been) that we are against any redundancies but if these are unavoidable then our preference is for individually negotiated voluntary severances rather than compulsory redundancies.

As usual, KU management are consulting after making decisions when UCU should be involved in the decision-making processes to seek to mitigate job losses. There seems to be a clear and fixed intention already to make redundancies and a decision about how to make at least some of those redundancies seems to have been made. Voluntary redundancies are still redundancy dismissals in that an employer cannot decide on how many applications for voluntary redundancy to accept until it has decided upon where and how many redundancy dismissals may take effect. There is also an obligation to consult about ways to mitigate the effect of any dismissals and UCU have not been involved in this prior to the issuing of any VS notices. Given that there has been a portfolio review in KSA for a number of months now to which UCU has not been invited, we feel that it is very likely that the university is in breach of our Facilities Agreement with them. This is a very serious issue.