We are very pleased to say that at our General Meeting last week we agreed to resolve our dispute with management over their failure to adequately support staff when MRC pulled SPHSU’s funding. The concessions made by management were in the email sent out on Thursday afternoon, but this is a great result for our members, and we should all be proud that the solidarity we showed with SPHSU members resulted in such a positive outcome.
One aspect of this victory that will play out over the next several months is an agreement by senior management to develop a trial to move some research staff onto open-ended contracts, to bring them into line with most lecturers, technicians, and administrative staff in the university. Shamefully, this trial will be almost unique across the whole Higher Education sector*, never mind in the University of Glasgow, and so is a really important step forward for the reduction of casualised employment for research staff in HE.
UCUG is involved in designing this trial, and the first meeting about it happened yesterday. We now need your help to make it a success. If you are involved in research as research staff or PI/Co-I on grants, or in other roles such as a project administrator or Director of Research for your school, you likely have vital information that will help make this trial work. Please fill out this survey – https://forms.office.com/e/cQ37kqZcxg – which we think should take about 5 minutes in most cases, so we can get a picture of where trials of moving researchers onto open-ended contracts might have the best chance of success in the University.
If you have other thoughts, or you’d like to get involved, please feel free to email us or the anti-casualisation group – ucug-anticas@glasgow.ac.uk. We really value any insights you may have, and we’d welcome anyone who wants to get involved in working on this!
In solidarity
UCU Glasgow
* UCU launched a researcher manifesto on exactly this topic in January – https://www.ucu.org.uk?mediaid=14731 – and the first major trial that we are aware of has recently started at the University of Bath. The only existing group at UofG that we are aware of that was specifically set up like this is MVLS’s Research Software Engineering (RSE) group, with the first staff employed in that group last November. Similar RSE groups exist in most universities in the UK. However, apart from the Robertson Centre for Biostatistics, which provides statistical and clinical trials expertise at UofG, we are not aware of other groups either inside UofG or in other universities that operate like this.