As we said a few weeks ago, Lina, our amazing branch organiser / administrator since 2019, has moved on to greater things as Branch Development Officer for UCU Scotland as a whole. We are therefore looking to recruit a new person into our local branch organiser position, and the advert has just gone live…

It’s a permanent job at £42.7k pro rata for 22.5 h/wk (so £27.5k) – roughly the equivalent of an MPA mid-grade-7 role at UofG. The job advert and details for application are here:

https://www.ucu.org.uk/vacancies#BAO5

The main job is obviously to keep the branch running through maintaining membership lists and organising meetings, but also particularly through supporting the development and implementation of recruitment and organising strategies, organising events and meetings to support local campaigns, and building and maintaining networks of activists.

It’s a critical role for the branch, so please do advertise it as widely as you can – as a branch, UCU Glasgow has been incredibly lucky to have Lina in this role for the last six years, and we hope to have someone equally brilliant and enthusiastic to keep us all organised for the next many years to come…

Closing date for applications is 5th June at 10am.

If you would like to talk to someone about the role, please do get in touch with any of the officers or committee – https://glasgow.web.ucu.org.uk/committee – or you could contact Lina directly to find out what it has been like – https://ucuscotland.wordpress.com/about/

The deadline to submit your nomination to join the UCU Glasgow Branch Committee for 2025/26, is 5pm on Tuesday, 20 May 2025. The new branch committee will be elected at the AGM on Wednesday, 4 June 2025 from 12 until 1.30pm. We have a number of long-standing members stepping down from their roles, including Richard Reeve as President and Vladimir Unkovski-Korica as Secretary. We are therefore calling on members to seriously consider a position on the branch committee.

To nominate yourself, please fill out this form and ask two members to email ucug@glasgow.ac.uk, cc’ing our Branch Secretary at Vladimir.Unkovski-Korica@glasgow.ac.uk, quoting your name and the position you want to stand for (there are 31 committee positions including 8 officer positions, but shared positions are possible). Please also see here for an explanation of each branch role.

A list of positions is copied below, and please note that it is possible to job-share a role. If you have any questions about a role, or what sitting on the Committee entails, you can get in touch with current office holders to ask more about their position – https://glasgow.web.ucu.org.uk/committee – they are happy to answer any questions. For more information please email any of the officers (again on the website) or us all on ucug-officers@glasgow.ac.uk.

Serving on the branch committee is an important leadership role and reflects the strengths of our diverse membership. We have been a vibrant and successful branch over the years, and we anticipate the need for an active union in coming years as the sector faces multiple challenges on account of years of market mismanagement and government neglect. You can help ensure we meet these challenges by standing for a position and becoming more involved.

UCUG Positions

• President
• Honorary Secretary
• Vice-President
• Honorary Treasurer
• Organising Officer
• Equalities Officer (or representative*) and Equalities, LGBTQ+ and Migrant Members Representatives (4 positions)
• Anti-casualisation Officer (or representative*) and Fixed Term Staff and Graduate Teaching Assistant Representatives (3 positions)
• Sustainability Officer (or representative*)
• Health & Safety Representative
• Casework Co-ordinator
• Communications Representative
• Constituency representatives (see also Equalities and Anti-casualisation roles, above):
• Colleges and University Services Representatives (2 per area – CoAH, CoSE, CoSS, MVLS and US) (10 positions)
• Management, Professional & Administrative and Technical & Specialist Representatives (2 positions)
• PGR Rep
• Pensions Representative
• Retired Members Representative

* Please note that there are some positions (Equalities, Anti-casualisation, Sustainability) where you can decide to either become a Branch Officer or just sit on the Committee – for these positions you should state if you wish to stand as an officer or a representative on the form when you stand.

In case you’re uncertain, the principal difference between officers and committee members is that officers are empowered to negotiate on behalf of the branch with management. Although they mostly have their own specific areas of interest, they do regularly cover for one another as needed. They also meet more regularly to keep on top of all of the issues that are arising in the branch. As a result they tend to have more buyout from their day jobs (“facilities time”) to allow them to carry out these duties, where money goes back to their schools / business units to allow other staff to cover their time.

We write to convey the UCU Glasgow branch’s deep concern over the continuing failure to resolve the dispute with UCU Unite, as a result of which you have forced them to commence another round of industrial action to defend their working conditions.

In our own disputes, we often endure public attacks from employers who seek to de-legitimise our position in disputes and shift blame onto us in attempt to force us to accept poor offers. It is upsetting to see similar rhetoric from our own union leadership towards the representatives of the staff our union employs. As a trade union, where we employ staff we should seek to behave as a role model of positive engagement in industrial relations.

Furthermore, industrial action arising from this dispute has now caused the last-minute cancellation of the 2024 Sector Conferences as well as the postponement of the 2025 UCU Scotland Congress. This endangers the democratic accountability of our union and cannot be allowed to continue.

As instructed by two resolutions of our General Meeting of 27 March, we therefore call upon you to take immediate steps to resolve the dispute, to remove the vitriol from communications regarding the dispute, and to give Unite an opportunity to communicate with all UCU members.

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.

The University and College Union Glasgow (UCUG) is gravely concerned at the response of the university’s governing bodies to peaceful student protests relating to divestment and the ongoing genocide in Gaza.

The way to deal with a student occupation and hunger strike should be to engage immediately with the students whose health and wellbeing is in danger, not to refuse to call an emergency meeting of Court to discuss student demands, nor indeed to invite police on campus for three days in a row to intimidate protesters.

We in UCUG have been clear that we wish to see divestment from the arms industry and a just peace in Palestine. We will also continue to vocally oppose the global crackdown on basic human rights and civil liberties on staff and students involved in the divestment and pro-Palestinian movements, especially when it happens on our campus.

We call once again on the senior management group and members of Court to examine their conscience and change course.

The University and Colleges Union Glasgow (UCUG) notes the decisions made by the University Court on 18 June 2024.

We are deeply disappointed by the failure of the University Court to vote to fully divest from the arms industry now. The ongoing, abhorrent Israeli policy of genocide against the Palestinian people in Gaza serves as a dire warning of what investment in the arms industry entails.

Our union position on divestment is therefore unchanged. We salute the tireless work of students and staff who have campaigned on this issue and pledge to redouble our efforts to get the university to divest from the arms industry as soon as possible. That the university has now called for a consultation on socially responsible investment to conclude by November is testament to their hard work.

We welcome the University Court’s commitment to support Palestinian students and universities, now and in the future, and we will continue to work with all relevant actors to ensure this support is delivered.

Over the next months, we will engage our members about the best way to proceed, and we will coordinate our next steps with our campus sister unions, the Students Representative Council, relevant student groups, and the Rector of the university, Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah. We believe that another university is possible!

It is with dismay that we read David Duncan’s update on industrial action on 20th June. Instead of genuinely engaging with us, Senior Management prefers to offer statistics. We have our own.

Hundreds of actual staff members, not statistics, have taken part in the boycott, fighting for all of us who have seen our pay cut in real terms year in year out for well over a decade. The latest 5.4% real-terms pay cut (even CPI inflation – never mind the higher RPI – was 10.4% in February when UCEA imposed the 5% pay settlement on UCU members) is just the icing on the cake of the never-ending spiral of worsening pay and conditions for staff in higher education.

Here’s another one – we’ve seen staff (without marking so not on the MAB), whose “official” workload is already well over 110%, being told that they need to do cover marking because it “wasn’t at 120%” (yet!). A 120% workload is a 6-day working week – not as a one off, but as an average over the year – something we thought we had got rid of for good in the early 20th century! We need action on overwork at Glasgow now, not still higher student numbers in 2024/5 and the promise of cake tomorrow in some mythical future utopia.

Meanwhile management’s statistics mask the devaluation of those degrees that are being awarded through marking without full quality assurance by the wrong staff, risking a tsunami of preventable mistakes and appeals, and even compromise of degree accreditation processes. Reports of chaotic exam boards, collective letters by staff members detailing the disregard for academic standards, and external examiners refusing to sign off on the integrity of mitigation processes should be indications of the need for a rethink by SMG.

We are instead told that the sector cannot afford anything but the continuation of the practice – established since 2009 – of making real-terms pay cuts every academic year. In the week after the public learned, many for the first time, about the eye-watering sums being raised by Scottish universities, largely through unsustainable rises in overseas PGT student numbers, such words ring hollow; this is the same strategy that left our students homeless at the start of the year and now UofG proposes to graduate them with IOUs instead of degrees. The “justification” for our senior management’s refusal to encourage compromise is that some universities were not so lucky – but poorer universities like Glasgow Caledonian have publicly called for UCEA to return to negotiations*, so why can’t ours? And the sector negotiation framework in any event allows for individual universities who cannot afford an increase to defer them until they can, so this can’t be used to stop a better sector-wide deal.

With PGT marking now on the horizon, we are likely to see further disruption in an area that universities across the UK see as the cash cow of their institutions. It is not too late for our senior managers to change course. Doing so requires constructive engagement with our branch – working together to promote what would be best for the University of Glasgow and for the sector. We believe the first step along that path is a public commitment to negotiations and a statement that we all believe that the staff who kept the university going through the years of the pandemic deserve better in the context of the biggest cost of living crisis in memory.