LUCU 2020 AGM Motion

Published: 21st April, 2020

Motion passed at LUCU AGM on 21 April 2020:

We understand that the COVID-19 pandemic imposes unique and unexpected challenges to University activity. Leicester UCU resolves to uphold its mandate to protect the health, professional standing, and financial stability of its members to the maximum extent possible, even in these difficult times.

LUCU therefore calls on the University’s Executive Board (EB) to demonstrate its commitment to the future of the University community’s Citizens of Change and to uphold the university’s stated values and principles of the Recovery Plan by the following means within the next thirty (30) days:

1. Acknowledge that all staff are essential workers of the University and address their needs for on-campus and off-campus resources.
2. Reinstate mission critical – teaching, marking, and student-facing – Unitemps contracts cancelled as of 8 April 2020. Extend fixed-term contracts set to end on or before 1 October 2020 to improve university flexibility and capacity and reduce hardship.
3. Provide clear and transparent operating principles for making COVID-19-related changes in resourcing and staffing, including Unitemps contract non-renewals, furloughs, post elimination, and hiring freezes. To work with all campus trade unions, including the Students’ Union, to advocate collectively for government underwriting of the university sector.
4. Publish full details of the EB’s current COVID-19 response scenario plans for staff consultation to mitigate risks to mission-critical University activities, staff health and morale, and the fate of the University’s equality, diversity, and inclusion agenda. This must include clear messaging around timelines, plans for teaching and student-facing activities, and research (including access to research infrastructure).

In order to preserve staff health and wellbeing, to mitigate against unnecessary precarities of employment, and to ensure the immediate and long-term success of the University of Leicester as an outstanding higher education institution, LUCU resolves:

1. To support individual members to resolve issues with their current working conditions under the University’s established ordinances, policies and procedures.
2. To report major problems in infrastructure and staffing to the appropriate unit managers and to the EB.
3. To encourage members to work to contract, even where this puts mission-critical activities, including summer 2020 assessments and re-sits, at risk of late- or non-fulfilment.
4. In the absence of satisfactory responses by the EB to the above requests, to call an Extraordinary General Meeting to address perceived shortcomings.