Dear members,
You may have seen the communication that was sent by the Warden, Frances Corner, ahead of the start of our eight days of strike action to resist the senior management team’s redundancies and restructure. This industrial action is taking place at a crucial time, when the SMT is planning to send out dismissal notices to academic staff by Friday 25 March.
The Warden’s email contains a number of inaccuracies and deliberate obfuscations designed to discredit resistance to the redundancies and restructure. GUCU officers would like to take this opportunity to respond to each in turn.
Engaging with negotiations
The Warden suggests that people have communicated “concern” over the number of strike days taken by Goldsmiths UCU this academic year. Throughout the periods of industrial action, GUCU has been committed to negotiation and engaged fully with the entire process. In addition to participating in three months of collective consultation from September to December 2021, we have consistently requested dispute resolution meetings and have made concrete negotiating proposals ahead of every strike period. Every single one of these has been rejected by management.
Since December 2021, management’s official position – as communicated by the Chief Financial Officer (CFO) in meetings and evidenced by the College’s annual reports – has been that the College’s financial position is such that redundancies are unnecessary to meet the university’s banking covenants, and there is little evidence that cuts of this nature will address the underlying deficit. It has been entirely within management’s power to resolve the dispute. Instead, their intransigence has led to the level of disruption experienced by students this year. Unlike GUCU negotiators, Frances Corner has yet to attend any dispute resolution meetings.
Student welfare, staff welfare
Unlike SMT, staff know Goldsmiths students, work with them weekly and care deeply about student welfare and learning. We want to spend more time with our students, and to support them when the senior management of this institution is failing them so badly. For this reason, our members called upon the national union to exempt the branch from national strike action in the last week of term. GUCU negotiators have communicated the seriousness of this decision, and again reiterated our commitment to dispute resolution to management this week.
Frances Corner has taken the unprecedented step of urging our members not to take strike action to defend jobs and working conditions. She is now advising members of GUCU not to exercise their democratic right to take part in a reballot for industrial action, at a time when their colleagues in History and English are due to receive redundancy letters. Colleagues are aware that the changes being proposed by SMT mean that this round of redundancies are only the start of a 2-3 year restructure of professional services and the reduction of staff in academic departments. Management is planning tranches 2 and 3 of the professional services restructure and aiming to cut a further £1.3 million by reducing staffing in academic departments, beginning in June this year. This is the reason we urge members to vote in favour of keeping our ballot mandate live, in order to defend the interests of students and staff.
Strike declarations
The Warden repeats a line that has featured in many communications which is that the college has received a low number of strike declarations. This is not true. In this dispute, management have made three significant changes to existing custom and practice in relation to strike declaration. Firstly, senior management have refused GUCU’s and Goldsmiths SU’s call to put lost wages into the student hardship fund as every previous Warden has done.
Secondly, this Warden has stated that strike deductions will not be spread out over a number of months as every previous Warden has done, which would avoid financial hardship for staff.
Thirdly, the College has created an incredibly convoluted system for calculating deductions for fractional and Associate Lecturer staff. This has involved members being asked for additional information regarding the exact number of hours due to be worked, which does not fall within the legal requirements of staff who have participated in strike action. This means that many part time and casualised members have notified the college of their strike dates but not yet been deducted.
Crucially, it is not the case that GUCU members declaring participation is necessary for the College to refund students for lost learning. The Office for Students only requires that information should be collected centrally, which is possible through the existing student complaints process. The College is in fact delaying processing student refunds and has taken draconian action against students who have exercised their democratic rights to protest and withhold fees.
Refusal to use substantial savings already made to lower the recovery target
Among the “sensitive” and “confidential” information presented by SMT to GUCU negotiators in dispute resolution meetings are financial documents that demonstrate that the College has made substantial savings in staff costs this financial year from the voluntary severance scheme (VSS) and from vacancy savings. The number of vacancies in professional services is currently close to double the number of staff that could be made redundant. It is difficult to understand why SMT are intent on pushing through redundancies when this is the situation.
Rather than committing to reduce the number of redundancies to reflect the substantial savings made and move toward zero compulsory redundancies, SMT are planning instead to increase funding to the recovery plan’s ‘Project Management Office’ this financial year. GUCU negotiators feel that as a publicly funded institution this information should never be kept from staff, and that members deserve to know the truth about the College’s financial position. We will continue to press for full transparency in communications with our members.
Refusal to stop the clock
At every dispute resolution meeting, negotiators have communicated that GUCU would be willing to attend negotiations mediated by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS) if management agrees to pause the restructuring process to allow negotiations to take place, or commit to zero redundancies. Pausing activities while ACAS negotiations take place is standard practice in most organisations. It is the position of both unions, GUCU and Goldsmiths Unison, that zero compulsory redundancies are achievable.
The Wardens’ email suggests that GUCU members are taking industrial action in response to the ‘risk’ that some colleagues may be made redundant. This is disingenuous. Staff in professional services have already been sent letters stating that their roles have been ‘deleted’ and last Friday, academic staff received a numerical ‘score’ which will be used to rank staff against each other to determine who will receive dismissal notices on Friday 25 March. This is the level of institutional violence that management considers part of “doing everything we can to keep potential redundancies to the lowest possible number”.
Goldsmiths has failed to uphold a fair and transparent redundancy selection process. GUCU raised many serious concerns about the way staff affected by the redundancy process have been treated during Stage 2 of the consultation process – see report here. To date, none of these concerns have been addressed by the college. And the college has refused to allow this issue to be part of the Joint Negotiating and Consultation Committee agenda. Goldsmiths are yet to respond to any staff member who proposed credible redundancy avoidance and cost-saving measures in individual consultations.
Based on this unfair process, affected academic staff have received a numerical score. This was followed by an email mistakenly sent by the scoring panel identifying the highest and lowest score in each department, making it clear who has scored lowest in each department. Staff were then given the right to review their score but have been provided no information about how scores were arrived at by the scoring panel, and therefore no evidence to attest to the fairness of their scoring. The ‘right to review’ process states that staff will find out the results of the review five days after submission, however they have now been told they will receive the result on the same day they will receive notice of redundancy. The College has additionally blanket refused to hear any individual grievances submitted by staff affected by the redundancy process. In their sheer determination to impose the restructure at any cost, the Recovery Team have shown contempt for staff and a complete disregard for due diligence.
Finances or ideology?
The target of the Recovery Program was £6m in recurrent staff savings this year according to the document linked to in the Warden’s email. The December 2021 Annual Report and Financial Statement notes that the College will make £4.4m in savings from VSS (this figure is expected to have grown since) and the most recent financial update forecasts £2.6m from vacancy savings. This means that in terms of recurrent staff savings, the College is already well over the target set by SMT and their ‘banking partners’.
Rather than “exploring initiatives which will help support jobs”, SMT is deliberately choosing the path of maximum disruption and violence to both staff and students, a course which GUCU will continue to take all action necessary to oppose.
In solidarity,
GUCU officers