Why won’t SMT meet with ACAS this week?
On Thursday 31 March, GUCU and Goldsmiths UNISON negotiators and regional officials attended a lengthy, 9-hour day of constructive negotiations with Goldsmiths’ senior management team (SMT), mediated by the Advisory, Conciliation and Arbitration Service (ACAS). This was to be the first in a series of meetings, with the second due to take place on Tuesday 5 April.
Unfortunately, on Monday 4 April GUCU negotiators were notified that Tuesday’s meeting was cancelled due to staff illness at ACAS. GUCU negotiators immediately requested that the meeting be rescheduled for later in the week, but SMT refused. Furthermore, at 2.34pm on Tuesday – when the second ACAS meeting would have been taking place – SMT sent out a Recovery Briefing email outlining precisely how they would be pressing ahead with redundancies this week, with Goldsmiths’ Council meeting on Friday 8 April to ratify the recommendations of the Redundancy Committee, and dismissal notices due to be sent out on Tuesday 12 and Wednesday 13 April.
What are GUCU doing to resolve this dispute?
Following the cancellation of the ACAS meeting, GUCU officers wrote an urgent email to SMT requesting that all redundancy processes be paused whilst negotiations are ongoing. GUCU officers also offered to pause our own industrial action, if SMT agreed to pause the redundancies and restructuring. This was rejected outright by SMT, even though they subsequently wrote to all staff on Monday to say that, “A further positive step would be for Goldsmiths UCU to pause the marking and assessment boycott while such talks are ongoing”. In addition, in their response to GUCU officers’ request to pause the redundancies, SMT stated that negotiations could continue this week if GUCU were to pause our action without any change to their redundancy timeline. This is despite SMT insisting that ACAS negotiations could only go ahead “without any preconditions”.
Are the redundancies necessary?
The GUCU executive believes that if the current timeline goes ahead, SMT will have failed in their statutory obligation to mitigate fully against redundancies. This is because we believe that the college has already made the savings it is aiming to make. The December 2021 Annual Report and Financial Statement notes that the College will make £4.4m in savings from Voluntary Severance this financial year (this figure is expected to have grown since) and the most recent financial update forecasts £2.6m from vacancy savings. The university as a whole is even projected to run a small surplus this year without further savings from the Professional Services Blueprint (PSB) and Academic Portfolio Review (APR), and the college is not in danger of breaching its banking covenants.
Management have confirmed that a number of redundancy avoidance proposals raised during individual consultations have been formally accepted. It is our firm belief that the savings made through these measures puts these academic departments clear of their contribution rates. However, management have also stated that any FTE reduction agreed to during Stage 2 consultations by staff in affected departments will not be considered within the APR savings – even though it is a recurrent saving – simply because it does not come into effect until the 2022/23 academic year. Similarly, SMT refuse to rule out redundancies in relation to the PSB – despite the fact that the number of vacancies across professional services is currently close to double the number of staff that could be made redundant – because some roles have already been ‘deleted’.
To this end, both unions have written to Goldsmiths Council, ahead of Friday’s planned meeting, outlining in detail some of these cost-saving measures, which have not yet been exhausted or have not been included in SMT’s savings, as above. Both unions believe that Council is not in a position to ratify the Redundancy Committee’s suggestions whilst the above is true, as the college has not yet met its statutory obligation to mitigate fully against redundancies.
What next?
In the meantime, GUCU will continue to fight any and all redundancies as well as the damaging restructure, and we are committed to pursuing:
- A marking and assessment boycott, which began on Monday 4 April
- All other forms of action short of a strike (ASOS), including non-compliance with the Comprehensive Curriculum Review (CCR)
- Reballoting our members in order to extend our mandate beyond Tuesday 3 May
- Strike action in induction week of the next academic year, should SMT’s intransigence continue
In addition to our next branch meeting on Friday 8 April at 5pm, we will also be organising both online and in-person meetings so we can come together as a branch in support of members who are at risk of redundancy. We know that, should dismissal notices go out next week, our fight is by no means over. Last year, the University of Liverpool branch of UCU were able to successfully overturn all dismissal notices and prevent any redundancies during their local dispute, through a combination of a marking and assessment boycott over the summer term and strike action at the start of the next academic year.
This is a dispute we can and must win
To be clear: GUCU are willing to pause industrial action if SMT pause their redundancy and restructuring processes. We remain committed to finding a successful resolution to this dispute, which at this point is entirely within reach, and would lay a meaningful foundation for repairing industrial relations at Goldsmiths going forward. We still believe that ACAS negotiations offer a potential route towards this goal, which is why GUCU negotiators are frustrated and disappointed that SMT declined our request to reschedule the cancelled meeting for later in the week, and have not paused their redundancy processes in the meantime. It is not too late for SMT to return to negotiations as soon as possible, and avert further industrial action by working constructively with both campus trade unions to halt the restructure and reach zero compulsory redundancies. Until then, we will continue to take action to defend our colleagues’ jobs.
In solidarity,
GUCU executive