General Meeting at 1pm on Thursday 11 September, online

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There will be a General Meeting at 1pm on Thursday 11th September, online via zoom.

Members should register in advance to receive a zoom link to attend this meeting, the registration link has been sent by email.

The purpose of this General Meeting is to discuss the following issues:

  1. Campaign to Extend Statute 18 Rights
  2. UCL Cleaning Staff – 153 job losses announced by subcontractor Sodexho
  3. UCU Equality Conference Motion

All members are encouraged to attend and vote.

Motions received on these topics are in the Appendix below.  One amendment was received by the proposer of Motion 2 and has been accepted.  The revised wording, increasing the donation from £1,000 to £3,000, can be found below.

Equality Conferences

UCU holds annual Equalities Conferences open to members to attend and vote. If you wish to attend one of these conferences on behalf of the branch, please also email ucu@ucl.ac.uk.

Other Equality Conference motions are welcome, and can be debated at the next UCL UCU branch meeting on 21 October. The branch is entitled to submit up to 3 motions. You can also contact branch officers for help with drafting motions.


UCL UCU Executive Committee
https://ucl-ucu.org.uk

Appendix – Motions received

1. Motion: Who is an “academic”? Statute 18 rights for all academic staff

UCL UCU Notes

  1. UCL has a system of recruiting academic staff on three ‘tracks’, while excluding teaching track and research track staff from Statute 18 tenure-type rights. But on 16 May, the Academic Board voted to extend Statute 18 rights to these staff. 
  2. Approximately two-thirds of academic staff are on ‘research only’ or ’teaching only’ contracts. These groups have greater proportions of women and non-white staff than those on ‘academic’ contracts. Despite the contract labels, many of these staff are required to do both teaching and research.
  3. Whereas no academic staff member with Statute 18 rights has been threatened with redundancy since 2010, research staff are routinely made redundant, and teaching staff are vulnerable to arbitrary dismissal: 
    1. UCL refuses to pool ‘teaching only’ staff with Statute 18-protected academics. As a result, teaching staff are likely to be selected for redundancy due to falling student numbers if they do not have a Statute 18 ’academic’ contract.
    2. HR’s August 2025 statistics reported to the government show that, after subtracting potential redundancies where staff have less than 4 years’ service at the point of redundancy, 5% of research staff are at risk of redundancy in the next quarter (of the order of 20% per year). (This method of accounting hides the true figure. Based on historic data, some 15% of research staff per quarter, or ~60% per year are at risk of redundancy.)
  4. The Employment Tribunal decision in Carter v UCL of 2020 that Statute 18 is intended to apply to all contracts ‘explicitly academic in nature’.
  5. The Institute of Education equivalent of Statute 18 applied to research staff.

UCL UCU Believes

  1. Many staff are performing both teaching and research but are issued with ‘research’ or ‘teaching’ contracts by HR, in order to put them outside of Statute 18.
  2. The prevalence of these contracts impacts overall academic freedom in the university, because staff categorised as ‘teaching only’ or ‘research only’ are increasing in number, and have far less protection than ‘academic’ staff.
  3. To mark the ‘UCL 200’ Bicentenary, UCL should enact the reforms the academic community would like to see, including the Academic Board motion passed in May 2025, and put a plan in place to extend Statute 18 rights to teaching and research staff. 

UCL UCU Resolves

  1. To continue to campaign to extend Statute 18 rights to those on ‘research only’ and ‘teaching only’ contracts.
  2. To put the union’s resources behind test cases where staff are performing the same set of ‘academic’ duties and yet face dismissal by redundancy.
  3. To call on UCL to halt redundancy proceedings in a test case, “Academic X”, who is doing both teaching and research.
  4. To ringfence £10,000 in a fund for legal support for one or more test cases that challenges this discrimination.


2. Motion: Solidarity with UCL Cleaners Fighting Redundancies

UCL UCU Notes

  1. UCL and their subcontractor Sodexo have announced they will be cutting 195 full-time equivalent (FTE) jobs within cleaning services at UCL. In practice, this means over 100 cleaners losing their jobs. 
  2. The proposals include making 45 cleaners redundant in student residences, cutting the workforce there in half, whilst ending the contracts of most casualised cleaners on the main campus to avoid having to give any redundancy pay.
  3. Those cleaners not losing their jobs will face even worse conditions than before. Understaffing and overwork are already serious issues for cleaners, who struggle to safely complete their tasks at current team sizes. 
  4. Most of the workers affected are women and Black, Latinx, and migrant workers, already discriminated against through UCL’s racist two-tier system of outsourcing. 
  5. Cleaners at UCL have been campaigning, including through strike action, to be in-housed since 2019.
  6. UCL and Sodexo’s proposals aim to “reduce the frequency of core cleaning” by “removing unnecessary daily visits”. These proposals raise serious health and safety issues for all staff and students at the university. 
  7. The justification given for these cuts by UCL and Sodexo is the wider financial situation in HE, despite UCL itself meeting its current financial targets this year. 
  8. IWGB members working as cleaners at UCL are balloting for strike action and holding demonstrations to combat this senseless decision.

UCL UCU Believes

  1. That cleaners are key to running our institutions, and they risked their lives to keep our universities safe during the pandemic. Their struggle is our struggle.
  2. Outsourcing should be eradicated from higher education, as it creates a tiered system between university workers and directly contributes to institutional racism.
  3. That we cannot allow universities to use the current financial crisis in HE as an excuse to cut jobs and services. 
  4. That every effective local campaign against redundancies in the sector strengthens the position of all university trade unions, and will dissuade university employers from continuing and expanding redundancies in their institutions.
  5. That cross-branch and cross-union solidarity is one of the strongest resources we have in the fight against corporate managers and the erosion of our sector.

UCL UCU Resolves

  1. To make a donation of £3,000 towards IWGB’s UCL cleaners’ strike fund should their current strike ballot pass. 
  2. To publicise IWGB’s campaign against cleaning redundancies at UCL, including upcoming demonstrations.


3.  Motion for UCU Equality Conference 

(All motions submitted for these conferences must be 150 words or fewer, and are enacted by UCU, not the branch.)

(For Women’s Equality Conference) – Education of Afghan women

UCU notes:

  1. The Taliban’s systemic and violent repression of women and girls in Afghanistan by reason of their female sex.
  2. Afghan women and girls endure extensive restrictions on speech, education, working, and unaccompanied travel or any kind of engagement in public life. 
  3. This has been described by the United Nations special rapporteur as amounting to a gender apartheid.

UCU believes:

  • Education is a human right.

UCU resolves to:

  1. Call on the UK government to adopt and implement the recommendations of the UN Working Group on Discrimination against Women and Girls and the Special Rapporteur on Human Rights in Afghanistan on the Situation of women and girls in Afghanistan.
  2. Donate £5,600 to the Afghan Female Student Outreach charity (AFSO), which will educate 20 women for one year.
  3. Share details of AFSO with all members and encourage individual donations and participation in the charity’s work.

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