Redundancy bad practice ‘widespread’ across UK universities

Preliminary results from a survey on the impact of job losses in UK higher education indicate that almost all respondents have witnessed “bad practice” in recent redundancy proceedings.

This includes the misuse of protected conversations, hiring freezes, non-renewal of fixed-term contracts, voluntary severance, voluntary redundancies and compulsory redundancies.

The survey, being carried out by the Open University branch of the University and College Union (UCU), reported that more than half of the 70-plus respondents to date – drawn from 34 institutions – had been made redundant in the past five years.

It comes as universities are increasingly announcing cost-saving plans. While Goldsmiths, University of London settled a dispute with its union after it announced plans to make 97 members of staff redundant, academics at Sheffield Hallam University are due to strike at the start of the academic year over a voluntary severance scheme that has seen more than 140 researchers leave.

Six in 10 survey respondents reported that their university had failed to adequately consult their union over redundancies, and 89 per cent had experienced or observed negative mental health effects as a result of a redundancy process.

Almost nine in 10 (87 per cent) said redundancies had resulted in increased workloads for remaining colleagues, and 86 per cent said they had led to a deterioration in working conditions, including lower morale.

A member of Open University UCU, who wished to remain anonymous, said the figures pointed to how “people are being totally left out of these processes”. “It confirms the anecdotal accounts that we’ve heard a million times before that universities are doing whatever they want without proper consultation.”

In particular, they continued, reports of deteriorating working conditions, including higher workloads for remaining staff, “challenge the idea that these job losses are because we don’t have enough students or because there isn’t enough work”.

They argued that universities were hiding behind commitments to make no compulsory redundancies, when in fact “people [are] being pushed out, or pushed into taking early retirement, with the threat of compulsory redundancies being dangled in front of them all the time”.

“If people don’t agree to take voluntary [redundancy], it means they don’t get a package when they leave, so they only get the statutory payout, which is shamefully low,” they added.

Meanwhile, David Harvie, honorary treasurer at UCU and a former associate professor in finance and political economy who won a tribunal against his former employer, the University of Leicester, after being made redundant, said his dismissal took a toll on his mental and physical health that plagued him for more than two years afterwards.

He now claims that UCU is failing to adequately support university workers whose jobs are at risk or who have been made redundant. Since joining UCU, “not a single person has asked me what it was like being made redundant”, Dr Harvie said.

He added that leadership had also failed to utilise his successful tribunal case. “No one has asked me what we did, what worked, what didn’t work, what might have worked if we’d done it slightly differently,” he said. “They talk about updating redundancy guidance for branches, but how do they update it if they don’t even talk to the person who’s in the room with them?”

juliette.rowsell@timeshighereducation.com