What is happening? 

  • Automation of student enquiry services (AskQM) 
  • Portfolio review through the consultancy NOUS – see this page for further info
  • Restructure of professional services across the whole university – see this page for further info
  • Conversations about voluntary severance
  • Compulsory redundancies are not ruled out
  • Slashing of Teaching Associate budgets
  • Outsourcing of essential services

This is restructuring by a 1000 cuts. Beyond the headline restructures, staff at QM are being called into one-on-one conversations, pressured to take ‘severance packages’, and instructed to jump through the ill-informed hoops of externally designed curriculum reviews, all changing the nature of our university and our work.

SET have claimed these cuts are required now due to the University’s current “financial situation”.  

However, to date, no information about student numbers, income levels, expenditure and finances have been provided to staff and the QMUL Trade Union branches to show that job losses are financially justified, or to give staff or Unions the chance to put forward and discuss alternative solutions that avoid redundancies.  

Instead, with few details given, SET has threatened that a series of restructures will take place over the next 12 months that could lead to redundancies for 100s of staff – this has already caused huge amounts of stress.  

Alternatives:

None of this is inevitable. For a start, SET has presented no plan. They are hoping staff will write their own redundancy stories, but we don’t want to, and we don’t need to.

QMUL UCU and Unison question any financial justification for management’s plans – see this blogpost questioning the financial justifications for the restructure of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in 2024.  Although the wider Higher Education sector is facing financial difficulties, QMUL itself is not – there are large funds currently being spent on building works (such as the new SBM building or the refit of the Queens Buildings), and the University continues to have healthy financial reserves.  No information confirming that expenditure is outstripping income and that QM is currently financially unsustainable has been provided by management.  

What we have seen of much of the proposed solution, AI, is messy at best. There is no evidence that new systems are any more efficient, and the only way they claim to be is if workloads of the remaining staff go up significantly.  In other universities, they’ve had to revert their short-sighted destruction of joint-degrees, they’ve had to re-establish humans to make up for the failures of AI.

Staff have already lost 15-20% of their pay over the last 15 years – we are now either being threatened with redundancy or being asked to take on an additional 20% more work.  

Given the scale and speed of these changes, QMUL UCU and Unison are concerned that they pose a threat to QM being able to support students at the University, recruit new students, and for staff to have workloads that are in any way achievable.

Our response:

Staff at QMUL are already moving to resist and challenge the proposed cuts. Both QMUL Unison and UCU branches have recently held well attended branch meetings, with members passing motions (QMUCU and QMUnison) calling for no compulsory redundancies, and for management to provide meaningful information on the financial situation of the University before any changes are enacted.  

However, the QMUL Trade Union branches have found, during restructures that took place over the last few years, that QM management is unwilling either to provide such basic information to justify redundancies, or engage in meaningful discussion with staff or their Union representatives. 

Given this, possible next steps to be considered will include whether we ballot members over industrial action to help us fight these unjustified changes. The proposed restructuring may take place over the next 12 months, and may do so on a workplace-by-workplace basis.  

However, waiting until each workplace is restructured won’t help us fight each restructure – we need to fight the whole plan, and do so together now, as QM-wide union branches and staff. 

Next steps:

Attend the open meeting on 12th March and encourage as many fellow Union members and staff members in your workplace to attend.

  • Keep sharing information: the anxiety everyone is feeling is made worse by the lack of transparency. Send emails, make a Whatsapp group, chat to colleagues in the corridor. The more we inform each other the better. 
  • Become a contact point or rep in your department, both to feed information of what is happening with you locally to the branch and to provide information to your direct colleagues. Reach out if this is of interest to you.
  • Encourage everyone to join their union, either Unison or UCU, depending on their contract – some info on joining in this leaflet produced between UCU and Unison. Unions can help with casework and discussing terms and collectivising what have become very isolating experiences, but can only do so with members, not as an external company, nor for non-members.
  • Let people know their rights in ‘Protected Conversations’ (i.e.: one-on-ones with HR or a line-manager that turn to settlement agreements), as outlined in this blogpost 
  • Sign up for casework if you need one-on-one support in dealing with pressure to take voluntary severance and negotiate to settlement agreements.