UPDATED 25/03/21: UCU Coventry Statement of Support

* UPDATE 25/03/21: This week colleagues received a further ‘slap in the face’ as 26 learning technologists (24/03/21) are now facing subsidiarisation to CU Online. They supported and kept the university running during the pandemic. 

We are disgusted by the ULT’s decisions to move ~ 526 into subsidiaries on worse terms and conditions. 

[18/3/21]

UCU Coventry branch is appalled to learn that Coventry University is planning to TUPE over nearly 500 Professional Services colleagues to a privatised subsidiary, Coventry University Enterprises Ltd. The deal will involve less annual leave, reduced entitlement to sick pay, an inferior pension scheme, and ultimately fewer opportunities for progression, and lower pay.

A handful of new posts will result from the change proposal, but these are at senior management level. Many other roles are set to disappear, putting staff at risk of redundancy. Most roles will be moved to the subsidiary, on much less favourable conditions.

Previous consultations have involved professors, lecturers and researchers, and many redundancies have been imposed on these academic staff.

This time around the University is not targeting academics. Instead, it has colleagues from two key infrastructure divisions, Estates and IT services, in its sights. These are the overworked, underpaid yet tirelessly dedicated professionals who deliver the post, staff the IT helpline, clean and maintain our buildings. These are the key workers who had to come into campus throughout the lockdowns, who installed the hand sanitizers and Covid signage, and without whose contribution there could be no “return to campus”. In fact, without them, the university could not function at all, pandemic or not.

For the most part, these are Coventry people. Coventry University is proud to call itself “one of the city’s largest employers”. And yet it is willing to jeopardise Coventrians’ livelihoods, and put them on inferior contracts, all in the name of nebulous and unspecified cost savings, including “VAT and Tax savings” that benefit the University’s charitable status.

All this on a day when even Uber has seen fit to start treating its staff slightly more humanely.

UCU welcomes those who are eligible to join the union, encourages others to join one of the other professional unions, and stands in solidarity with all workers in the University.

UCU Coventry Committee