Cost of living is the term usually used to describe the way the prices of essentials, such as food and energy, stacks up against the amount we have coming in. Particularly when applied to the current situation, such as by saying a “cost of living crisis”, it can seem completely inadequate. What we are actually facing…
What is the pay spine and what are the discussions for? The structure of grades and points is how our pay is organised. Our yearly pay talks mostly involve increasing everyone’s pay by a percentage, but the pay spine talks are more nuanced and include negotiating the pay people begin on, how quickly they move…
Update 10.06.2022 – we’ve received an *updated* offer from the University. This is summarised below and can be also be seen in full in PDF format. While pay negotiations at the University of Birmingham started differently this year, we are now ending up in a very similar position to the Universities who remain in national…
UCU and UNISON, the unions representing mental health support workers at the University of Birmingham, are seriously concerned about changes made to counselling provision at the University last month. After years of underfunding and understaffing the University has elected not to replace counsellors after all but one of the existing post-holders left in March via…
On Wednesday and Thursday last week all staff working in the University of Birmingham’s catering and conferences departments were invited to meetings with senior managers and HR. At these meetings roughly half of the staff (almost 120 staff in total), including chefs, supervisors and the whole Conference and Events Department were informed they were at…
No to the ‘covid blip’ redundancies in Creative Media Joint blog-post with Birmingham UCU In a worrying sign that the University of Birmingham is looking to use the Covid-19 pandemic as a reason to justify outsourcing and redundancies, we have now been informed of a proposal to make up to 10 staff redundancy in the…
UoB UNISON will be holding an online members meeting this coming Tuesday at 1pm via Zoom. You should have had the invite to the meeting by email and or text. If you are a member and haven’t had it please contact us on unisonbham@contacts.bham.ac.uk and we’ll send it through to you. The meeting will discuss…
Many institutions, companies and organisations have been very vocal about racial inequalities in the UK and others just showed up last week. No one is perfect and we know that we- as the UNISON union branch at UoB can and want to do better. We don’t want to take what has been said/talked about and…
Birmingham University UNISON are excited to announce that we are recruiting for a part-time organiser, focusing specifically on building our strength in the Edgbaston Park Hotel (a University-owned subsidiary company). The role is two days per week and on a fixed-term contract for 11 months. (The reason for the contract term is because it’s being…
