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…
Despite current sky-high levels of inflation, staff at the University-owned Edgbaston Park Hotel are facing a big real-terms pay cut, unless a drastic improvement in the latest offer occurs. Following a pay freeze in 2020/21, the Hotel is refusing to move from their initial, derisory, offer of 2% and an early implementation of the minimum…
Update 07.09.21 – Additional point added on areas where face coverings are required As September begins we find ourselves in a broadly similar situation to last year – coming out of a summer where restrictions have been minimal into a new academic year, in which the key driver seems to be to keep things as…
While it’s a bit of a relief that Monday will not see radical changes to safety arrangements at the University, there were a couple of issues in the Vice Chancellor’s recent announcement on the University’s plans for the transition period to the start of the new academic year. Firstly and possibly most urgently there is…
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…
Ahead of our AGM on Wednesday, here are a few tips on joining Zoom meetings. Zoom meetings can be accessed from any device with a camera and a microphone (including laptops, smartphones and tablets). You can also phone in to Zoom meetings – the numbers used tend to be 01 or 02 numbers so while…
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…
