Dear subscribers,
We were heartened to hear from our General Secretary yesterday when she addressed the picket lines – progress is being made in BOTH the USS and pay and conditions disputes! Hold the line today; and let’s hope for some positive news before the weekend.
Speaking of the disputes, our candidate for Midlands region and UK-wide rep (HE), Caroline Proctor, made the video above live from the picket line earlier this week. Caroline is a member of professional services staff at Warwick who is interested in coming up with practical solutions and taking action – as she says herself, ‘On the picket line, I’m the one with the tea and coffee, putting up the gazebos, waterproofing the signs and fixing the stapleguns’. She will bring this practical, solution-based focus to NEC. And, like all Commoners, Caroline’s a staunch and vocal ally of the trans community, ‘if you don’t like it, you can jog on!’
Here you can find Caroline’s full election statement, or you can scroll down to the bottom of this post and read it there. You can also follow Caroline on Twitter @cagglesproctor.
A final reminder on our last day of strike action this week – our flyers are available in both English and Welsh and can be downloaded from our website. We’d love it if you could distribute these to your colleagues and comrades.
In solidarity,
UCU Commons
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Election statement | Caroline Proctor | Midlands region and UK-wide rep (HE)
I have worked in departmental professional services teams as an academic administrator, web developer, or IT support at the University of Warwick since 2014, and I’ve been a UCU branch committee member for professional services staff since 2018.
Having spent the majority of my working life on temporary, casualised and zero-hour contracts, my primary focus for union work is supporting and fighting for the rights of casualised workers. Nobody should have to move yearly to pursue a career in the HE sector, and give up a stable home environment because universities desire last-minute staffing to suit their own needs. If you can’t even adopt a cat because you don’t know where you’ll be next year, there’s something very rotten with the whole system.
Coming from a professional services background, having worked closely alongside academics and research students in four very different departments, I can see the struggles all of us face and I’m keen to make sure we don’t let the universities divide us based on the jobs we do. ARPS staff are overworked and often underappreciated by employers, limited in promotion prospects by fixed grade job positions, and increasingly trapped in between pie in the sky central policies and the realities of teaching and research in our universities. Academic staff are judged on research, despite ever-dwindling time and resources to undertake it, and more and more they’re expected to police their students instead of teaching and supporting them as they should. Meanwhile our PhD students are burdened with excessive teaching and marking, on short notice and in poor conditions, for which they are often paid unacceptably late. As an NEC representative I want to be a voice for all our members, student, academic or ARPS alike.
I am a vocal supporter and ally of our LGBTQ+ members, and support trans and nonbinary colleagues unequivocally against any and all discrimination and hate speech.
Working in IT, my focus is on developing practical and effective solutions to problems. My ethos as a union representative too is that while thoughts and prayers are all very well, definite action is better. On the picket line, I’m the one with the tea and coffee, putting up the gazebos, waterproofing the signs and fixing the stapleguns. When the branch motions for solidarity to a cause, I’ll suggest practical action rather than stop at a tweet. This is what I would bring to NEC — not to curb debate, but to ensure that debate isn’t all we do, and that we arrive at a resolution with real action.
I am standing as a member of @UCUCommons, and endorse other Commons candidates, especially Emma Battell Lowman for VP and David Harvie for Treasurer. I am on Twitter @cagglesproctor.
