A quick follow up from your friendly tech admin (Bijan Parsia) about the support letter for Emma Battell Lowman’s motion.
First a huge thank you to all who signed and commented (even if you didn’t sign). We got 107 signatures (including Emma’s) from UCU institutions all over, including from folks we’ve not seen before. The letter with signatures was sent in this morning, well in time to inform the HEC meeting starting at 13:00.
As there are legal and strategic issues with any industrial action decisions, the results of the HEC meeting will be confidential for a few days. For example, let’s say that HEC decides on a strike day on Nov 26th. We are legally obligated to send notice to the employers in good time and they have a period in which to respond. Leaking our intent before notification has been acknowledged can potentially open us to legal challenge.
The aggregated ballot does make notification easier as it’s essentially 1 notification, not N.
However, once confidentiality is lifted, we will update you on how the motion fared.
This is our second experiment with this mode of HEC lobbying and I think it’s quite interesting and worth doing. It’s by no means perfect, but it’s worth experimenting more.
UCU Commons 