You may not be aware that in the summer the LDD section was under threat of redundancy. The team were told that not enough students had been enrolled and that they wouldn’t need as many teachers so two teachers would need to be made redundant.
After a few meetings with the team we invited the Regional Officer (Teresa Corr) to come and talk to the LDD team and then to represent each union member of that team in one to one meetings they would have with Senior Management.
Fortunately, through analysis of timetables Teresa quickly concluded that what was happening what as a result of timetabling error. The LDD team with Teresa’s support were able to convince the college management that they were making teachers unnecessarily redundant by trying to bring in instructors in to replace lecturers. Just prior to that, unfortunately one teacher put in for voluntary redundancy. If we had not got Regional reps involved at this moment, there would indeed now be further job losses within that team, so we want to reassure all of our members at Dudley College that if we stick together on this we will be assured of our worker rights.
We see this as a huge victory for the union and all of us within it. We are totally committed to representing every one of you in whichever way we can and to have more regular meetings where issues can be discussed and we can have more clarity, transparency and a feeling of strength among us.
We hope you will join us to create an area for communication in this new UCU Dudley website and more importantly join us at the next meeting in October.