ACADEMIC RELATED ANNUAL MEETING
11 March 2009
Motions adopted

Motion 1: Career progression of AR staff (University of Birmingham)
Birmingham is concerned about the perceived lack of career progression of AR staff.  This concerns members who are not progressing through increments and, in particular, staff that get stuck at the top of their scale.  This often occurs for many years.  
We therefore request that the AR Committee solicits from each institution a 5-year survey, by age and gender, which outlines the severity of lack of career progression of AR staff.  This national collective action should help all universities to address this issue.
Motion 2: Attendance at UCU Congress (University of Birmingham)
Following on from motion 2 of the last meeting of 5 March 2008, Birmingham are querying why AR committee members do not have full voting rights, since this motion states that they are only observers.  We formally request that AR Staff Committee Members should have full voting rights.
Motion 3: Restoration of promotional opportunities for academic-related staff (University of Leeds)
This meeting believes that the term ‘academic-related’ is being slowly and deliberately erased from the workforce vocabulary of academic institutions in the UK by their adoption of inflexible job evaluation and profiling schemes such as HERA and increasing managerialism and marketisation of the workplace.
As academic-related staff, we are finding our career and promotional opportunities severely eroded by increasing management unwillingness to support promotion based on performance rather than re-grading exercises. We feel we are not valued for what we can do, but rather for how many we are allowed to line manage.
This meeting therefore calls upon UCU to continue its efforts to prevent prejudicial interpretation of framework agreements by local management, to actively seek to reform them where such interpretation is easily facilitated, to insist on natural grade progression and to resist further marketisation. It is only by such means that equality of opportunity and progression with our academic colleagues can be restored and the academic-related role prevented from becoming a thing of the past.

Motion 4: Professional Development (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
The Annual Meeting notes that: 
•	In addition to promotion and progression, a key part of the Professional, Development and Review (PDR) procedure is to identify and facilitate the professional development of staff.
•	Appropriate professional training should be identified to support individuals in their roles and provide career growth opportunities.
•	Individuals should be given the time off and funding to pursue the training objectives identified during PDR. 
The Annual Meeting believes that:
•	Workloads must be negotiated and agreed that incorporate protected time for training and/or scholarly activity.
•	Common standards must be adopted by institutions rather than the current “manager’s discretion” which prevails.
•	Where necessary academic-related staff must be financially remunerated for any membership or subscription charges where these are a necessary expense in order for training/examinations to take place.
•	University internal short courses do not provide the scope of training required by staff. If suitable opportunities cannot be offered by an institution outside training providers must be considered.

Motion 5: The new Points Based System [PBS] for immigration and its effects on UCU members (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
The new Points Based System [PBS] for immigration to the UK from non-European Economic Area [EEA] countries will be rolled out by the Home Office’s UK Border Agency from the end of March this year [2009].
Under the new system, colleges and universities who want to employ or teach non-EEA nationals must have licences to become sponsors.  These are being issued by the UK Border Agency.  Effectively, this means that colleges and universities are being blackmailed into becoming surrogate agents of the Home Office.
This in turn will mean that individual UCU members (both academic and academic-related) will be required to carry out policing and surveillance duties on behalf of the Home Office.  Individual UCU members in some cases could be liable to substantial fines and possible jail sentences for failure to comply with the regulations of the UK Border Agency.
There are currently no plans for any additional resources to be allocated by the Home Office to colleges and universities who, it is claimed, will “benefit" from this internal policing and surveillance work.
This UK Border Agency-directed policy will impose additional workloads on UCU members and will ride roughshod over any individual member’s moral objections to collaborating in such distasteful 1984-style surveillance activities.
This meeting calls on UCU to urgently lobby all relevant bodies and individuals to secure the amendment of the PBS legislation to ensure that UCU staff are released from the existing requirements to act as unpaid and unconsulted agents of the UK Border Agency – a body charged with (sic!) securing the United Kingdom borders and controlling migration into the UK and enforcing immigration and customs regulations.
Motion 6: A proposal on ‘Harmonisation’ (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
This Annual Meeting is concerned that many institutions are attempting to use the introduction of the single pay spine and the harmonisation of pay and conditions as excuses to ‘level-down’ the conditions of employment of academic-related staff.
Instead of improving pay and conditions, holidays are being reduced, flexible working hours are being curtailed and grievance and redundancy procedures for academic-related Staff are being separated from those for academic staff.
This meeting calls upon the Academic-Related Staff Committee and the HEC to continue to investigate the impact of harmonisation on AR staff, reporting evidence where harmonisation is being used to worsen the pay and conditions of academic-related staff.
Motion 7:    Outsourcing (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
IT professionals on campus aim to provide a level of service that is tailored specifically to the exacting requirements of students and staff.  IT services play a key role in supporting learning, teaching and research across our institutions.  It is testimony to the dedication and expertise of these AR staff that a high level of service has been maintained through a period of increased demands coupled with reduced staffing levels and an ever diminishing budget.
This meeting believes that the moves of institutions to outsource some core IT services, including email, is a damaging step which has serious implications for data protection, data integrity and audit control.  The resultant de-skilling of staff will further reduce effective contribution of IT on campus.
This meeting calls on the AR Committee, in conjunction with HEC, to collect data from institutions where this has already occurred and to produce campaign material calling for appropriate funding levels of IT services.
Motion 8: Workloads (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
This meeting welcomes the work being done on Workload Protection by HEC while noting that workload models in Universities are becoming increasingly common. The AR Committee note that academic related staff are required to deal with workloads increasing while resources of time allocated to perform well, and preserve an effective work-life balance, diminish. This meeting encourages local branches and committees to negotiate with management to make workload protection a priority for all staff categories.
Motion 10: Negotiating Framework (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
This meeting endorses the action of UCU in seeking to achieve a negotiating process with the employers that allows UCU to represent all of its members equally without external interference.
Should a satisfactory resolution not be possible through negotiations this meeting requests that any subsequent proposals for industrial action include a form of action to which all members can contribute.
Motion 11:  Academic Related Manifesto (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
This meeting welcomes the production of the AR manifesto and commends its use to all UCU regional committees, local associations and branches.
 The manifesto highlights the importance of administrators, librarians and IT professionals within UCU.
This meeting asks that all regional committees, local associations and    branches be provided with copies of the AR manifesto to use as a recruitment tool wherever these staff categories are represented in the workplace.
Motion 12: Redundancies (Academic-Related Staff Committee)
UCU members are facing increasing threats of redundancy.  Academic-related staff (along with academic colleagues) are faced with a hostile management attitude towards the handling of redundancies.
The Academic-Related Staff Annual Meeting urges UCU to continue to oppose redundancies as agreed by Congress 2008 (HE23 in HE Sector Conference) and to press university managements to work towards finding more imaginative ways of retaining staff, including redeployment, training and bridging funding.