The UCU are in a legal and legitimate dispute with management at GCU over wages pay and conditions. Currently the dispute is taking the form of members working to contract and implementing a Marking and Assessment Boycott (MAB) by refusing to mark and assess students work.

Staff had made a cogent case for no deductions to be taken from members involved in the MAB, since staff are continuing to working well above agreed workloads, and those staff not marking were already doing other work. The union had also specifically indicated that following discussions with line managers, members would take alternative work to that of marking and assessment.

Although being Scotland’s university ‘for the common good’ after almost a week’s consideration, management turned this chance down, and confirmed all staff involved would be deducted 30 percent of their wages over a three week period.

All campus unions were shocked however, when one of the union members involved in the MAB was contacted by a member of senior management to indicate that if marks were not processed then the staff members e-mail mail account would be accessed and ‘details retrieved’ from it

In the words of the e-mail

If I don’t not (sic) have this by the end of today,  I will be forced to retrieve these from your university email account which is clearly not my preferred position. 
 

On contacting HR to ask under which policy this could be justified, and who would authorise it, we were only informed that this ‘this would not be necessary’ if the local branch followed UCU guidance.

The UCU believe they are following UCU guidance on the MAB and have confirmed this with their Scotland Office.

Monitoring e-mails to further management position in a trade dispute

The Combined Union Committee at GCU issued this statement today regarding this draconian approach, which we do not believe has been suggested in any other of the 145 universities taking part in the current dispute.

“The intention expressed to monitor and retrieve information from staff e-mails we believe would be a misuse of current GCU policies, and also a breach of GDPR approaches which all staff are currently being instructed to follow.

There is trust between staff and management regarding the privacy of e-mails and an acceptance particularly that correspondence that may pertain to issues within a trade dispute should never be monitored or accessed. We intend to table a discussion on this question at a forthcoming Joint Consultative Committee and will be contacting the Principal and Chair of Court over the matter. We believe that management will see sense over this issue, but ask all staff to let us know if there is any further suggestion that their e-mails have or will be be accessed to further management’s position in this dispute”

Stop Press Edit: Following the publishing of this blog post, the UCU was subsequently contacted by by a member of the senior management team who stated: “Just to be clear, we are not monitoring emails”.

We are glad to hear this, and would now hope that this position is made clear to all senior management members.