What We’ve Won
These are not gifts from management. They are the result of organised workers demanding better — and refusing to back down.
The following documents our wins across Pay, Childcare, Redeployment, and Casework — gains achieved through collective organising, sustained branch pressure, and strike action.
This is the trajectory of London Weighting Allowance negotiations at KCL.
Incremental gains, each won through branch pressure and industrial action, establish the baseline for the current claim.
Childcare
The childcare subsidy scheme now available to all King’s parents is a union win. It was won through our local dispute and marking and assessment boycott in summer 2023. Since January 2024, we have fought relentlessly to ensure the deal was implemented in full: we successfully removed the annual cost cap that management initially tried to impose (which would have run out after just one trimester of claims), pushed the individual cap from £250 to £500 per child per month—covering virtually all of our members—and secured backdated payments from April 2024 for parents of three-year-olds caught in an administrative loophole. Management’s all-staff communications have consistently presented these as gifts from above; they are not. They are the result of sustained pressure by our branch, negotiated by UCU alongside UNITE and UNISON. The scheme now costs King’s over £1 million per year—five times what management originally wanted to spend—and that difference goes directly into the pockets of colleagues with young children.
Redeployment (we are currently fighting to launch this policy!)
As a direct result of the strike and marking boycott in 2023, a joint union-management anti-casualisation working group was established at King’s. Representatives from UCU, Unite and Unison contributed to the creation of a new redeployment policy intended to improve job security, providing opportunities for ongoing employment after redundancy or the expiry of fixed term contracts (including externally funded ones).
Key points from the new policy:
- An employee will qualify for redeployee status at the point that they are given notice that their role is at risk of redundancy, this could be because the role:
- is directly affected by a restructure and the employee has been declared at risk of redundancy
- is subject to external funding, which is due to expire
- is for a fixed term, and will not be renewed
- is no longer suitable, due to a long-term health condition or disability
- Redeployee status will give the employee early access to applicable vacancies within the University and priority status at the shortlisting stage. In addition, the employee will have the opportunity to take reasonable time off to interview for alternative employment.
- Applicable vacancies will be advertised internally for redeployees only for 5 working days, with interviews taking place before external advertising.
- A redeployee should be offered the role if they demonstrate through shortlisting and interview that they meet the essential criteria or can do so through reasonable training.
Protecting Staff from Moving Goalposts on Probation
UCU caseworkers identified a pattern of staff being assessed against probation criteria that differed from those they were given when they started their roles. We raised this at the Joint Negotiating Committee, where management confirmed that confirmation in post must be based solely on the criteria staff were informed of at the outset. We have since continued to support affected members case-by-case through HR, ensuring this principle is applied in practice.
Bullying
We had a case where RAs accused a PI of bullying. Different caseworkers were supporting all of the people involved, including the PI, because they were all UCU members. It was a very difficult case, but one of the RAs reported that even though her job came to an end a few months early because the whole project had to be shut down, she felt it was well worth it because she believed the college had been pushed to face the situation and deal with it. In other words, she had a sense of justice having been achieved.
Bullying and EDI
An RA in a science lab was bullied horribly within days of taking up the post. She found out because the email that her LM had circulated to everyone else was shared with her by an outraged colleague. Even HR were shocked. But, importantly, our member kept pushing because she was concerned this could easily happen again. So, the outcome she was requesting was not simply an apology but an undertaking by the faculty that in future all PIs and LMs on research projects would get EDI training — she was the only person of colour on the project — and also anti-bullying and harassment training. She persisted long after her contract at KCL ran out, and won.
Maternity leave
Female member of faculty in a heavily male-dominated school found herself negatively impacted by a combination of maternity leave and a change in rules around research leave — she delayed her RL, and while she was on maternity leave, the faculty halved the length of the RLs for everyone. She argued she should get the old length, but they denied it, even though HR advised them the law meant she should not be detrimentally affected by her mat leave. She had to complain and complain, and get most of the way to the ET, but she won in the end.
Maternity leave in a HPL contract
The case of the person convening multiple modules on HPL contracts, adding up to more than a full-time regular job. She was shocked to discover her “worker” (rather than “employee” status) meant she was not entitled to mat leave. We did manage to get her mat leave. Will she get at least an FTC when she comes back? Not sure yet.