Management have recently sent out a letter imposing the terms and conditions of a Pay Framework. UCU's advice is not to sign.

If you accept the management offer on the Framework you will:

• give up any chance of backdated pay which was in the national agreement (Westminster would be unique in having no backdating)
• allow management to sideline the unions – union recognition must mean that any changes to pay or conditions are agreed. If they do it here they will undoubtedly do it on other issues. This is dangerous at a time when there is a real threat to jobs across the HE sector.
• agree the introduction of a performance appraisal by your line manager. This is not the same as the current system where the emphasis is on professional development and is conducted by someone of your own choosing.
• agree to the customising of the national academic role profiles through local contextualisation. Management has not yet specified what these are but past drafts from them raise the requirements of each role to make it more difficult to achieve an upgrade and would demand you worked at a higher level for the pay you now get. In the light of their action on the Framework, we have no reason to trust their promise of negotiation or that they will take such negotiation seriously.
• allow the creation of a two-tier work force with members who have not signed doing the same work but with different rates of pay and on different pay bands with different London weighting. This is divisive and may well be subject to legal challenge.
• finally, union members will lose the protection of the union in matters related to this agreement. Management will claim that as they have agreed to non-negotiated terms they will not have to talk to the union about them. This may also weaken the union¹s ability to help in other ways.

Campaign - sign the petition now: http://petitions.number10.gov.uk/CeramicsHarrow/#detail

After 50 years of outstanding achievement at the Harrow campus the University of Westminster are proposing to close their acclaimed Ceramics BA Degree Course and recruitment of new students has already suspended

Far from questioning standards the decision to close the course is being made for economic not educational reasons as the university apparently feels unable to continue to support this valuable course as it is said to be too expensive and take up too much space, as a senior manager justifying the course closure said: 'the trouble with clay is you can't store it on a memory stick'.

Students are staging a determined campaign to Save Harrow Ceramics and are seeking as much support as possible to stop the closure.

Please support our campaign

Send letters and emails of support to Geoffrey Petts, University Vice Chancellor, copied to Sally Feldman, Dean, School of Media, Art and Design and Kyra Cane, Ceramics Course Leader.