UCU: Redundancies and disabled members

Motion

Motion text: Conference condemns the growing numbers of redundancies being announced by further education colleges, which will worsen under this Government's regime of cuts.

Conference re-affirms the principle of branches totally opposing and campaigning against any threat of redundancies. It acknowledges, however, that, despite such opposition, compulsory redundancies are imposed by recalcitrant employers. In such circumstances Conference calls on the FEC to campaign actively with branches about how to fight redundancies, looking to generalise from the best experiences of the union but also including informing members of their employment rights during the redundancy process.

Evidence already suggests that in FE the detrimental effects on disabled members are wholly disproportionate. Conference calls on FEC to fully appraise branch negotiators of this inequity and to ensure that the following steps, as a minimum, are taken to protect disabled members against unfair treatment during any redundancy process:

insist that all employers carry out a full and comprehensive equality impact assessment
insist that any selection procedure for compulsory redundancies does not include criteria which would de facto indirectly discriminate against disabled members.