A group of Leeds students have occupied a room in the University in protest of the senior management’s treatment of students and staff.
The students have occupied the council chamber room within the University of Leeds and have made two demands. They have demanded an end to all pay deductions for staff taking part in the marking boycott and have asked the Vice-Chancellor, Simone Buitendijk, to commit to resolving the Leeds UCU and Unison disputes.
So far, the students have been occupying the room since Monday and have said they refuse to leave until their demands are met.
One of the students, Ellen, said the unions had raised a number of issues with the University including pay, pensions and contracts over the past four years. Ellen said: “As students we’ve been affected by these strikes and repeatedly University management have used that as a way to shame staff and to say, actually they don’t care about their students because they’re going on strike.
“We’re a group of students deciding to show University management that is absolutely not true and that we stand with our staff.”
Ellen went on to say: “We know that they’re striking because it’s a last resort and not because they want to disrupt our learning, they care about their subjects and they care about their students.”
The University of Leeds said it remained open to finding a resolution to the industrial action and hoped to continue talks with the UCU branch members.
Ellen said: “It is predominantly about staff and about the fact that UCU and Unison have not met with our Vice-Chancellor in over a year and that’s absolutely shocking. But also, it’s about the weaponisation of students as a homogenous mass of people and a lot of the management university management use to say that they condemn the strikes is surrounded by language of wanting to support the students.
“We just really want to counter that and say that those aren’t two separate things, we need to be supporting our students and our staff at the same time.”
The University of Leeds also released a statement where they said their community was one of only “20 from about 150 institutions” which is subject to the marking boycott. They said: “The University remains open to finding a resolution to this current period of industrial action, and many local actions are already in train through our Fairer future for all action plan , including reducing the use of fixed-term contracts , reviewing our workload principles and modelling, and initiatives around equity, diversity and inclusion.”
“Senior management and local UCU branch members had a positive discussion at a scheduled meeting earlier this week, and we hope to continue talks in the coming days. In the meantime, our priorities remain to protect the interests of students - including minimising any disruption to them; to retain the cohesion of our community; and to protect the standard of Leeds degrees.”
Ellen accused the University of a “lack of empathy” and said: “I think their refusal to engage in the issues is just a sign of a huge disconnect between management staff and everyone else who is part of this University and that’s really scary I think.
“This lack of empathy for everyone else and they really just don’t understand what staff are going through.”
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