Jeanette Findlay (University of Glasgow)

Election address

My name is Jeanette Findlay, I am a Senior Lecturer in Economics at the University of Glasgow. I have been the President of UCU University of Glasgow Branch since late 2017, a member of UCU for over 33 years, a Branch Committee member for 25 years and a personal case worker for almost 20 years.

I am a passionate and committed trades unionist and I have taken great pride in any contribution I have made to improving the working lives of our members.

I have been involved in negotiating policy developments at Glasgow; in reviving our Joint Union Liaison Committee which sees the UCU cooperating closely with all the other campus trades unions to our mutual benefit; and in piloting (first in Scotland) a series of workplace stress Health and Safety Inspections.  These address one of the greatest threats to our members' well-being and health.  As UCUG President, I took part in a review of Graduate Teaching Assistant provision at Glasgow and we now have a sub-committee of the Branch which has produced a comprehensive report on wider issues of casualisation - the recommendations of the report are being discussed with management and real improvements have already been achieved across the University.  There were few substantive negative impacts on our GTA and fixed term colleagues arising from Covid and I believe this was due to the groundwork already laid by the Branch Committee over a period of years.

The issues of pay and pensions are, of course, negotiated at a national level, but I would like to see our union providing more direct support for local campaigns around workload, casualisation, bullying and equalities.  We need to keep building and renewing the union from the ground-up and, in my view, engaging in local campaigning is an important way to do this.

I believe the 2018 pensions strikes, which I played a leading role in at the University of Glasgow, were a defining moment for our union and were enormously successful.  Without them we would now have a 100% defined contribution pension scheme and that would have been a disaster.  However, although I took part in it, I was not in favour of the last action and I believe it was ill-conceived, ill-prepared and ultimately a failure.  My position on this is that strike action in the future should always be around specific demands, a clear understanding of what we can achieve and based on a genuine assessment of the willingness to take action of our members.

In conclusion, I believe that the depth of my experience which I can bring to the role of Vice President makes me an ideal candidate for this role.  I ask for your support.