Email to staff 10 August 2023 from HR

Important information for staff participating in the Marking and Assessment Boycott

For the attention of University of York employees only. This relates to anyone who is currently participating or intends to participate in the Marking and Assessment Boycott.

Dear colleagues,

We previously advised that there has been a temporary 'pause' of salary deductions for the Marking and Assessment Boycott.

This pause is from 23 June to 14 August, to allow a review of the impact and position of the University.

This pause is now coming to an end, and I write to advise that salary deductions will commence on the same basis as prior to the pause.

For further details in relation to the nature of these salary deductions, please refer to the Management of Industrial Action Policy and emails of 18 April 2023 and 12 May 2023. There is also further information about the Marking and Assessment Boycott in the Industrial Action web pages and within the staff Frequently Asked Questions.

Declaration and withdrawal of participation

Please note that you do not need to make a declaration if you are not, or have not, participated in the Marking and Assessment Boycott.

From Tuesday 15 August, the declaration process will reset and start afresh. This means that it will not be assumed that you remain in the Marking and Assessment Boycott.

When you are allocated marking, you will be asked to declare by the department if you intend to carry out the marking allocated to you (or not). If you do not declare your intention either way - and subsequently the marking or assessment is not completed on or before the deadline - it will be assumed that you are participating in the Marking and Assessment Boycott.

As advised previously, if you are participating in the Boycott, salary deductions will continue until:

• You have used the marking and assessment boycott participation form to notify HR that you are withdrawing from participation in the Marking and Assessment Boycott (you can do this at any time and once you do HR will advise the department of the date on which you are resuming your full contractual duties).
• UCU ends this form of ASOS.
• HR is made aware* that there is no longer any marking/assessment available for you to complete.

*The department needs to advise HR that there is no longer any marking/assessment available for an individual to complete and the date on which this has become the case. Salary deductions would be taken up to and including the day before that date.

Salary deductions

Salary deductions will be applied from the day after the marking completion deadline date in any of these circumstances:

• Marking is not submitted on the notified, department determined, completion deadline date (with no good reason and agreed in advance with the HoD).
• Marking was not completed by you and you were the person to which it was originally allocated and made available to and there is no good reason (unless agreed in advance with the HoD) for this other than participation in the Marking and Assessment boycott.

At the beginning of each month, we will:

• review boycott participation for the previous month (ie from the first to the end of the month) and pick up any newly advised participation from other months.
• liaise with departments in order to check and validate the data as necessary - for example, to establish the deadline for assessment/marking
• contact any participants in that month (and newly advised participants from other months) and advise them of the details of any salary deductions.

If you believe there has been an error it is important that you contact HR immediately (hr-enquiries@york.ac.uk). Please note the payroll deadlines outlined below, as after the deadlines we won't be able to correct the error until the following month.

Where you know you've participated in the previous month (or months) but have not been contacted by HR to confirm salary deductions by the relevant 'Payroll cut off' dates shown above, we would strongly advise that you to get in touch with us immediately at hr-enquiries@york.ac.uk. HR may not be aware of your participation and we want to prevent, where possible, multi-month salary deductions in a single (or more) payroll month(s).

Please be advised that we will make every effort to process salary deductions as described above. However, if we do not receive relevant information in time to be able to process calculations, we reserve the right to carry over to the next available pay date.

We appreciate that many staff will not be participating in this action and we regret having to write to you all. However, we do need to mitigate any impact on students and to ensure that we have fully communicated the University's position to all staff, and we hope that you will understand why these all staff emails are necessary.

If you have any queries about this email please contact hr-enquiries@york.ac.uk.

Kind regards

Helen Selvidge
Assistant Director, Human Resources