Trinity News | Tuesday 24th January
Volume 63, Issue 5
Features this issue
Ciarán Sunderland looks back on Ireland’s divorce referendums in 1986 and 1995, from proposal to passing.
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Dublin’s club scene; class politics on TV; culinary trends of 2017; Humans of Dublin; open relationships & more
TRINITY NEWS Trinity’s Newspaper of Record EST. 1953
Comment Is Repeal enough? p.15 Aislinn Shanahan Daly contextualises the movement
Trinity Life p.11 On the decks with DUDJ: an interview with Rob Fitzpatrick Candidates for TCDSU Leadership Race 2017 announced outside House 6
InDepth
Workers voice opposition to hiring and promotion policies alongside longstanding grievances
p.21 Peter O’Donovan looks at third level drop out rates
College trade unions raise prospect of industrial action Cathal Kavanagh Investigations Editor
Oisin Vince Coulter Editor
A
MEETING HELD ON 11 January 2017 saw an agreement between members of the Services Industrial Professional and Technical Union (SIPTU) and Unite trade unions to campaign in opposition to College’s hiring and promotion policies, with a ballot on industrial action by Trinity’s service and support staff being among the options considered.
steward Cieran Perry said the meeting saw a high turnout, and ended in agreement to oppose what Perry referred to as a “management diktat” around human resources (HR) policy. Section committee organiser of SIPTU in Trinity, Jack McGinley, said that the meeting had to be moved to a 198-seat lecture theatre, which was filled to capacity due to strong interest.
Union members are opposed to the cessation of promotions among nonacademic staff, and the phasing out of permanent jobs in favour of mediumterm contracts between three and seven years.
At the meeting, which SIPTU and Unite held together, staff were angry with the “lack of respect shown to staff and our representatives” over recent years, according to Perry. In a phone interview Perry said that the freeze on promotions, along with the changes in the nature of contracts, has been going on for some time but was only officially communicated to union representatives in a meeting with HR before Christmas.
The workers represented by Unite and SIPTU include cleaners, security guards, maintenance, tourism, and library staff. In an email to Trinity News, Unite shop
A report to College Board in October last year showed that the proportion of staff in Trinity on temporary contracts stood at 38%, up from 32% in 2006/7.
In a statement on behalf of College, a spokesperson said that “there continues to be promotional opportunity for staff through normal recruitment competition”, and that 44 administrative, library and support staff were promoted in this way in the 2015/16 academic year. McGinley also referred to plans to institute a management-led employee evaluation scheme, referred to in the Lansdowne Road Agreement, which a vote at the meeting on 11 January unanimously opposed. “Some people will probably get promoted, but an awful lot of other people will leave themselves open to be queried… it could be a very slippery slope.” A College spokesperson said that the development of a “revised approach for administrative, library and support staff” was indeed approved by College Board in December 2015. According to McGinley, in the wake of the Lansdowne Road Agreement being signed in mid-2015, College unions sought meetings with the HR department on the replacement of staff who
were due to retire, but that the process was dragged out: “we had to wait until December to have the initial meeting, and when the initial meeting went nowhere, we got no assurances.” The matter went to the then-Labour Relations Commission but when there was little progress, unions decided to postpone the issue until the current academic year, instead of threatening industrial action or going to the Labour Court. McGinley said that many workers in Trinity are unhappy with the degradation of employment conditions in recent years, and that there appeared to be a desire for industrial action. “An awful lot of the people here who came in the last 10 years - they’re on lesser pay, they’re on lesser conditions, they have worse holidays, they have a worse pension scheme, they have worse sick leave conditions, and in many cases they don’t have full hours,” he said. Perry referred to a staff survey carried out by Unite before Christmas, which
showed both morale and trust in Trinity’s management to be at extraordinarily low levels among support and service staff.
SciTech We look p.22 at new developments to gene editing technique CRISPR
McGinley said that union members are aware of the impact any potential industrial action could have on students, saying it would be necessary to see “who are you going to discommode, are you going to hurt the people who need to be hurt, or is there going to be collateral damage; all that has to be weighed up”. Meetings between different groups of union members are expected in the coming weeks, before another general meeting on February 14: “In the next two weeks, we’ll begin putting some kind of plan of action together,” said Perry.
Sport Dáire O’Driscoll p.24 interviews DU Boxing Club captains Aisling Anderson and Pierce Cleary
McGinley argued: “the reality will be whether people have the stomach to take either strike action or industrial action, or else people will decide they don’t want to take any action – they’re realistically the three propositions that will be in the melting pot.”
Collective bargaining introduced DUCAC runs €40,000 between teaching assistants and deficit in 2015/16 The organisation funded the deficit by drawing on their €80,000 surplus from 2014/15 department of sociology The agreement also sets a limit for weekly teaching duties, with excess hours to be remunerated.
Johnny Byrne
Johnny Byrne
Deputy Investigations Editor
Deputy Investigations Editor
T
RINITY NEWS HAS LEARNED that PhD students in Trinity College’s department of sociology put in place a system of collective bargaining to deal with their teaching requirements. The agreement was implemented for the first time this academic year. David Cichon, last year’s PhD representative in the department of sociology, negotiated with the department on behalf of the PhD students. Speaking to Trinity News, he expressed satisfaction with the agreement reached and was pleased that he and other PhD students enjoyed a positive working relationship with the department.
He noted that the agreement sets a definite limit for weekly teaching duties, and requires that work beyond this amount be remunerated. Most importantly, he said, a process has been put in place which allows teaching assistants to openly negotiate their work requirements on a yearly basis. When asked for comment, head of the department of sociology Professor Richard Layte, emphasised the critical role that PhD students play in developing new research that contributes to the college’s reputation. He said that the school of social sciences and philosophy had been particularly hard-hit by dramatic cuts to government funding that have increased staff/student ratios. In this context, he said the department has “worked with PhD students to agree term and conditions acceptable to
all within the resources that are available”.
“
...teaching assistants complained that there was no process in place for them to negotiate their work requirements
Most PhD students are required to teach in order to receive university funding and the college calendar sets a maximum weekly workload of six hours of teaching and related activities. However Trinity News reported last year that many teaching assistants across college are regularly expected to work in excess of this amount. In that piece, many teaching assistants complained that there was no process in place for them to negotiate work requirements with their school or department. Some PhD students felt unable to raise the issue of burdensome teaching duties for fear that doing so would damage their relations with more senior academics, on whom they depend for doctoral supervision, academic references and promotion.
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U B L I N UNIVERSITY C E N T R A L ATHLETICS Club (DUCAC), the body that regulates and funds sports clubs in Trinity, ran a €40,000 deficit in the year 2015/16, according to accounts shared with Trinity News. DUCAC largely funded this deficit by drawing on the €80,000 surplus the body ran in 2014/15. In this way, the capitated body managed to keep expenditure roughly constant with the previous year, at around €540,000. DUCAC receives most of its revenue from the College Capitation Committee but supplements this income with a proportion of the profits from the Pavilion Bar, as well as income from other sources. Although DUCAC’s
overall spend remained much the same in 2015/16 as a year earlier, a higher fraction went towards the running of DUCAC and less went to club expenditure. One factor responsible for this is DUCAC spending €145,000 on salaries in 2016, €20,000 more than in 2015. Club expenditure fell overall, as higher spending on coaching (totaling €100,000 in 2016) was outweighed by lower spending on equipment and affiliation fees. Excluding the Pavilion Bar’s contribution directly to sports facilities development, overall income for DUCAC fell slightly year on year due to lower miscellaneous income and lower affiliate college capitation. Capitation income however increased by just over 2% to €343,294 in 2015/16. Income generated from club subscriptions remained stable at just over €13,000. The Pav contributed €90,000 to DUCAC’s operating expenses in 2015/16, down €10,000 from
the year before. The Pavilion Bar increased sales in 2015/16 by €9,000 to €877,002. Drinks sales fell by over €20,000 to €726,255, but the Pav made up for this drop by increasing food sales by €30,000. The bar spent considerably more on wages, insurance, advertising and staff training in 2015/16 and also spent almost €45,000 on refurbishment. In 2015/16, DUCAC made a €45,000 contribution towards ‘state of the art outdoor sports facilities’ the body is developing in conjunction with Trinity’s Department of Sport and Recreation. DUCAC committed to providing a total of €250,000 for this purpose on a phased basis. As of June 2016, it had contributed €170,000, of which €145,000 came from the Pavilion Bar’s profits. The accounts were audited by Leonard Accountancy, of Lower Dundrum Road, Dublin 14.