An Employment Tribunal (Part II)

The Author and the highly persistent Suffolkian Mr Longley

Yes readers. It's the time of year once again and it would appear that Part II of our Employment Tribunal (conveniently entitled Dr Gary Duke -v- University of Salford) is upon us. Next week's proceedings follow on from the previous two day hearing in March of this year.

A quick recap

For readers who are new to this case and for those who wish to be updated, you may recall that a certain chap was dismissed by his employer the University of Salford in August 2009 for 'bullying, harassment and victimisation' two members of staff, and for 'bringing the University into disrepute'. The cause of this, according to the disciplinary panel, was through the authorship and distribution of a series of satirical publications called the Vice Consul's Newsletters.

The evidence so far - no complaint

In March, the Tribunal heard how despite the University having a Code of Conduct on Bullying and Harassment that states that a formal complaint must be made of bullying and harassment for the employer to instigate an investigation, that no complaint of bullying had been made against The Author of bullying or harassment by either two staff members. This was confirmed by the witness evidence given under oath by the Chair of the Disciplinary Panel Mr Hopwood and the Finance Director Mr Attwell who sat as Chair of the Appeal Panel. 

The evidence so far - no written statements

When pushed, Mr Attwell also admitted to the Tribunal that no written witness statements from the two alleged to have been bullied and harassed had been sought or provided to this author. Similarly, both members of staff had refused to give witness testimony and attend the disciplinary hearing in August 2009.

The evidence so far - no damage to University

Under cross examination by the persistent Mr Longley, Mr Attwell could not demonstrate any specific evidence of damage caused to the University by the authorship and distribution of the Vice Consul's Newsletters, despite his upholding this allegation in the subsequent Appeal against The Author's dismissal.

The evidence so far - the prejudicing of proceedings?

The Tribunal further heard how senior managers had introduced in internal releases to staff and students and external releases to the press the issue of a staff member's ethnicity. This went much further when the Registrar (now Deputy Vice Chancellor) Dr Adrian Graves suggested in an email to these managers that they 'might want to slip in the fact that the allegations include the harassment of a female student of Chinese ethnic origin'.(1) Mr Attwell stated that he (Attwell) "cannot not be responsible for the comment of Adrian Graves". (2) Questions were raised with regard to how such actions were prejudicial to the disciplinary procedures and an attempt to poison the well of public opinion. This was refuted by Mr Attwell.* 

You foul b'stard

The evidence so far - a pre-determined outcome to the hearing?

The Tribunal also heard how an external PR consultant employed at the time by the University - Mr Ed Rowan - had sent an email to the Vice Chancellor Martin Hall, Dr Graves and head of HR Keith Watkinson on the 31st July 2009, providing a timeline for the Disciplinary Hearing, stating the exact day when the decision would be announced to this author. 

Mr Rowan also provided for Mr Watkinson's consideration a single press release with the outcome of the Disciplinary Panel - dismissal. Nothing unusual here one might think except this was four days before The Author's disciplinary hearing! No second draft press release was produced by Mr Rowan. No evidence has been presented or submitted to the Tribunal, or provided under document disclosure or two Subject Access Request to suggest Mr Watkinson considered asking for a second press release or that one was prepared in the event that the disciplinary hearing decided in this author's favour.

This three day hearing promises to open many more doors on the disciplinary processes at the University of Salford. You are of course cordially invited.

Employment Tribunal

Dr GARY PAUL DUKE;
-v- 
UNIVERSITY OF SALFORD

10:00AM on the 15th, 16th, and 17th August in the year of our Lord 2011

ALEXANDRA HOUSE, 

14-22 The PARSONAGE, 

MANCHESTER, 

M3 2JA

Notes and References

* The Vagrants have consistently put forward the opinion that this action from the Deputy Vice Chancellor was prejudicial and was also clear encouragement by Dr Graves for his staff to breach the Data Protection Act 1998 in releasing Sensitive Personal Information of a staff member.

(1) Email from A Graves to Keith Watkinson, Professor Brian Longhurst, Dr Paul Rowlett, dated 21st May 2009, timed 17:47, Subject: Petition from Languages Students

(1) From The Author's note of the second day of the Tribunal Hearing, 2nd March 2011

The harassment of a generation

"Power never takes a back step - only in the face of more power"

Malcolm X

April 2011 marked the thirtieth anniversary of the first Brixton rising. In the wake of similar risings that spread across the UK that year, the draconian 'sus' laws were scrapped.

Just as then, today, amidst the calls for rubber bullets and troops to be deployed on the streets to quell the disturbances that started with the riots in Tottenham, the usual media culprits are happy to categorise those who have taken to the streets as 'thieves', 'thugs' and simple 'looters'. Yet an important truth has been conveniently relegated to the background: that if you are black, you are six times more likely to be stopped and searched than if you are white.(1)

Harassment on an epic scale

The impact of stop and search on a large swathe of British society cannot be understated. The statistics are staggering and provide a compelling insight into one of the prominent causes of the riots in London. Between the period 2007 to 2008 in England and Wales, there were more than 170,000 stop and searches carried out on black people.(2)  This was an increase on the figures for 2004-05 which show around 118,000 stop and searches carried out against the black population out of a total in England and Wales that year of 840,000.(3) We might wish to dwell here for a few seconds and consider the total figure for stop and searches in one year alone. In the year 2008-09 there were around one million stop and searches conducted under PACE* and around 256,000 under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act.

A policy designed to cut crime?

Given the sheer numbers of people stopped by the police one might make what appears to be a logical  jump to the assumption that stop and search is an effective policy in the fight against crime. The statistics show the opposite. It's estimated that stop and search has '... reduced the number of disruptable crimes by 0.2 per cent'.(4) This represents both a huge investment in man-hours and financial resources across England And Wales. It also represents a policy almost designed to alienate wide sections of society on a grand scale and spark the sort of scenes played out on our plasma screens.

Yet the policy continues despite the evidence that shows it has no real utility in cutting crime. The question is why? The Equality and Human Rights Commission is clear with regard to the force that drives a policy that disproportionately targets the the black community - it is simple racial discrimination.(5) There is an eerie historical continuity at play.

The two cases below prove illuminating and expose the beating heart that infuses this policy.

Barry Coy, a professional black ice hockey player, was stopped by the police on more than one hundred separate occasions after purchasing an expensive high performance car yet never charged with any offence. Or the case of special needs assistant 37 year old Anne Roberts who was stopped and searched by the police in London whilst on a bus. On arrival, the police stated that she was holding onto her bag in a suspicious way, wrestled her to the floor and arrested her. She was informed that she was being arrested on suspicion of fraud, later accused by the police at Tottenham police station of being a class A dealer in drugs. All charges were later dropped due to lack of evidence but she still received a caution for obstruction of the police. (6) 

Barry's case hails from 1982, Anne's case from 2010.

Echoes of the past

Two Acts provide police with extensive powers to stop and search: Section 60 of the 1994 Criminal Justice and Public Order Act and the 1984  Police and Criminal Evidence Act. Together, both provide the legislative framework for the implementation of the institutional harassment of hundreds of thousands of black, Asian and white young people. The former was introduced to extend to the police powers to stop illegal raves in the 1990s against much widespread opposition.

The 'sus' laws

Yet there is an historical precedent in the use of an existing legislative framework to harass specific sections of British society. Throughout the 1970s the police made use of the 1824 Vagrancy Act to implement the policy that became known more widely as the 'sus' laws. The 'sus' laws were hated, particularly among the African-Caribbean communities. These laws gave police powers to stop and arrest anyone whom they suspected might commit a crime. In Lewisham London 1977, the Special Patrol Group an elite squad armed with pick axe handles and alsatian dogs, targeted sixty homes in the area in 'Operation PNH' or 'Operation Police Nigger Hunt' as it was known by the police. The Metropolitan Police statistics at the time showed that if you were black you were 15 times more likely to be stopped than a white person.(7) The 'sus' laws combined with the wholesale stopping and searches and the mass arrest of the African-Caribbean community as part of Opeation Swamp 81' in Brixton in 1981 are widely seen as the catalyst for those riots. (8)

Today, this harassment continues apace:

The Metropolitan and City forces in London together generate the large majority of excess stops and searches of black people: over 100,000 compared with around 150,000 in England and Wales... Outside London, large excesses are also seen in the West Midlands, Thames Valley, Greater Manchester, West Yorkshire, Leicestershire and Hampshire... While London generates the majority of excess stops and searches, in other areas the powers are used much more disproportionately against black and Asian people. Dorset has persistently stopped and searched black people disproportionately. Leicestershire and Hampshire also have high black/white disproportionality ratios. Some of the highest Asian/white disproportionality ratios over the last five years are seen in the West Midlands, Thames Valley, West Mercia and South Yorkshire. (9)

The above provides a partial explanation as to why these explosions of discontent are erupting across England.

A system heaping opprobrium on the oppressed

In 2010 the Institute for Public Policy Research published statistics that showed that around fifty per cent of young black males were unemployed. (10)  Today in 2011, black men are five times more likely to be unemployed than their white male counterparts. Youth unemployment, high across all groups, impacts more heavily on the young from working class areas.

Lacking any real prospect of secure decently-paid employment in the foreseeable future, these young people also lack the economic cushion enjoyed by their middle class counterparts in the shape of cash-flush parents. Factor in the siren call of the product marketers and advertisers whose 'must-have' message is both difficult to avoid and resist as it's pumped out through our TV screens at ten minute intervals and displayed in a grand style via a multitude of prime location bill boards. In this paradigm, the only way to validation is through ownership of the next generation iPhone. Unable to acquire these luxury items through legitimate means, is it any wonder that this Generation X might decide to use others?

Quoted in the Guardian, criminologist and youth culture expert John Pitts hints at the deeper problems:

"Many of the people involved are likely to have been from low-income, high-unemployment estates, and many, if not most, do not have much of a legitimate future... unlike most people, some of those looting had no stake in conformity. Those things that normally constrain people are not there. Much of this was opportunism but in the middle of it there is a social question to be asked about young people with nothing to lose."

The Cure - more of the same

Since the coming to power of the Conservative-Liberal coalition government, we've witnessed savage cuts to social provision and the welfare system on a scale unknown since the war. This has sharpened the growing anger. Global capitalism in crisis is in the process of wasting a generation of young people cheered on by politicians who want us to swallow more of their savage cuts. The bankers responsible for the crisis all the while continue to fill their own mouths with gold. And the police? True to their historical rationale and form, view this crisis as a further opportunity to exercise a power unique to them and one that affords to them apparent immunity from scrutiny or prosecution.

Thirty years of neo-liberalism has created the tinder. The execution of Mark Duggan by police last Thursday  was the spark that lit this conflagration. But its been a conflagration a long and very predictable time in the coming.

Notes and References

* PACE - 1984 Police and Criminal Evidence Act


(1) Stop and Think, A Critical Review of the use of Stop and Search Powers in England and Wales, sourced at http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/uploaded_files/raceinbritain/ehrc_stop_and_search_report.pdf
(2) The Guardian 2nd June 2010 sourced at http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2010/jun/02/police-stop-search-black-asian?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487
(3)Bowling B and Phillips C, Disproportionate and Discriminatory: Reviewing the Evidence on Police Stop and Search, 2007  The Authors. Journal Compilation, 2007 The Modern Law Review Limited.(2007) pp 942-943
(4) Stop and Think, A Critical Review of the use of Stop and Search Powers in England and Wales, pg 6, sourced at http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/uploaded_files/raceinbritain/ehrc_stop_and_search_report.pdf
(5) As above, pg 6
(6)The Guardian 8th July 2011 sourced at http://www.guardian.co.uk/law/2011/jul/08/racist-stop-search-powers-challenge
(7) Stop and Think, A Critical Review of the use of Stop and Search Powers in England and Wales, pg 69
(8)P Morgan, Socialist Review,1999, sourced at http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr228/morgan.htm
(9)Race, Crime and Arrests, Home Office Research Studies no 58, London, 1979. Pg 33
(10) Sourced at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/8468308.stm and http://www.politics.co.uk/news/2010/1/20/recession-leaves-half-of-uk-s-young-black-peo

Related articles

• Strange police priorities in a time of austerity (guardian.co.uk)
• Why people are rioting (Socialist Worker)

A Prelude to Privatisation?

There's no mention of it in his blog this week... well not that we can divine and we have made extensive use of the liturgy and the forked willow.

In its salt'n'vinegar strokes a mention is made of a 'rich resource' for the 'University' but we don't think he's talking about the staff who work in the EFL (English as a Foreign Language) department formerly of the School of Languages.

Are they taking the lead or taking something else?

Over the past year or so we've tried to ginger up the Salford UCU leadership so that they might take the initiative in something other than applied fustian grandiloquence. Our attempts have not fallen on deaf ears as the major protests and rolling strikes at Salchester over the last couple of months in defending the 200 or so jobs threatened with exposure at the foot of Mount Taygetos have clearly demonstrated.(1) Thus in keeping with our grand old tradition we invite Salford UCU Presidente Christine Sheehy to consider the plight of the twenty or so teaching staff who work in EFL.

Playing the long game

Now it's the opinion of the vagrants that Salford EFL staff work bloody hard. They are possibly one of the best adverts for students from abroad to come to the North West and study at Salchester. However, we learned last week that so cherished are these staff, that many of these long-service EFL-ers have been providing their teaching services over the course of the academic year without the simple nicety of having a signed contract with their employer. This despite the almost urgent attention devoted to their cause by the UCU branch leadership. At the time of 'going to press' nothing has nearly been secured by the union and nobody's quite sure what this nothing isn't. We've cleverly formed an opinion that this might be an adroit double strategy consisting of on one hand not rocking boats and being extra nice to HR managers, and on the other something to do with two aged snails, a trap and an arboreal primate.(2)

Bitter-sweet laments from Ivorical Towers

Yet there are rumblings. Could it be that others sections of University staff of a more gradualist hue are straining at the leash to follow this route? We haven't heard yet if the Salchester Professoriat, so enamoured with this idea and the obvious long-term security that it potentially offers, are contemplating adopting it wholesale. Possibly, if a clause is inserted for wider palatability back-dating its introduction to the academic period 1878-79.

As it's been related to this tired tilter, morale among EFL staff is said to be at an all-time high. It's been disclosed that those who are not already members of Salchester UCU are photocopying a registration form desperate to join up and secure any potential benefits on equal terms. Nor is anyone said to be threatening in the slightest to tear up their union membership cards.

Re-designation

Yet it's the more recent policy of re-designation that has added to their intermutual joy. Some are said to have over-urinated in contemplation of the future. Others are said to have developed a form of predysphasic-pedagogery. One or two have likened it to the penultimate stage of Rapture played we're told to within the final inch of its life on an old 'Dansette' in the now defunct staff room on the eight floor by an irked former part-timer, smoking joint-bundles and dropping amphetamines."What's re-designation" you ask? Well it would appear that in this case its a highly attenuated shift from the use of the rather old-fashioned and unrefined bourgeois classification Teaching Staff  for the current crop of EFL staff, to the more exalted and thoroughly modern appellation of S.T.U.D.E.N.T.S.U.P.P.O.R.T.S.T.A.F.F.(in a Daleky voice). It's thought that there may be great kudos in other academic and teaching staff accepting this nouveau appellation and if successful it might well be rolled out across the entire HE sector by a division of  early 19th century Plug-Plotters on piecework rates.

A new approach to teaching?

It's not been confirmed if the re-designation is in response to a manager's claim that there has been a paradigmatic shift among EFL staff from a thoroughly dialectical approach to knowledge impartation to a more empirically based form of educative conveyance known as the R.O.T.E. method named after its Swedish founder Svart Tavla Undervisning Lärarjobb Rote.* Coincidentally the current fiscal climate has led to this intensely modernistic method garnering a recent welcome boost from the doyen of contemporaneity David Willetts. Staff are said to be actively polishing down their hard-earned skills in preparation for next years 'teaching out of a book'. An already visible shrinkage in EFL staff admin hours, historically seen by staff as a vital adjunct to intelligence promulgation among students, might indicate this policy may already be well under way.

Old skool... rather bourgeois

New Skool... rather less bourgeois

If you saw Sid and told him, would he shit himself too?

Yet even these substantive re-adjustments to the fabric of academic space-time in all things English as a Foreign Language related are small fry when considered within the context of an email received last week.

'Subject: Review of EFL Provision

Message sent on behalf of Professor Cynthia Pine

Dear colleagues

I am writing to thank you for engaging in the review; your contributions were very valuable and were incorporated into the report to the Executive. The discussion at Executive confirmed that that [sic] this is an important area for the University; that provision will remain internal to the University in the short to medium term; and will be subject to review as external changes (e.g. UKBA) become clearer. The Executive has decided that EFL provision will be separately managed; that this will be outside of the new School but within the University. The Deputy Vice Chancellor, Dr Adrian Graves is now leading the next stages. His office will be in contact to provide further details.

With best wishes

Cynthia

Professor Cynthia Pine CBE, BDS, MBA, PhD, FDSRCS, FRSA, Pro Vice Chancellor International, Dean of the College of Health and Social Care'

Enter the re-situationists

Apart from the word executive being remarkably like the word execute, we nearly had to rent space in a disused panopticon adjacent to Strangeways to situate Cynthia's modest cognominations. We alighted at the bus stop opposite the sentence that said '...that provision will remain internal to the University in the short to medium term; and will be subject to review...'. The next bus to 'The Deputy Vice Chancellor, Dr Adrian Graves is now leading the next stages. His office will be in contact to provide further details...' was late. 

If EFL is to be relocated from its former position within the School of Languages into the arms of Student Life** without a whimper from the unions, maybe the UCU's Chris Sheehy might want to at least consider applying the full force of her considerable rhetorical powers to extract from one of The Executives - The Chief Executive a certain Martin Hall - a most solemn undertaking in blood or its equivalent. It could for example  secure the long-term future of EFL provision ie, that it will remain 'in-house', not privatised and thus out-housed. To obtain such a promise would almost certainly do her the power of good and will obviate the need for a short or indeed a medium term. It might also save a few bob in the process as it's quite well known in the 'Term' Trade that short terms like ill-founded libel claims can prove rather an unnecessary drain on vital financial resources.

DALEK: Out of my way you bald useless fuck-er?
DALEK LEADER: You will refer to me by my full title which is 
Deputy.Assistant.Vice.Regent.Operating.Senior...
(in a Daleky voice)

Notes and References


*R.O.T.E. Reading Out Teacher's Edicts (readers can do the translation themselves)
** Student Life provides advice and support to students according to the website http://www.advice.salford.ac.uk/
(1) This is an obvious attempt at irony
(2) The Vagrants have been informed that a 'slowly.. slowly... catchy... monkey... strategy' has been invoked by certain union officers concerning this matter. At the time of going to press we were still not quite sure which century they're anticipating getting something negotiated or indeed which genus they are hoping to trap.


USUAL DISCLAIMER


As usual, this is a work rooted in the fine old tradition of satire. The contents are the honestly held opinions of the author who is far from anonymous. Being a humorous work, it is not intended to hurt the feelings of senior types or their immediate subordinates who do after all get paid a lot from public funds and suchlike.

If you would like to add to the emergent picture in EFL, please feel free to post comments or email the Vagrants. We will treat any information provided in the utmost confidence. If there are any inaccuracies or if any individuals or institutions feel corrections are necessary, please send an email by pressing here. It is most definitely worth doing this before availing oneself  of the libel laws or sending expensive threatening Pre-Action Protocols demanding we close down the entire blog, as like a company of miniature clowns who perform exclusively on a Venetian blind, it would be silly on a variety of levels. 


We do of course also operate a right of reply and unlike some other blogs, will let you make more than one posting if you feel so inclined under your own name or anonymously as it's a free-ish country.

The Vagrants