University of London making redundancies according to twitter

[Lightuptheskytonight]

According to some people on twitter the university of London is going to be starting a redundancy process for around 50 staff on Monday. Aibu to think that it’s not acceptable to do this to staff and there families so close to Christmas?

They could have waited a couple of weeks. I agree. As for redundancies, that’s life.

Why are they being made redundant?

Why is this on twitter? Has it been announced to the staff?

Thing is when done properly the redundancy process can take a while. It's probably best to know so you don't blow loads of money before Christmas rather than get back on Jan 1st and wish you hadn't spent loads.

For several years I was served this notice just before Christmas. It's a bit depressing but a reminder of the financial realities you might face.

Well it's got to be done at some point...and not everyone bothers that much with Christmas these days either, some not at all

End of year seems reasonable....enables people to plan. I'd rather know sooner

worse to do it afterwards when you've blown loads of cash

Is this Birkbeck?

It happened at my husbands company a couple of weeks ago. It’s rubbish at any time of the year but if before Christmas then at least you can avoid splurging if it’s unaffordable.

If it's starting now, it'll be March, or more likely end of the academic year, before people go anywhere. They'll be at risk in the meantime enabling them to apply for other jobs that come up.

The government hasn't upped the rate of student fees and universities are seeing fewer home students than they'd budgeted for. This isn't the only university doing this, by a long stretch.

If UoL are bound by particular statutes then the timing may well be an unavoidable consequence of the need for Council (or whatever their equivalent is) approvals and employment law obligations. You can bet that UCU would be up in arms if the correct procedure wasn’t followed. Getting these things right is more important than some faux sentimentality about Xmas.

‘University of London’ is actually a bunch of different institutions that are run independently of each other.

The proposed big axe-swinging plan at Birkbeck (which is part of Uni of London) was announced some weeks ago. Everyone (in academia) is up in arms about it already and letters have been written to Birkbeck’s inept senior management whose poor financial decisions is ultimately being laid at the feet of on-the-ground student-facing staff. They’re cutting back some of the country’s best humanities departments.

are, not is!

I think that's a good point but probably better to have announced redundancies even EARLIER as many people who have £££ on Christmas shopping already.

Never a good time to be made redundant but not sure what you mean by unacceptable. If the tiles are no longer needed, or the business can't support the salaries, it's acceptable.

Ex job got the HR Manager to make people redundant in the month before Christmas. Made her redundant Christmas Eve, after reassuring her she wasn't at risk 😭

Utter dickheads. So glad I left there.

*roles

I'd also rather know as soon as my employer did. I wouldn't want them to keep it from me to protect me from feeling sad at the wrong time of year.

Happened to me 2 years ago. Found out just before Christmas then my last day was the 15th January. It made for a very shit Christmas and I would have preferred them to wait until the new year.

They are legally required to let staff know as soon as possible. They would be breaking the law if they waited weeks until after Christmas.

They will only move to compulsory if the vser doesn't fit the numbers

It's 16th. I dare to say most of the money is already "blown"...

There's that

also, I got canned before xmas once and much preferred to know with as much time planning as possible, plus I knew not to go for meals and drinks etc.

is it a decent redundancy offer, I hope so.

Name changed for obvious reasons. The number of compulsory redundancies required by each department is now known. Who those individuals will be is NOT YET KNOWN. There'll be a scoring process which will decide.

While I won't debate how we ended up here, this is the inevitable consequence of no increase in fees for the last 12 years. Birkbeck won't be the last university that needs to make large scale redundancies to avoid going bust.