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BUIRA welcomes Keele ‘greylisting’ 
Support the assessment boycott by refusing to mark outsourced Keele scripts

Dear colleagues, 

The British Universities Industrial Relations Association (BUIRA) Executive is urging all
members and supporters to support the University and College Union’s (UCU) call for an
academic boycott (greylisting) of Keele University from Friday, June 13th (see below for
details) 

BUIRA is also asking IR and HRM academics outside of Keele to be aware that the
University management want to outsource unmarked scripts from the School of Economic and
Management Studies (SEMS) in an effort to break the ongoing assessment boycott. We urge
you to refuse this work and to inform us immediately if you learn of any such attempt. We
also call upon colleagues in other branches of management, business and economics to
refuse to mark outsourced scripts.

This is a major escalation in the campaign to resist the planned thirty-eight
redundancies and large-scale course closures, and marks a crucial moment in the campaign.
Greylisting is in direct response to the threat by University management to impose
punitive pay deductions on UCU members in SEMS in an attempt to undermine their successful
assessment boycott, in operation since May 6th. 

On 28th May, University management told all SEMS staff to declare, by Monday 2 June,
whether they were taking part in this action. After this date, the University management
would decide whether, from a date to be notified, it would start to deduct 25% of salary
of anyone still refusing to mark. A meeting of UCU staff in SEMS agreed to continue the
boycott and advised members not to respond to management's request on whether they were
taking action.

Management are now ordering SEMS staff to return all final year undergraduate essays and
exam scripts (their deadline was Thurs, June 5th). If the action continues, Year 1 and
Year 2 essays and exam scripts will also have to be returned by specific dates over the
course of three weeks.

One possibility is that the University will attempt to get any unmarked essays and exam
scripts marked by academics outside Keele University, which is why BUIRA is stressing the
need to ensure management, are unable to farm out unmarked work to IR/HRM academics
outside of Keele. However, there is not just unmarked work from the dual honours course in
Human Resource Management, but also in five other dual honours courses - Business
Administration, Marketing, Economics, Finance, Management Science - and two single honours
courses - Business Economics, and Accounting and Finance. We urge you to pass on this
message and contact our colleagues in other branches of management, business and economics
to refuse to undertake any of the boycotted marking. 

UCU’s greylisting of Keele 

The greylisting tactic is the ultimate sanction against an institution and involves the
voluntary boycott of an appropriate and specific set of academic and other university
activities undertaken by academics and academic related staff from outside of the targeted
institution. UCU is urging its members, other trade unionists and colleagues
internationally to impose the following sanctions against Keele from Friday, June 13th:

§	Non attendance, speaking at or organising academic or other conferences at Keele
§	Do not apply for jobs at Keele
§	Do not give lectures at Keele
§	Do not accept positions as Visiting professors or researchers at Keele
§	Do not write for any academic journal which is edited from Keele
§	Do not take up new contracts as external examiners for taught courses

For more details, follow www.ucu.org.uk/index.cfm?articleid=3339 


Paul Brook, Secretary, British Universities Industrial Relations Association 
Email: [log in to unmask]	Tel: +44(161) 2473993 


Paul Brook, 
Senior Lecturer, 
Manchester Metropolitan University Business School,
Aytoun Street,
Manchester M1 3BH
0161 247 3993
[log in to unmask] 

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