Author: F H

Local hardship fund claim form NEW – weeks 3 and 4

UCU Warwick has established a local hardship fund from branch reserves and external donations to offer financial support to those experiencing hardship as a result of industrial action. A full description of the principles of the fund is available here. UCU Warwick has now decided to open applications for weeks 3 and 4 of the strike thanks to the amazing amount of donations we have received!

Salaried staff, and hourly paid staff not experiencing hardship or with access to significant secondary income should apply to the National Fighting Fund. The branch is happy to support applications to the national fund with a branch note if this is needed.

The deadline for applying for the hardship fund including all evidence, regarding the first two weeks of strike, is Wednesday 2 May. The tight deadline is to ensure that we can make payments as soon as possible but avoid a first come, first serve scenario, enabling fair treatment. No final decisions on reimbursement will be made before that deadline. However, if  If you need funds urgently please contact treasurer@warwickucu.org.uk with details
of your circumstances and we will try to assist.

Before starting to fill out the form below, please read carefully what evidence we need to assess your claim. Thanks!
Instead of filling out the form, you can also download this word version and return it to the Treasurer with the necessary evidence at treasurer@warwickucu.org.uk

This Form is for claims relating to weeks 3 and 4 of the strike. If you want to make claims for weeks 1 and 2 because your deductions had erroneously not yet been applied, please fill out this form instead.

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At this stage we are unable to confirm the value or timing of hardship payments but it is likely they will not
exceed £500 (in total) per member. If you need funds urgently, or have any other question please contact treasurer@warwickucu.org.uk and anticasualisation@warwickucu.org.uk with details
of your circumstances and we will try to assist.

Evidence-STP-VAM

Evidence needed for local hardship fund claims (STP /VAM)

Please attach to your application a combination of the following documents, depending on your circumstances:

1) To provide evidence of lost income:

 a) an overview screen of your STP homescreen
showing your weekly earnings for the whole claim period. This means all (in all likelihood four) weeks that will appear in your payslip. This helps, on the one hand, to show variations in working hours between strike weeks and non-strike weeks, and to corroborate the infos between your SPT info and your payslip, which is needed to evidence loss of income as the rules for the hardship fund require us to do.
This overview of the STP screen should look roughly like this:
 
Note that “Status” and “Approval date” should show whether a timesheet has been approved.
AND
b) detailed timesheets
When you then click, from the above screen, on the page item under View/Edit Hours (circled), you will get to the detailed weekly view, which we need for both strike weeks within your claim, and at least one comparator timesheet of an unaffected standard week. It should look something like this:
In this weekly view, it is clearly visible what kind of work has been done on what day.
(Unlike in the submission receipt emails that you will receive from STP; they do not disaggregate the types of hours, which is however what is necessary to make sense of the claims (e.g. when you had teaching, covering for someone else, etc.))
It is not possible to submit empty timesheets to STP; in which case a detailed view of the timesheet is not needed – but the overview screen above, in addition to the payslip, should show that you did not receive any pay for said week.
Ideally you can make use of the comment field to explain how pay has been affected by the strike (you can formulate it in a way that is useful for both the departmental approval of timesheets and for the hardship fund team to understand pay losses). Obviously, if you claim for work on a strike day, this would count as a strike day on which you haven’t participated in the strike. 
AND / OR
c) a copy of your contract / job assignment
This is only necessary if you don’t have comparator timesheets available that demonstrate a regular working pattern. In this case your contract / job assignment should give us some clue of your expected earnings.
There will still be individual cases that will remain confusing, in which case please help us to understand the claim using the comment box in the application.

2) To provide evidence of payments:

– copies / scans of payslips
If applying for weeks 1 and 2, the March payslip
If applying for weeks 3 and 4, March and April payslip (because the two weeks fall into different claim periods)
– OR a screenshot / copy of a bank statement showing the relevant bank transfer from Warwick in March compared with a previous month if available).
Note that timesheet submission deadlines for February-March are 12/03 (STP) and 05/03 (VAM), while the paydate for all payrolls is 24/03.
Timesheet submission deadlines for March-April are 15/04 (STP) and 06/04 (VAM), and the paydate is 24/04.