About us

Interested in getting involved?

There are a variety of ways that members can get involved.

Getting started

These UCU pages gives you access to information, guidance, tips from the national team and from other UCU activists, and a huge range of tools and resources to help you to effect change in your workplace.


Branch updates

UCU training

Congress & conference

Join the Committee

The main role of the Committee is to sustain the branch through:

  • Talking and listening to members’ and non-members’ views to find out their problems and concerns; identifying areas of low membership density; encouraging members to get involved; distributing leaflets and newsletters; involvement with branch strategy.
  • Representing members collectively or as individuals. This involves keeping up to date with procedures, agreements, policies and contractual conditions at your workplace; representing members at formal meetings with management; taking up collective issues with management.
  • Campaigning on local, regional or national issues of importance to UCU, such as workload, stress, equality issues.
  • Keeping records of meetings with the branch or members; attending meetings with other unions in your workplace.
  • Recruiting new members by attending induction events, identifying non-members who might be interested in joining.

Register as a Departmental Contact

A Departmental Contact is someone who is willing to take on a range of smaller tasks that help raise the profile of the branch among your immediate colleagues and who ensures that members in your department feel that the union is present, relevant and listens to them. Contacts help by:

  • Distributing union literature on behalf of the branch or the national union to departmental Union colleagues.
  • Act as a point of liaison between members in the department and the branch.
  • Distribute union messages to non-members in support of recruitment and campaigns.

Keep people safe as a Health and Safety Rep

Being a health & safety representative is one of the most powerful and useful trade union jobs you can do. You don’t have to be an expert, just enthusiastic for improving the working environment.  The following are some examples of the support H&S reps provide:

  • investigate actual and potential hazards;
  • inspect the workplace regularly every quarter and other inspections when changes are introduced;
  • represent general health, safety & welfare matters to the employer;
  • receive information about health, safety and welfare from the employer;
  • consult with the employer on a wide range of issues related to health, safety and welfare in the workplace.

And most importantly – train as a Caseworker

When members are facing problems at work, they can expect the help of caseworkers to discuss their concerns with, and to accompany them to formal meetings if necessary. As a  caseworker, you would:

  • Listen to members’ concerns and identify what outcome they are seeking.
  • Provide one to one support for individual members facing workplace issues.
  • Accompany members to meetings with managers to try to resolve issues informally.
  • Accompany members to formal hearings such as disciplinary, capability or grievance.

Your rights to time off for training

If you are an elected UCU rep you have rights to time off for training. See also our UCU training FAQs.

The UCU is its members

We understand that you may feel that you do not have the time to devote to these roles but without local reps, contacts and caseworkers the branch cannot provide the support that we all may rely on one day and we cannot continue to grow.

The power and influence of the union comes from working collectively and the more people the branch represents and the more unified they are, the more authority and bargaining power we have. So please do think about how you can get involved to ‘Build the Union’.

Local Rules

Download the ‘UCU Local Rules‘ for Warwick UCU as amended and approved by the members in 2019 (with some minor amendments from UCU National relating to a) quoracy, b) number of branch meetings).

The Branch Rules describe the processes by which the Branch is governed and the duties of the committee members.